The Shawshank Redemption
Reflection Essay Exam #2
Evan Mowry
The Shawshank Redemption is less about race and more about social class. In it, a man is wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife. Andy’s struggles with prison life; the predatory inmates, the abusive guards, and the sadistic warden all, while not racially charged, do carry the same element of racism and segregation. There is a distinct line of humanity that the inmates are not allowed to toe: an upper and lower class of person within the prison.
The movie does not, in general, challenge stereotypes, nor does it perpetuate them. The prison is a mixing pot of different races and social classes, and the inmates all behave more or less similarly with some notable exceptions that do not appear to have anything to do with social class or race. The furthest I could go in naming a stereotype it challenged was the slightly surprising ratio of white men to black men in prison. Especially in an era of racial oppression, I would have expected the whites to be the ethnic outsiders, not the blacks.
Conflict theory could view the prison in two ways; as an institution that mirrors an already existing tension between a prisoner class and a guard class, or as a metaphor economic inequality. I don’t think either is right. With respect to the former, there aren’t fundamental differences in the way the two classes behave. Both inmates and guards are brutal towards each other, both stick together, and both look for individual opportunities to advance. The only difference between them is who has the power within the prison; outside of the existing environment of the prison, they would behave roughly the same.
Regarding the possible metaphor of economic equality, this seems the more likely of the two. There is a distinct difference between the guards and the inmates in how they treat their peers. The movie challenges the stereotype of everyone in jail being vicious, but the fact remains that the guards do not need to fight amongst themselves to survive, whereas the inmates do. The inmates battle for their lives as if the only way to stay alive is to get ahead of all the other inmates and stay there, somehow. This is eerily reminiscent of the climate in South American cultures during periods of lower-class political apathy: the rich help each other stay that way, and the poor fight amongst each other desperately to get out of the slums. This parallel also makes sense when you see the violence against the “lower” class by the “upper”, such as the beatings, random cell searches, and neglect. In the movie it becomes apparent that some of the inmates can no longer even stand an equal system. One inmate is released, but has grown so used to the easy, stationary stability of the brutal prison that he cannot handle the free, open outdoors, and commits suicide. The main character’s best friend, Red, calls this being “institutionalized”. The walls, “At first you hate them, then you get used to them. Eventually, you depend on them”, provide a reason for rigidity. This, also, is seen in poverty stricken societies, where the poor are reluctant to act on their desires for upward mobility because it risks all they have gained at such high cost; the inmates were reluctant to leave the prison because it was what they had gotten used to; it had socialized them in a manner almost completely incompatible with the outside world.
Structional Functionalism, also, could view this movie from a variety of angles. It could argue that the inmates are in prison, and being treated as sub-human, partially because they were sub-human; convicted felons, it is popularly perceived, have fewer rights than law-abiding citizens, or none at all. In a sense, this would be saying that the prison, and all the bad things in it, exists because of the need for a societal retribution to criminals, in order to provide a living example to people of what happens to law-breakers. The brutality of the prison, in other words, is necessary as a deterrent to crime; the few must be abused so the many do not abuse, sort of thing.
Alternately, a structural functionalist could see separation of classes within the prison as a necessary, or at least effective, way of keeping order. If, for example, there was no “discipline” in the prison, there would most likely be a riot due to the aggressive and unruly nature of the inmates. If there was a riot, there would be much suffering on behalf of the guards, possibly some suffering on behalf of the people nearby the prison, and definitely a large amount of suffering on the parts of the inmates, after the national guard got called in, or whatnot. Again, being habitually brutal is a way of keeping people alive, or at least keeping the majority of them alive.
The most realistic view of the prison, given the humanistic quality of the movie, would be that of Symbolic Interaction. Someone subscribing to this view could view the prison as a melting pot, as it were, of people, all of varying degrees of power within the system that had developed. The brutality of the guards would be seen as their attempts to retain their superior position over the inmates. The brutality of the inmates would, just as in Conflict theory, would be seen as their attempts to solidify not a position of power, per se, but a position in which they can survive.
However, what attracts me most to this view is the interaction between the inmates and the guards that transcended power. Each character seemed to have threads that tied them inextricably to other characters, which they strengthened or tried to break, depending on the nature of the connection. Many of these had little to do with power, or social comfort, but much to do with feeling human: many of the most integral moments of the plot, such as when Andy offered financial advice to a guard in exchange for some beer for his work crew, weren’t motivated by the desire for advancement, but instead out of the desire to strengthen relationships. Red, who narrated the movie, even said that although it had seemed to some that Andy had done what he did to curry favors with the guards and the inmates, he thought Andy did it just to feel human.
While Symbolic Interaction best explains the behavior of the characters in the movie, all of these views are best at describing the existence of one or more different factors of the movie. One could not have a complete view of the Shawshank Redemption without looking beyond one perspective and gaining a three dimensional image of the forces at work. That, in essence, is the weakness with any one perspective: there is always another side to something (especially societal institutions and functions) than the one you’re looking at.
Reflection Essay Exam #2
Evan Mowry
The Shawshank Redemption is less about race and more about social class. In it, a man is wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife. Andy’s struggles with prison life; the predatory inmates, the abusive guards, and the sadistic warden all, while not racially charged, do carry the same element of racism and segregation. There is a distinct line of humanity that the inmates are not allowed to toe: an upper and lower class of person within the prison.
The movie does not, in general, challenge stereotypes, nor does it perpetuate them. The prison is a mixing pot of different races and social classes, and the inmates all behave more or less similarly with some notable exceptions that do not appear to have anything to do with social class or race. The furthest I could go in naming a stereotype it challenged was the slightly surprising ratio of white men to black men in prison. Especially in an era of racial oppression, I would have expected the whites to be the ethnic outsiders, not the blacks.
Conflict theory could view the prison in two ways; as an institution that mirrors an already existing tension between a prisoner class and a guard class, or as a metaphor economic inequality. I don’t think either is right. With respect to the former, there aren’t fundamental differences in the way the two classes behave. Both inmates and guards are brutal towards each other, both stick together, and both look for individual opportunities to advance. The only difference between them is who has the power within the prison; outside of the existing environment of the prison, they would behave roughly the same.
Regarding the possible metaphor of economic equality, this seems the more likely of the two. There is a distinct difference between the guards and the inmates in how they treat their peers. The movie challenges the stereotype of everyone in jail being vicious, but the fact remains that the guards do not need to fight amongst themselves to survive, whereas the inmates do. The inmates battle for their lives as if the only way to stay alive is to get ahead of all the other inmates and stay there, somehow. This is eerily reminiscent of the climate in South American cultures during periods of lower-class political apathy: the rich help each other stay that way, and the poor fight amongst each other desperately to get out of the slums. This parallel also makes sense when you see the violence against the “lower” class by the “upper”, such as the beatings, random cell searches, and neglect. In the movie it becomes apparent that some of the inmates can no longer even stand an equal system. One inmate is released, but has grown so used to the easy, stationary stability of the brutal prison that he cannot handle the free, open outdoors, and commits suicide. The main character’s best friend, Red, calls this being “institutionalized”. The walls, “At first you hate them, then you get used to them. Eventually, you depend on them”, provide a reason for rigidity. This, also, is seen in poverty stricken societies, where the poor are reluctant to act on their desires for upward mobility because it risks all they have gained at such high cost; the inmates were reluctant to leave the prison because it was what they had gotten used to; it had socialized them in a manner almost completely incompatible with the outside world.
Structional Functionalism, also, could view this movie from a variety of angles. It could argue that the inmates are in prison, and being treated as sub-human, partially because they were sub-human; convicted felons, it is popularly perceived, have fewer rights than law-abiding citizens, or none at all. In a sense, this would be saying that the prison, and all the bad things in it, exists because of the need for a societal retribution to criminals, in order to provide a living example to people of what happens to law-breakers. The brutality of the prison, in other words, is necessary as a deterrent to crime; the few must be abused so the many do not abuse, sort of thing.
Alternately, a structural functionalist could see separation of classes within the prison as a necessary, or at least effective, way of keeping order. If, for example, there was no “discipline” in the prison, there would most likely be a riot due to the aggressive and unruly nature of the inmates. If there was a riot, there would be much suffering on behalf of the guards, possibly some suffering on behalf of the people nearby the prison, and definitely a large amount of suffering on the parts of the inmates, after the national guard got called in, or whatnot. Again, being habitually brutal is a way of keeping people alive, or at least keeping the majority of them alive.
The most realistic view of the prison, given the humanistic quality of the movie, would be that of Symbolic Interaction. Someone subscribing to this view could view the prison as a melting pot, as it were, of people, all of varying degrees of power within the system that had developed. The brutality of the guards would be seen as their attempts to retain their superior position over the inmates. The brutality of the inmates would, just as in Conflict theory, would be seen as their attempts to solidify not a position of power, per se, but a position in which they can survive.
However, what attracts me most to this view is the interaction between the inmates and the guards that transcended power. Each character seemed to have threads that tied them inextricably to other characters, which they strengthened or tried to break, depending on the nature of the connection. Many of these had little to do with power, or social comfort, but much to do with feeling human: many of the most integral moments of the plot, such as when Andy offered financial advice to a guard in exchange for some beer for his work crew, weren’t motivated by the desire for advancement, but instead out of the desire to strengthen relationships. Red, who narrated the movie, even said that although it had seemed to some that Andy had done what he did to curry favors with the guards and the inmates, he thought Andy did it just to feel human.
While Symbolic Interaction best explains the behavior of the characters in the movie, all of these views are best at describing the existence of one or more different factors of the movie. One could not have a complete view of the Shawshank Redemption without looking beyond one perspective and gaining a three dimensional image of the forces at work. That, in essence, is the weakness with any one perspective: there is always another side to something (especially societal institutions and functions) than the one you’re looking at.
posted by evan at 10:33 AM
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