An investment banker (Tim Robbins) is found guilty of the murder of his wife and sentenced to life imprisonment. While he is in jail he gets repeatedly raped, but curries favor with his jailer by becoming his investment banker and bookkeeper. He also becomes friends with (convict) Morgan Freeman; he exposes the prison inmates to the beauty of Mozart; and he starts a prison library. The jailers are nazis; the inmates are shown either as monsters or redeemable toughs; and the prison system is shown to be a corrupt death trap. Even though the actual criminal confesses, Robbins is not set free -- possibly because he is too useful to his jailers...or maybe just on principle. At the end of the movie he escapes, embezzling all the money that the prison warden has been "appropriating" (with Robbins' help) from prison labor, and he runs to a faraway island where Morgan Freeman eventually joins him. He justifies his deed by saying that he had stolen "the warden's money."
Of course, it's not the warden's money at all; it belongs to the prisoners...but never mind; we're supposed to forget all that. Just like we're supposed to forget that when Robinson Crusoe leaves his desert island and rejoins society he becomes a rich man as a result of the labors of his slave plantations. The main narrative of Robinson Crusoe is that of the self-made man, so that's what we retain at the end: that the self made man "deserves" his worldly reward.
Similarly, the moral of the Shawshank Redemption is: if you get gang raped for twenty years while slaving away to make sick psycopaths rich, you deserve to walk away with the loot. The moral feels right because that's IS the logic of our times. This doesn't mean that King hates the working class, only that he is able to plumb the depths of the American psyche and show its curious logic.
Shawshank's reversal of the Robinson Crusoe plot: where Robinson/Robbins and Friday/Freeman run away to the desert island (rather than seeking to rejoin the world) struck me when I saw it because it seemed like between these two expressions of the social unconscious, Robinson Crusoe and Shawshank Redemption, the capitalist myth had run the course of its alpha and omega.
The audience's feeling that Robbins deserves to retire with the loot, their willingness to forget the men upon whose backs Robbins' retirement rested, is partly due to Morgan Freeman's respect and love for Robbins. So I saw Freeman doing a similar whitewash in both Shawshank and MDB.
It's sad to say that last year's movie making was so goddamn awful that MDB actually looks like a good/deep movie by comparison.
Joanna
Bill Bartlett wrote:
> At 4:31 PM -0800 27/2/05, joanna bujes wrote:
>
>> Well you're supposed to accept that, but setting the black man up to
>> vet the righetous soul of the white man is an old trick. From what I
>> can remember, Morgan Freeman also narrates the "Shawshank
>> Redemption" and to equally obfuscating effect.
>
>
> I'm a bit slow, would you mind explaining that?
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas
>
>
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