The Shawshank Redemption

About nine years ago I saw the last ten seconds of the Shawshank Redemption. I walked in the door of my apartment and my roommate and his girlfriend were just finishing the movie. I walked in stood at the door and saw the ending. Since that day I have liked to tell people that I saw the ending of the Shawshank Redemption just to hear their reaction. Tonight I sat by myself and watched the movie in its entirety for the first time. Everyone always told me the movie would be ruined for me since I had seen the ending. But when those last ten seconds of the film rolled by tonight, it was different than what I remembered. Those ten seconds now had a context and completely changed what I saw. The movie was not ruined, in fact it became to me an instant masterpiece. Like other great movies I have seen, it made me think about a lot. I thought about pain and about loneliness. I thought about the human capacity for evil and the human capacity or hope and love. I thought about all I perceive to be unfair in this world and about how there is a lot to be angry about and a lot to be thankful for.

The movie made me want to hit the road and see new places, to have an adventure. The inmates in the movie are stuck behind prison walls their entire lives. Often times many of us get stuck behind the walls of suburbia and behave as if we are in prison. We get stuck in our daily routine, forget about the world except what we read in our narrowly focused newspapers and celebrity tabloids. And just like the “lifers” in prison who finally get paroled, we are scared to know anything different than the prison we put ourselves in. Sure we take our week or two of vacation every year. But we are only around other vacationers. What about being around other cultures and other peoples lives and seeing that the world and life is about much more than just us

This movie also made me think about all those who are victims of hatred and unfair treatment. But it dawned on me that there is so much more to them than what I see. There is hope and redemption and as “Andy” says in the film, “there is music, that something they can’t take from us.” At one point in the film, Andy declares “hope” as a “good thing, perhaps the greatest of all things.” What I believe his character missed seeing though was that in him sharing hope with his fellow inmates, he was exuding the one thing greater than hope, love.

The Shawshank Redemption overtook my emotions and sent me to sit in the shower to think and pray ( a favorite thing to do and something I hadn’t done in a long time). Then in the midst of all my thoughts, the strangest of songs popped into my head. It had actually been in my head all day from hearing it on the radio promoting some new fall television series. It is an ego filled song that goes something like this:

“20 % luck, 10 % skill
50% concentrated power of will
5% pleasure, 15% pain
100% reason to remember the name.”

I couldn’t help but think “who cares?! Whoever wrote that needs to watch the Shawshank Redemption.