Shawshank Road

Imagine a person in the most hopeless place possible: rock bottom, as it is sometimes called. Every person that they have ever known is gone, perhaps dead. Everything they knew about how the universe functioned, every law, every idea that they believed immutable, every principle that humanity had stood for: gone, like a rug pulled out from under their soul. This is despair. Now imagine that someone, a single solitary person, could change that situation and give that despondent person meaning in life once more. That single person, with the light of love on their face, reaches down into the pit, takes the suffering person’s hand, and lifts them unto the light. This is hope. To go from despair to hope is having another person there for you when you are lost, a person who is wise and has faith in you. In the film The Shawshank Redemption, the concept of despair is presented for the viewer’s emotional and metaphysical consideration in the story of the last years of Brooks Hatlen; then the concept of hope is proffered in the tale of Ellis Redding, both prisoners at Shawshank, both spend their last days in a completely different place, both physically and idealistically.

            In 1957, ten years into protagonist Andy Dufresne’s imprisonment, Brooks has been at Shawshank Prison for a long time, longer than any human should be at any correctional cage; he has been chained in darkness and in sighing for forty five years, since 1905. Brooks is left behind by time. He never flowed with the outside world, never learned to adapt to the change that it had gone through: two world wars, the start of the fear-steeped nuclear age, two massive economic and social changes, and the greatest depression the world had ever seen.

And what is the result of this brave new world on a poor old man who last saw it at the turn of the twentieth century? Despair. That is, an agonizing internal heartache and incurable pain. And worse, he is expected to be able to survive here, to thrive, all alone. His aloneness leads to his final scene in the movie: Brooks decides that “he doesn’t want to stay”; he hangs himself from a decorative wood section of the wall, above which he scribes, “Brooks was here” This is despair in the context of the film, when a man is alone in a world he does not understand or cannot live in.

Hope presents itself in the same context. The only difference is that friendship and love is metaphorically wedged between Ellis Redding and despair. After serving nearly the same amount of time in prison as Hatling, “Red”, as Ellis is nicknamed, is released after he tells the truth to his parole judges about what it means to be rehabilitated. He is given a job, by the prison department, at precisely the same Supermarket as Brooks served out his second prison sentence. He is also given the same room in the same halfway house that Brooks hung himself in. The moment Ellis walks into the room, he sees Brooks’ statement above the decorative arch.

Ellis’ life follows the same pattern, even. He lives his life in fear of a world that does not understand him or care. He considers, many times, the idea of “going away” as his fellow prisoner did in the end. But there is one thing that Redding sees in the skies above the cliff he is nearing. The eagle of his salvation is hope, in the form of Andy Dufresne, who was his dear and close friend.

Andy had come to Shawshank in 1947, and relatively immediately, Andy and Red had become the best of friends. The played Chess together, operated Andy’s library together, and used their sarcastic wit to keep each other alive, both literally and emotionally. Their relationship was friendship at its finest, most definitely. Andy, having hope already, had escaped from Shawshank some time before Ellis’ release, and fled to Mexico, living his life on the shores of the blue, briny pacific shore: a prisoner’s dream, truly. Ellis, after his own release, had found a letter addressed to him, from Andy. This letter, a transmission of hope from Andy to Ellis, beckons Ellis to flee the United States and live out his life as a free man in Mexico. And flee he does, eventually meeting his friend on that beach, making for an extremely wonderful happy ending to the tale. Before Ellis leaves his little flat, though, he carves another inscription next to Brooks’: “So was Red”.

The statement is essentially the same, but the men who wrote them were moving in completely opposite directions. One had fallen off of the cliff of despair into the nothingness that only death can procure because he had no friends. While the other, who had been given hope by companionship and love and thoughtful concern, stepped from the cliff face, running swiftly towards a beach in the sunny Pacific, eternally living out his days with his best friend, happy forevermore.