Interpreting Shawshank

Abstract

Chapter 3 is a critical analysis connecting Shawshank Redemption to those gothic elements, especially the haunted house, more typically associated with Stephen King’s oeuvre. While the chapter’s primary focus is on Frank Darabont’s cinematic adaptation, it also compares, whenever appropriate, the King novella to Darabont’s film, such as the topic of penal institutionalization, more significant in Darabont’s film. This chapter engages questions of race and the interracial bond between Andy and Red, immediately relevant when Darabont cast African-American actor Morgan Freeman as Red. This chapter also examines Hollywood genres that The Shawshank Redemption both inculcates and subverts: melodrama, the prison film, film noir, and the interracial male buddy movie. Lastly, Chap. 3 analyzes the specific allusions that the text and film make to works such as Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Emily Dickinson’s Poem 613 “They shut me up in prose,” Gilda, and other works of art. Shawshank’s allusions are not haphazard references but instead produce an intertextuality that is crucial to a true understanding of the film.

Only where the state ends, there begins the human being.

Friedrich Nietzsche