The Shawshank Redemption: Film Analysis

The daily life of an incarcerated individual is spent wasting away the hours, searching for a glimpse of hope in their personal lives. The media, especially in the film industry, has portrayed what can be defined as a “utopian” life, as life outside of prison, a complete opposite of the dystopian characteristics of being incarcerated. The search for a “utopian” lifestyle is “analogous to a quest for grace which is both existential and relational” (Klonowska). To an average person, an incarcerated individual is not typically perceived as someone who searches for greatness. Although prison films may serve as a source entertainment, they distort the image of a prison in order to appeal to the audience and to enhance the plots. One utopian feature of a …show more content…
Linking enclosure to inner freedom of an artist, the jail cell is an image for “rare and truly original” artistic creation through isolation (Hirsch). In The Shawshank Redemption’s famous scene when inmate Andy Dufresne plays opera music over the loud speaker of the prison, another inmate, Red, declares, “I tell you those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.” This scene describes the power of music to “escape” isolation and alter the dystopian “greyness” of the walls inside of the prison. Dystopia, as opposed to utopia, is undesirable and is represented by the horrible conditions that physically and psychologically alter inmates of prisons within films. Specifically, music disrupted the “normalcy” of the inmates and allowed them to restore their humanity even while being controlled by the laws of the prison (Romero). As viewers, individuals were able to feel this break in normalcy through the music’s appeal to