The Shawshank Redemption is certainly one of the best stories to implement this old and simple storytelling formula. A hopeful hero is faced with obstacles. He meets other characters who are hopeless. He tries to inspire them but they find it hard to share his optimism. They have their own reasons.
Andy was the hero with thrust heroic qualities. Brooks was the doomed side character. And Red was somewhere in between. It is Red’s transformation that we saw in the film, from his refusal of hope throughout the film to finally embracing it at the end.
Andy, Brooks, and Red
Andy was a talented banker on the outside, and that helps him on the inside. In several scenes throughout the film. Remember the scene on the roof which ends with the crew drinking icy-old, Bohemia-style beer, and the colossal prick even managed to sound magnanimous. Hell, they could have been tarring the roof of their own houses.
On the other hand, Brooks was doomed from the start. He came to Shawshank in 1905. And when he was released in 1955, a total stranger to the ways of the outside world. He saw an automobile once when he was a kid and when he got out, they were everywhere.
Red was pretty much on the same track as Brooks, unless it was for Andy. Now, did Red save himself? No, luckily, he got a friend. And it didn’t even happen easily. Andy tried many times to install hope in Red, but failed. And when hope wasn’t installed in Red, Andy gave him a purpose.
What if Brooks had a friend like Andy in his time? Yes, that would have been awesome and he might have been saved. But not everyone gets a friend. Most of the time we are totally alone. Andy saved himself without anyone’s help. So, what might Brooks have lacked? A banking degree to help prison officers do tax-returns, and gain their trust? A prison cell at the end of the lane that luckily connects to the waste pipeline, rather than another cell with another prisoner?
I sometimes think even if fate hadn’t allowed Andy to escape, even if he had to spend all the years he was sentenced, i.e. 40 years, he would have still thrived. That’s how he was from inside.
So how can Brooks be this strong? Even Red wasn’t this strong. If he wasn’t given a purpose by Andy, he would have decided not to stay too.
Man’s Search For Meaning
There’s a famous book, Man’s Search For Meaning, by the psychiatrist Victor Frankl, reminiscing his time in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the Second World War. In his book he talked about hope and purpose and dreams. He proposed to his friends to share one amusing dream everyday. About what could happen after their liberation? Whom would they go to? Some people had no answer. Some had no one waiting for them outside. Their families were all dead. But some men thought of being at the party in the future and losing themselves and asking the waiter to ladle the soup from the bottom. Frankl writes that this ability to see things in a humorous light in a brilliantly hopeless and bleak situation is some kind of art of living. So, in a way, we have to fantasize, we have to dream, or should I say, practice to amuse ourselves with idiosyncrasies.
In the movie, Andy thinks like this as well. He even shares one of his fantasies with Red. Fixing boats, charter fishing, living in a place with no memory. Zihuatanejo.
We are to believe Brooks never thought like this. He might have fantasized about life outside of the prison cell, but along the way he stopped. He probably thought it was stupid. He probably thought, “My life is gone. What’s even the point of dreams now?”
And fate didn’t grant him the hope within, and what he had was only taken with the passing of each day. Well the truth is he wasn’t written to be saved. Like I said already, it’s a story. In fact the letter scene from the movie wasn’t even in the book written by Stephen King. It was Frank Darabont, the director and screenwriter, who expanded the story of this two-times-mentioned-character from the book. But this story has touched me. A story of a man wearing his best clothes for his suicide, so that to die with a little dignity, which is all what remains of his in the world. I don’t want to stop by saying the writer didn’t even think this much about Brooks. I want to know if he could have been saved. What if we take Brooks’ story as a description of a real human experience somewhere, or a metaphor, what are to take from this? That it’s really a sad story of a man who cannot be saved?
Saving Brooks
What things should be corrected then? Well, the things that are very easy to say. That he shouldn’t have been hopeless, he should have had imagination. He should have dreamt, he should have had courage. He shouldn’t have given up. He should’ve waited.
But waiting for what? Is it even worth it? You know, pushing someone around 70 years old to go on when he has absolutely no one and nothing, just for the sake of us wanting it to look like a happy ending? Isn’t it better he escaped from this life, this hell, and perhaps hopefully, start over in the next one?
But how can we judge whether life is worth living or not, and how can we do that for someone who is not ourselves? This is a thousand years old question with an impossible answer. According to Albert Camus, the only philosophical question. But we can’t stop here saying it has no answer. We want it to look good, look natural. That’s why we asked the question in the first place.
So imagine Brooks living and contacting Andy and Red, and embracing them and being happy at the end in Zihuatanejo. It already feels like we are stretching too far and unnatural. And this thought experiment requires several complications. So yeah, not applicable.
Imagine Brooks meeting some old and rich woman, or someone else not in a romantic way, some caregiver. So he got a family in some way. A happy scenario, but again, extremely rare. We need to imagine Brooks alone and he becoming happy all by himself. So imagine him not giving up and being a writer or a painter afterwards, poor one of course, and searching for the meaning of life in nature and also being depressed most of the time. But there are people like that in our history. Again, similar fate. Whether fast or late. They all die of sadness in the end.
There is only our profit in this. Turning everyone into an artist. We hope to get something out of their despair. Some art. Some stories. So that we will be inspired, so that it will help us endure our own life.
Then what should we do? Should we just leave him, accept it's a story of a doomed man? That it’s just a fiction and it’s time to stop overreacting?
Yes. We let him go. We can not save him. The narrative won’t work then. It’s just a work of fiction. It isn’t fair, but this is how it is.
But you know what would have been the best?
Taking a time machine and jumping to the right point of his life and planting a tree of hope in his mind, or watering the bud that was already there but withering. Yes, that would have been the best. Very best. For another Brooks maybe. Maybe for ourselves.
