Shawshank Redemption is a film about the prison life of Andy Dufresne, convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. Andy learns to adapt and even thrive in prison, yet somehow always looking for a way out.
This is not your average prison. We don’t necessarily see hard labor. Instead the prisoners seem to have alot of free time outdoors to converse. They even get to see movies in a darkened room. Contraband is somehow easy to get to, yet a poster of Rita Hayworth can take a few weeks.
Like a worn our cliche, the warden is corrupt. He accepts bribes from construction companies to back off from highway bids for prison labor.
The thing that drives Andy is hope. Hope that one day he would gain freedom. With this hope, Andy is persistent. As the prison librarian he wrote letters to the powers that be in gaining funds for the library. And he didn’t give up, even when he got a one time gift.
What we learn from Andy is that escape, whether it is physical or mental, comes from time and pressure. That and a big poster to hide your tracks. Andy used small rock hammer to tunnel out of his cell and then through a sewer pipe. He crawed through the equivalent of 5 football fields of human waste for freedom. And who could forget seeing him emerge from the pipe and stand up with his arms raised high in the pouring rain? It was the personification of redemption.
The tagline for the movie is “Fear can hold you prisonor. Hope can set you free.” This is incredibly true. Wikipedia’s article describes how prisoners can become institutionalized, thinking that life inside prisons is normal. Sometimes prisoners will try to stay in prison by committing crimes on the outside once released. They are unable to function outside of the prison walls.
Yet Andy never let himself to become institutionalized. He always looked for hope on the outside.