Question about the plot to The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

I have a question about the plot, that I was having some trouble wrapping my head around and was wondering if anyone could help:

Sorry I couldn't get the spoilers to work on here for some reason:

I edited your post to fix the spoiler tags. You need to use an equals sign and put the title. Make sure to preview the post to see if it's going to process. You can also quote any post with a spoiler tag just to see how they did it, for future reference.

As for the question:

Okay thank you very much for explaining it.

But I don't think the prosecution really had anything on where Andy was that night though. That argument where he said I will see you in hell, took place earlier, possibly more than a day earlier, since they said it was at Andy's house. It wasn't established how much longer it took place before, but a fight between a married couple in a house, isn't near as bad as the husband admitting to being there with a gun.

So Andy really should have lied and just said he wasn't there, because a huge coincidence like that is morally an exception to the rule when it comes to lying on the stand. If you are innocent of a crime, and telling the truth will still get you convicted based an rotten trick coincidental fate, then why the tell the truth? It's fate's fault in that case, and Andy shouldn't have felt morally pressured under that exception.

Plus Andy feels that if he doesn't testify, that it will make him look more guilty, but admitting such a huge coincidence is worse.

I'm not sure why you think they didn't have more on him. We're not shown that they did, but it's implied through dialogue like that. At worst, it's simply not stated either way. We get a quick summary of the trial without most of its details, because the trial is relatively unimportant.

As for the moral exception: that might be how you think, and even how most of us would think, but it's not universal. We see throughout the film that Andy has a particularly strong sense of right and wrong, and also that he's kinda naive. He also appears to be in shock throughout the trial. Notice the judge says "you strike me as a particularly cold and remorseless man" (or something close to that), mistaking his fear and gentleness for indifference.

So, I would say there are two general responses here:

a) There's a difference between something not making sense, and simply not being told something explicitly.

b) Characters do not always have to act in fully rational ways, especially in stressful situations. Real people don't, after all, so why should depictions of real people? There's an old quote to this effect: "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense."

Love that last quote.

It's from Tom Clancy, and yeah, it's very perceptive. In real life, people do irrational things all the time, almost for no reason. They do them even more in high stress situations. And that's kinda fair, because irrational characters can be used to cover for sloppy writing. But it's obvious, in this case, that it's very much in keeping with the character, and that it's more about what they bother to show us. Nothing important about the film hinges on the question, and it's relatively easy to headcanon the things we're not explicitly shown.

I feel like a lot of these questions about plot are basically asking "assuming every character in every movie is a hyper-rational agent, why would they do this?" Usually there's an answer to that, anyway, but on the rare occasions where there isn't, the actual answer is to question the premise: why do you think fictional characters should be hyper-rational?

Oh okay. I feel that the prosecution did not have more on him because it was dark at the scene of the murder and Andy didn't see any witnesses around. It would have been too dark for any witnesses to see that he had a gun in the car, especially since the gun was on his lap. So I feel that the prosecution wouldn't have known that he would have brought a gun with him if his car as scene there.

Yes. A lot of questions seem to come from a perspective of "what I would do, rationally, in a moment." But there's a convenience in analyzing a moment after the fact with a disconnected mind. I think there's something to be said for emotionally sympathizing with a character in the moment of that character's trauma rather than approaching any given scene from the view of the audience. Else, why seek cinema at all? I want to feel what the characters feel.

I think you're extrapolating from very little information re: what the prosecution did or didn't have. Maybe he bought the gun a day or two before, and the gun owner can testify to it. Maybe people just knew he owned the gun, meaning they were going to be able to question him as to the coincidence anyway. Maybe he decided it actually looked good to admit a coincidence rather than downplay it. Maybe he didn't just sit in the car with the gun in his lap, but got out and walked around. Who knows? The universe of the movie exists beyond the explicit images we see.

But the other things about shock, naivete, and his particularly strong commitment to truth are plenty sufficient to explain it anyway, in my mind.

Yeah true I guess. I just feel that I was not getting all the information and was like hey hold on here, you are actually going to choose to be cross examined and admit to that??? It made me interested in what I was not seeing, evidence wise, but I guess they could have had a lot more with the gun, true.