It was a flop when it was released in the cinemas, but The Shawshank Redemption is now everybody’s favourite ‘prison movie.’ Shawshank’s fans regard it as a modern-day parable, an uplifting tale of triumph over adversity – it’s a prison movie, but it’s also more than that.

For its star Tim Robbins, the themes are universal: “…although not everybody has been in jail, on a deeper, more metaphysical level, many people feel enslaved by their environment, their jobs, their relationships – by whatever it is in the course of their lives that puts walls and bars around them.”

Though a movie buff, and a lover of fiction and storytelling myself, it’s this ‘deeper, more metaphysical level’ that I have a problem with. Like ‘drug movies,’ ‘prison movies’ cannot help but both glamorise and trivialise the lifestyles of the people they portray.

Similarly, the ‘prison movie’ is seldom really about prison – prison is a metaphorical backdrop, a stage on which attractive folk can struggle, succeed, and impart perfunctory lessons about the human condition, hopefully before the cinemagoer gets bored. Moreover, the typical structure of the Hollywood movie cannot help but give the lie to the reality of prison life. The priority of the filmmaker is to keep the audience engaged, to progress briskly along a predictable narrative arc towards a logical and satisfying conclusion.

Of course, the filmmaker would argue that his or her job is to entertain rather than to educate, but as someone who works in a prison, I can’t help but find the fundamental, if necessary, untruth of almost all prison movies – even the beloved Shawshank – infuriating. By making the prisoners’ journeys symbolic and their struggles allegorical, cinema both romanticises and diminishes the truth that lies behind the fiction.

Real prison life is not romantic. It is not a backdrop against which great metaphysical dramas are played out. Prison life is routine and methodical – it does not have the inexorable narrative momentum of the movies, no promise of a heart-warming pay-off. One day bleeds into the next, and into the next, and into the next. Battles won and lost in prison are not epic or figurative. The hardships endured are not stops on the road to deliverance. Each day is a dreary accumulation of tiny indignities, which break as many spirits as they harden.

One of the most iconic moments of Shawshank comes when Robbins’ Andy Dufresne uses his privileged position with the prison governor to gain access to his office and broadcasts the strains of Mozart over the tannoy system. One by one, the prisoners drop their tools, stop playing basketball, and stand listening, transfixed, in awe. Morgan Freeman’s honeyed tones impart the heavy-handed, sentimental learning point; “And for the briefest of moments – every last man at Shawshank felt free.”

What, for many people, was the most inspirational moment of the movie was, for me, the most troublesome. For them it delivered a poignant message about the innate dignity of the human spirit – for a moment, these prisoners are ennobled by the power of the music, they are freed by it, reaffirming Robbins’ ‘deeper, more metaphysical’ message that the only prisons that exist are the ones in your head.

For me, there was something deeply patronising in the implicit casting of the prisoners as ‘noble savages,’ momentarily shaken out of their bovine mental slumber. Moreover, while the idea of prison’s being ‘a state of mind’ is one that may be immensely palatable to the viewing public, the pragmatist in me wishes to point out that prison is also a large, grey building where young men and women watch vast swathes of their lives ebb away. A poignant moment it may be, but for me it always feels like a profoundly dishonest one.

There is something quite pleasant about playing the cynic. I won’t lie; I’ve rather enjoyed bursting the sentimental bubble of more than one Shawshank
devotee in my time by rolling out one version or another of the above argument. It’s syrupy; it’s hackneyed; it’s patronising. And the killer blow, “I should know, I work in a real-life prison don’t y’know.” Mmmmm, the sweet taste of a moral victory, garnished with a healthy dollop of intellectual one-upmanship. You can’t beat it.

However, what to the cynic is a healthy scepticism of the overtly sentimental, and a refusal to reduce life to a patchwork of clichés is, to the believer, nothing more than an arrogant denial of life’s emotional reality. And sometimes life delivers a blow to the gut that even the most ardent cynic cannot ignore.

Mine came a few months ago, as I sat in the chapel of the prison where I work, dutifully – I thought – attending a performance by a handful of prisoners that had been entitled ‘Rock Shop.’ A well-known musician had spent the previous three days working with them to put together an hour-long show. I had heard them rehearsing and, in truth, had turned up not expecting much, but wishing to be seen to show my support.

Taking my place on one of the long, hard pews, I steeled myself for what I anticipated would be an hour of artless percussion-bashing and little more. But, as the first few numbers rolled by, I was incredibly impressed by the virtuosity of some of the players, and the overall quality of what they had managed to produce in so short a time. I was enjoying myself, and could feel the atmosphere in the room slowly shifting. As we in the audience listened, and the players played, it somehow began to feel…less….well… ‘prison-y’. But, I thought, only in the same way as your last day of school used to feel less ‘school-y’ because you were allowed to wear your own clothes and bring in board games to play. We were being informal, and it felt good.

Around half an hour in, as the players tuned up between songs, a small black man in a too-big t-shirt, with a baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes discreetly made his way to the front of the stage. He shifted bashfully behind the microphone as an acoustic guitar strummed, and then he began to sing.

Here is where the professional cynic begins to lose his way. A moment of intense emotional clarity; the players, the prisoners, engrossed in their music, in this hymn to freedom, this Redemption Song; the audience captivated – taken captive – by the simply strummed guitar, the beautiful, keening melody that floats above us, and transforms us; a sense of being somewhere else, certainly not in a prison, not in any place of incarceration; not in any place at all, in fact.

“But my hand was made strong
By the ‘and of the Almighty.
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly”

Soon we are clapping. Soon some people are on their feet. Soon, some people have tears in their eyes and the room is bathed in a sense of escape. We, the audience, give ourselves up to the music; we are being allowed to listen, but this – I want to describe this simply, so that the words don’t disfigure it – this was a gift that the prisoners were giving to themselves.

Something came alive inside the room in that moment, as we swayed and clapped, and watched the small figure at the front of the room – eyes closed, voice clear and resonant – cast off his prisoner’s clothes and embrace freedom for us. There was no Morgan Freeman voice-over to summarise and clarify what we were sharing – if only there had been, we might have been able to hold onto it, take its buzzing potential, and do….something.

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds.” Marley’s call to arms rang out loud and clear. The same ‘deeper, more metaphysical level’ I had often derided before taking on an urgent, pleading truth – take it, make this moment last. Maybe we can learn something. Or maybe we can just stand here and sway, and listen to this beautiful music forever.

But as the final chords played out, and the room erupted in applause, it was already ending. Like the flame of a candle, fluttering and gently unravelling before being extinguished, the song was over, and the applause subsided, leaving only smoke and the memory of something natural and incredible. The audience sat down, the players put down their instruments and began to tune up for the next song. The small black man in the too-big t-shirt and the baseball cap pulled low over his eyes stood down and discreetly made his way back to a corner seat until he was lost in the crowd.

Before long the concert itself was over, and we went back to our lives, the clarity of that moment – pregnant with all the possibilities of the human spirit – forgotten in our surge back toward the comforting certainties of life. For us, train times; for them, bang-up. Looking back, the weird energy of that moment seems more and more like a flaw in the design – being allowed to peer through a window that wasn’t meant to be open. Or maybe a clue, but we just haven’t worked out how to fit the pieces together as yet.

It was just a moment – it existed in our heads for only a little more than three minutes. There was no handy Morgan Freeman-voiced summary because the truth of the moment could not possibly be distilled in that way. I dare say it was different for all of us – gloriously universal and intensely personal all at once. All I know is what it meant to me. All I can say is how incredibly poignant and powerful it was to witness a group of life-sentenced prisoners making fantastic music together on a grey afternoon, in a grey building that eats lives, in the South of England. And it seems especially fitting that it should be a young black man who made us dance and cry and sing along: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.”

Perhaps the cynicism I have worn so long and so proudly at times was my ‘mental slavery’. Perhaps the whole thing was in my head. But that afternoon will stay with me for a long time. And, in the year when Bob Marley would have celebrated his 65th birthday, I will remember his words, sung by a small black man in a too-big t-shirt, with a baseball cap pulled low down over his eyes, and be thankful for them.

Related Reading:

1. Hip-Hop Mozart
2. The Perfect Picture
3. Issues in Black Mental Health
4. The Hate and the Quake – Rebuilding Haiti
5. The Sanctified Church

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