The Shawshank Conundrum

@Corax
“It's Stephen King. He's pulpy. His horror fiction is largely rehashed tropes, plots, and premises from One Step Beyond and Tales From the Crypt crypt. His non-horror fiction surfs emotional waves that usually break on the Lifetime Channel. It's sentimental and moralizing and too cute (e.g., manipulative, convenient), but it's also cathartic and earnest.”

I’ve only read four of King’s fictional works: Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, The Body, and Misery. Never really got into him. Shawshank is probably my favorite work of his, but it’s no literary masterpiece.

Mark

Wow, don't hold back, how do you really feel about Stephen King?

I think his earliest books are solid. He may be better as a writer of short stories. Once he got into his drug phase, his books got bloated and weird. Even after he came back down to sobriety, I think he was cursed with being "The King." He could write anything at all and it would still be featured in airport bookstores. On Writing was a good read and I'm glad that he got Evil Dead on the map.

I’ve never been able to watch The Green Mile from beginning to end.

I've seen The Green Mile once.


I own Shawshank and view it once or twice a month


That should give ya my answer..

I like The Shawshank Redemption quite a bit, but I view it mostly as a pretty good gateway film which I've moved on from over the years.

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Just found it the novella in a local Barnes and Noble the other day. Haven't read it yet. I think King has turned into a looney on Twitter/X...hard to support him...but I will always be grateful it produced this flick...so I had to get it lol

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That damn world coming to a census on a piece of work being an all-time great. Fools.

So I'm assuming you agree with every movie that damned world comes to a "census" on? Or is it only bland ass Shawshank that you cling to the hope that majority rules for?

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i don't have any strong feelings about shawshank but this post made me remember how much i hate the movie that got me into movies and now i'm a bit jealous lmao.

Calm yourself down before I add more dialogues in the "greatest monologues" thread.

Even if Shawshank somehow achieved absolute perfection for that type of film (basically a reverential take on classical Hollywood sentimentalism), it is still, almost by design, deeply uninteresting. Yes, it's well made, yes it moves people in the expected ways, but as a film (you know, an art form which can adopt limitless styles and express limitless feelings about the human condition) it's just doing the one thing movie makers had already essentially perfected decades before Shawshank was even made.


Some would say this tried and tested way of making a movie is proof positive of how it is ultimately the superior movie making way. Give the audience a good old heroes journey, give them something to root for, give them a tidy resolution. How could you possibly complain about that when these kinds of films essentially make the backbone of all cinema. Are essentially all of the films which make all the money and that put asses in seats.


And maybe that's true. Maybe the majority means something here. Maybe.


Or, I don't know, maybe these people simply haven't seen enough movies. Or at least enough different types of movies. Maybe their belief that everything that you can ever want from a film can be accomplished by movies like Shawshank stopped them from looking any further, into cinema from the past, from all the other countries, or made with completely different philosophies of what a movie can dare do. Maybe the quick to like qualities of Shawshank mostly just blot out the value of movies whose qualities are a little more difficult to discern at a quick glance


I don't know. I honestly dont. But I obviously have my suspicions.

You sound like the chef in The Menu who needs to learn how to love cheeseburgers again.

Is simple, is sappy, is openly manipulative, but works. Is cheeseburger. Can plebs haz cheeseburger, plz?

I think The Shawshank Redemption is something a little better than a bland tale told extremely well: I think it's a significantly above-average tale told almost perfectly. I would certainly concede that it's not particularly inventive, at least not in any way that pushes the cinematic form forward, but very few films are, and a lot of those that are, are that and little else. One-off experiments from which we learn, as much through their mistakes as by their insights. I see those efforts as valuable, but valuable to what end? To the end of someone using those expanded ideas and forms to tell a good story even better than they would have before.

But, admittedly, I have a soft spot for particularly quotable films, and Shawshank is certainly one of those.

It's only on a forum filled with cinephiles that something like Shawshank could ever be mistaken for some kind of crowd-pleasing schmaltz, anyway. For your genuinely average moviegoer, plucked at random from the population at large (and not the self-selected population of an enthusiasts' community), it's slow, overly long, excessively ponderous, and way too sad at points. It's only normie bait when you've already recalibrated the scale to exist entirely within the 99th percentile of filmgoers.

And that, perhaps, helps explain the appeal. For a lot of people it was a more thoughtful film that pulled them up a step, one key step closer to a deeper appreciation of cinema. A cinematic gateway drug that helped them question a few preconceptions about why and how to watch films. Which is, itself, a kind of pushing-forward, but the kind that happens inside people's heads instead of in the outward form, for all to see.

I don't know that it is great story in terms of the bones of the plot (it's kinda mid and tropey), but it's a perfectly serviceable. And the sense in which it is well-done (the manner in which the tale is told) is in that Spielbergian school or sappiness. Then again, Spielberg has entertained many millions over the span of decades. For what it is, it's perfection. It is everything the Hallmark Channel aspires to be.

I'm not against sentimentality. Or manipulation. Or exclusively narrative based films.


But when youre talking about what the greatest film of all time is (whatever that means), I'm sorry, we have to extend the conversation beyond cheeseburgers. Not in order to exclude them, but to include everything else

Because these are what some people respond to. It isn't some complicated esoteric mysterious process that leads people to liking these films instead of more traditional ones. What some people get out of Shawshank, others get from Wavelength.




A film doesn't have to influence anything to necessarily matter, but yes, many experimental films have indirectly pushed narrative films in different and often better directions.




This might be true. The average viewer might think Shawshank is too slow and nuanced. Why? Because of how limited their exposure to different kinds of films are (at least this would be one of a handful of possible reasons)


Now let's just push that a little further along and we have to group of people who have seen enough to grasp that more subtle filmic language of Shawshank to the point they see it as special.


I can only wonder what might possibly happen if they keep going?


I only wonder how many of them might move passed whatever Shawshank represented to them?


I wonder if people move into that 99th percentile if they might have a better idea of all the things movies can aspire to be, and if they might have a better command of what actually makes a movie special?

I put The Shawshank Redemption in that B+/A- range of film, the way I look at a movie like LaLaLand, Scarface, Heat, Pulp Fiction, Die Hard, Forrest Gump, The Matrix, Gladiator, Pan's Labyrinth, and other films of that ilk that just absolutely inundate the IMDB top 250, that are very good and endlessly re-watchable, but fall short of greatness of what I would consider to be "canon" of great cinema.

Maybe the best way I can describe it is this: The Shawshank Redemption is a film that I don't own on physical media, would never have the need to buy, and if I do go to my grave never having watched The Shawshank Redemption again (which is a very likely possibility) I am perfectly OK with it. That being said, if I was bored and didn't have anything going on and The Shawshank Redemption was on TV, I would instantly start watching it and be entertained and interested in it.

I think Yoda's analysis of how The Shawshank Redemption sits within the general movie going population vs where it sits within the cinephile population is spot on. There's a bit of an echo-chamber effect that goes on where a small community such as on MoFo or even Rotten Tomatoes back in the day, could form an opinion that The Shawshank Redemption is "mid" or mainstream, and while it might be when measured against the scale of the type of people who post on movie forums, it certainly isn't mainstream of mass appeal for those people who only see movies as a distraction or escape now and again and primarily stick to what's trending on Netflix or the latest Marvel film.

Also keep in mind for anyone who is between the ages of 30-50, and let's be honest here, our introduction to Shawshank has pretty good odds of having happened on the cable-TV Ted Turner two-headed beast of TNT and TBS where it played at least once every two or three weeks from 1996 to about 2003 or so. So for the cable going population, a film like Shawshank was very unique compared to the usual films that played on TV. If all you're used to seeing on cable TV is Die Hard for the 90th time, or Hard Target, or Highlander, or Missing in Action OR on the other end of the spectrum Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes... then yeah, Shawshank Redemption was truly something special and unique that was a mainstay cable-TV film that played.

I do like the film. It is emotionally manipulative in parts and it doesn't likely reflect prison or incarceration anywhere near the reality, at least not today... and yes I did work, in part in the criminal justice system for a short time dealing with inmates in a halfway/reintroduction house, so I got a brief introduction to that world. Still the characters are interesting, they are likable, and they do have personalities, and even though it's a subtle and quiet melodrama, it is still a melodrama.

Something about The Shawshank Redemption that always stood out to me was how it shows the passage of time. For such a slowly paced film, a lot of time does pass by, 20 years if I remember, and in doing so, the audience does get to see the characters grow in maturity and acceptance of one another and their situation, but it also forgoes the psychological hardship and Hell aspect of prison which is knowing your life is wasting away and the boredom, and knowing there really is no hope. And I get the message is in fact the counter to that, but in that sense the film undermines itself because the fact is for many inmates there is no hope or world beyond the prison walls. Let's be honest the best scenes and most painful in the film are those of what happens to Red and Brooks as they try to rehabilitate and acclimate to a life post-prison.

To say The Shawshank Redemption is a bad movie is ridiculous. To even say The Shawshank Redemption is "mid" or just decent is also a bit of a stretch. The Shawshank Redemption is a wonderfully crafted film that is very, very good. For my mileage it just lacks that something special and it lacks something captivating that wants me to revisit a film time and time again. It's not in the upper echelon of great movies or to be fair even great prison movies.

The Shawshank Redemption doesn't belong in the same category as films like The Great Escape, Brute Force, The Birdman of Alcatraz, Hunger, Cool Hand Luke, A Man Escaped, Bridge on the River Kwai, Chopper, Bronson, or a handful of other truly unique and innovative prison films that really try to do something special with the sub-genre that just sticks in craw. Still, I think the amount of hate The Shawshank Redemption gets in certain circles is every bit as ridiculous as the other end of the spectrum where people think it's the greatest and most impactful thing that has even gone through a viewfinder.

That it's ranked the number one of all time on IMBD is absolutely ridiculous and laughable, but that doesn't make it a bad film.

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Exactly. Commando is the greatest film of all time. It goes beyond cheeseburgers... it's the quadruple stack burger of films and cinematic glory! It can also deadlift, bench, and squat waaaay more than Shawshank!