DRAFT LESSON ON

Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank RedemptionStephen King

General Introduction

This is an example of a story which became much more famous than it was originally because of a movie that was based on the story. The 1994 movie, called simply The Shawshank Redemption, starring Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne and Morgan Freeman as Red, is a brilliant re-working of Stephen King’s story. In fact, it’s hard to say which of the two, the original story or the film script, is the better. The film script was put together by the director of the film, Frank Darabont, and is a masterpiece in its own right. It simplifies the plot and reduces the total number of characters, but keeps all the best elements and even many of the best lines of the original story.

In fact, the movie contains a number of surprises in the way the plot twists and turns, and one hates to spoil it for a viewer who has not seen it yet. If you haven’t seen the movie, I suggest you stop reading right here, go and rent the movie, and then return to this lesson after you’ve seen it.

The author, Stephen King

Stephen King was born in 1947 and raised in New England in the Northeastern United States. The Northeast of America, with its history of witches and witch burning, and tradition of writers of Gothic Tales and Ghost Stories (Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne come from this part of the country) seems to have been an ideal environment for stimulating King’s fantasy and his interest in horror and the macabre. Many of his tales are set in this area, including Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (Shawshank prison is placed in Maine by the author).

Stephen King is generally considered to be a writer of pulp fiction, that is, stories that aspire to popularity rather than artistic accomplishment. He has written a very large number of novels and short stories and many of them have been made into movies. Although pulp fiction writers may write quickly and a little carelessly at times, their work often has great fluency and power. Charles Dickens, for instance, also wrote for the popular market, and many of his novels appeared serialized in magazines (King has also published serialized novels), and he is certainly a powerful writer and excellent stylist. King, like Dickens, is able to capture the cadences and flavor of the colloquial English of his time. “Red”, the narrator of Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, speaks in a convincingly natural way – he has a kind of natural “voice” – even though many of the ideas and opinions he expresses are not really simple, and his sentence structure can be quite complex. This is surely one reason why Darabont chose to make extensive use of Red as a narrator in the movie version, and many of the narrated passages are taken directly from the original story. Because they are natural, the lines are easy to deliver, and become very much alive in the voice of a talented actor like Morgan Freeman.

Most of Stephen King’s works include some elements of horror and the supernatural. This is no doubt partly because such elements ensure the interest of a large audience, and because it is an easy source of action and motivation in the development of a plot. It connects, however, with King’s fascination with the problem of evil in the world; questions of good and evil are generally quite evident in his fiction, and his treatment of these questions is one of the things which qualify him as a serious writer.

King has aptly chosen to write about prisons – places where all kinds of evil and evildoers are gathered together, where violence and cruelty have a natural field of play. King looks at the ironic realities of this environment – the prisoners are not, in fact, all devoid of human feelings, while some of their keepers, representatives of our civil society, apparently have no such feelings, and are thus the most absolute kinds of evildoers. And, of course, at least one of the prisoners is innocent!

King continues his exploration of prison life in a later, immensely popular novel, The Green Mile (also an immensely popular movie, starring Tom Hanks). In this novel, however, he deals specifically with the death penalty, a concern which is absent from The Shawshank Redemption – Maine, at the time in which the story is set, was one of many American states which had abolished the death penalty. (Of course, if Maine had had the death penalty, it would surely have been used in the case of Andy Dufresne. As Red says: “They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring’s crocuses poked their heads out of the snow.”) Unlike Andy Dufresne, an innocent but otherwise quite ordinary human being, the innocent victim in The Green Mile is a quite extraordinary being of exceptional goodness and purity, and also endowed with supernatural healing powers. John Coffey is a Christ-like figure whose magical power to heal the sick and dying seems to derive from some extraordinary fund of spiritual innocence, accompanied by a simplicity which renders him basically unfit to live in this evil world of ours. Unlike Andy Dufresne, who finally escapes, John Coffey dies after a life of trouble and persecution. He is a kind of perfect innocent victim, and thus shows the death penalty (unjustly applied, in this case) to be a perfect form of injustice. The prison described in The Green Mile also has its cruel, venal, brutal guard, Percy Wetmore, showing how easy it is, in such institutions, for spiteful people to wield awesome power over other human beings. But Percy Wetmore is just an everyday kind of villain. As a kind of counterbalance to the perfectly good John Coffey, King describes a villain of absolutely monstrous evil, the man who did, in fact commit the crime for which John Coffey is mistakenly punished, the rape and murder of two girl children. The evil incarnate in this man, William Wharton, seems to emerge from nowhere – there is no description of any possible explanation for the evil urges that drive him, no troubled youth, broken family or history of previous persecution. He seems to revel in the commission of evil for the pure joy of it – a true devil incarnate!

Perhaps King is convinced that there are devils, and that they appear among us more often than we would like to think. The Shawshank Redemption is unlike the majority of King’s works in that the supernatural is not featured anywhere in the story. The world of Shawshank prison is a real world, a world whose reality is totally plausible and commonplace, and the horror is an everyday horror. Evil is something which may occur quite easily without supernatural assistance. When musing about the why’s and wherefore’s of what happened to him, Andy Dufresne says the following words to Red: “What do I think?” He laughed – but there was no humor in the sound. “I think there was a lot of bad luck floating around that night. More than could ever get together in the same short span of time again…”

In Stephen King’s world, evil (Andy’s “bad luck” surely qualifies as evil) seems to float invisibly around the world, emerging without warning in the acts of human beings, acts of extreme cruelty, brutality and spite, and in situations of consummate horror.

The Story of Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption with selected quotes

Our story is in many ways a modern version of the classic The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Both stories tell of an innocent person locked up in a prison where escape seems impossible. In both stories the prisoner escapes by tunneling, and takes an enormous amount of time to tunnel an amazingly long distance. In fact, in the movie version of the story, the writer pays homage to Dumas, in the scene where another prisoner sees The Count of Monte Cristo in a shipment of books donated to the prison library, and Andy Dufresne, the hero of the story, tells him that it is a story about a prison break.

The narrator of the story (the movie also uses this narrator for many of the scenes, and to tie the various threads of the story together) is a convicted murderer called “Red”, a man who murdered his wife. (The movie gives no information about this crime, but it is recounted at the beginning of the original story). Andy is also in prison for murdering his wife, but Andy is innocent, whereas Red is guilty, as he himself admits to Andy. Having been in prison for many years, and having a certain amount of native intelligence and practical skill, Red has developed a special role – he is the man who can “get it for you”. He has a network of connections which he uses to bring all kinds of contraband into the prison, and to turn a small profit. But the profit is not really his motivation, as he himself relates…

“...I don't get all those things gratis, and for some items the price comes high. But I don't do it just for the money; what good is money to me? I'm never going to own a Cadillac car or fly off to Jamaica for two weeks in February. I do it for the same reason that a good butcher will only sell you fresh meat: I got a reputation and I want to keep it. The only two things I refuse to handle are guns and heavy drugs. I won't help anyone kill himself or anyone else. I have enough killing on my mind to last me a lifetime. (p. 17)

Red, it turns out, is a man of principle. Although he is a murderer, living in prison, he has a strong sense of right and wrong. No doubt this is one reason why he and Andy Dufresne become such close friends.

Early on in their friendship, Red asks Andy what his crime was. When Andy tells him that he is innocent, Red has a hard time believing it at first. He is used to the convict’s habit of pretending to be innocent, and he compares their eagerness to convince you of this innocence of theirs with the ardor of TV evangelists reading the Book of Revelation (The last book of the Bible which tells of the end of the world and the casting of sinners into the eternal fires of hell):

...everyone in prison is an innocent man. Oh, they read that scripture the way those holy rollers on TV read the Book of Revelation. They were the victims of judges with hearts of stone and balls to match, or incompetent lawyers, or police frame-ups, or bad luck. They read the scripture, but you can see a different scripture in their faces. Most cons are a low sort, no good to themselves or anyone else, and their worst luck was that their mothers carried them to term. (p. 18)

Convicts (cons) are generally liars who portray themselves as victims, victims of judges with cold, hard hearts (“hearts of stone”) and severe, unforgiving attitudes (“balls to match”), or lawyers who don’t know how to do their jobs, or police who make up cases to convict the wrong man. Red thinks they would be better if they had died before their mothers had completed their term of pregnancy, that is to say, if they had never been born.

Eventually Red becomes convinced that Andy really is innocent. When he finds out the story of what happened and how Andy’s trial went, he is not really surprised that Andy was convicted. The case against Andy was very strong. But it was what we call circumstantial. That means there was no witness or physical evidence that he committed the crime, but that the circumstances of the crime suggested that he must have done it. As they discuss the trial, they talk about the witnesses saying things that Andy knows to be false. The clerk of the convenience store where Andy bought beer and cigarettes testifies that Andy also bought dishtowels. This is important because dishtowels were wrapped around the gun used to commit the murder, in order to muffle the sound of the shots. Those dishtowels were discovered at the scene of the crime with burn marks on them. Andy is quite certain that he did not buy any dishtowels on that occasion, and he and Red speculate on the reasons why the clerk claimed that he did:

Later, much later, he speculated to me about the clerk who had testified on the subject of those dish towels, and I think it's worth jotting down what he said. "Suppose that, during their canvass for witnesses," Andy said one day in the exercise yard, "they stumble on this fellow who sold me the beer that night. By then three days have gone by. The facts of the case have been broadsided in all the papers. Maybe they ganged up on the guy, five or six cops, plus the dick from the Attorney General's office, plus the DA's assistant. Memory is a pretty subjective thing, Red. They could have started out with 'Isn't it possible that he purchased four or five dish-towels?' and worked their way up from there. If enough people want you to remember something, that can be a pretty powerful persuader."

I agreed that it could.

"But there's one even more powerful," Andy went on in that musing way of his. "I think it's at least possible that he convinced himself. It was the limelight. Reporters asking him questions, his picture in the papers...all topped, of course, by his star turn in court. I'm not saying that he deliberately falsified his story, or perjured himself. I think it's possible that he could have passed a lie detector test with flying colors, or sworn on his mother's sacred name that I bought those dishtowels. But still...memory is such a goddam subjective thing..." (p. 22)

Stephen King puts a great deal of social satire and social criticism into his work, and it is clear that, in this story, he wishes to raise serious questions about the American police and penal system. When ordinary human beings have extraordinary powers to determine the fate of other human beings, some injustices are bound to occur, even if the system has legal safeguards. Andy’s story is an illustration of the dangers of using purely circumstantial evidence to obtain a conviction, especially in a major crime that carries a heavy penalty. It is just too easy for the public to accept that the police and the justice system do a conscientious job, and that justice is always well served. In fact, all the people in Andy’s case acted in ways that are all too human and plausible. The prosecutor sincerely believes in Andy’s guilt, but is also driven by political ambitions, and this factor silences any doubts he might have about the strength and certainty of his case. The police all want to be portrayed in the media as aggressively protecting law and order. The witnesses are more concerned about how they appear in the “limelight” than the accuracy of their testimony – testimony which will send a man to prison for life. King seems to be putting out the message that, when we consider questions of public policy with regard to crime and punishment, we need to consider very carefully, and to remember that the people who will implement those policies are ordinary people. And ordinary people often don’t behave well at all!

Red first gets to know Andy when Andy comes to him to shop for a rock hammer. Andy is an amateur geologist, a “rockhound”, and he wants to try to pursue his hobby, on a limited basis, while he is in prison. Later, of course, he finds other uses for this diminutive geologists tool!

"Hello," he said. "I'm Andy Dufresne." He offered his hand and I shook it. He wasn't a man to waste time being social; he got right to the point. "I understand that you're a man who knows how to get things."

I agreed that I was able to locate certain items from time to time.

"How do you do that?" Andy asked.

"Sometimes," I said, "things just seem to come into my hand. I can't explain it. Unless it's because I'm Irish." (p. 27)

In the story, Red is indeed Irish. Because red hair is common in people of Irish descent, the nickname “Red” occurs frequently in Irish circles. The Irish are also sometimes thought to have a certain kind of luck, “the luck of the Irish”, (perhaps a reputation for coming out of terrible scrapes without injury), and this is probably what Red is referring to when he speaks of the kind of luck where “things just seem to come into my hand.” In the movie version, Frank Darabont makes a singularly creative use of this phrase (“because I’m Irish”), placing it in a new context, and giving it a new significance. In the film, when they first meet, Andy asks Red why people call him by that name. He replies “Maybe its because I’m Irish.” The joke is, of course, that Morgan Freeman, the actor who plays Red, is very obviously black!

Andy patiently adapts himself to prison life. However he has the misfortune to be rather good-looking, and thus attracts the attention of a group of brutal prisoners called “the sisters”. These men are “bull queers” (“queer” is a slang word for homosexual), and they delight in raping and brutally beating other prisoners. They are specialists in “gang rape” – working in a group, they catch their victims alone in out-of-the-way places and take turns in raping and brutalizing him. King does his best to confront the reader with the grim and graphic reality of this phenomenon: