Daily Dialogue — February 22, 2015
Andy Dufresne: I just don’t understand what happened in there.
Heywood: Old man’s crazy as a rat in a tin shithouse, is what.
Red: Oh Heywood, that’s enough out of you!
Ernie: I heard he had you shittin’ in your pants!
Heywood: Fuck you!
Red: Would you knock it off? Brooks ain’t no bug. He’s just… just institutionalized.
Heywood: Institutionalized, my ass.
Red: The man’s been in here fifty years, Heywood. Fifty years! This is all he knows. In here, he’s an important man. He’s an educated man. Outside, he’s nothin’! Just a used up con with arthritis in both hands. Probably couldn’t get a library card if he tried. Know what I’m tryin’ to say.
Floyd: I do believe, Red, you’re talkin’ outta your ass.
Red: You believe whatever you want, Floyd. These walls are funny. First you hate ’em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.
Heywood: Shit. I could never get like that.
Prisoner: Oh yeah? Say that when you been here as long as Brooks has.
Red: Goddamn right. They send you here for life, and that’s exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyway.
— The Shawshank Redemption (1994), screenplay by Frank Darabont, short story by Stephen King
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Prison.
Trivia: The film is generally faithful to the Stephen King novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” Here are some of the differences:
* The novella specifies that Andy smuggled $100 into the prison in his rectum; exactly how he pays Red the agreed-upon price of $10 for the rock hammer is never made clear in the film.
* Andy orders a second rock hammer from Red in the novella, after the first wears down. This does not occur in the film.
* Multiple wardens oversee the prison in the novella. They are combined in the Norton of the film. For example, the warden who agrees to mail Andy’s letters and the warden who treats him so harshly at the end are not the same person in the novella.
* In addition to Red being a white Irishman, the novella also gives details of his crime that the film doesn’t.
* In the film, Hadley and his guards beat up Bogs as a favor to Andy for all his financial tips. In the novella, Andy uses the money he smuggled in the prison to pay thugs to do it.
* Tommy’s story is slightly different. He tells Andy that his old cell mate bragged that the double-murder he committed was pinned on a lawyer, rather than a banker, and Andy latches onto the idea that the two professions were commonly confused at that time.
* Tommy is also not killed in the novella; after agreeing not to testify on Andy’s behalf, he is sent to another prison.
* The ending received perhaps the most significant changes. When Red is released from Shawshank Prison, he finds a package Andy left for him in a hayfield. In the film, he simply goes directly to it, while in the novella, his hunt for the appropriate hayfield is a fairly substantial piece of the plot. The final scene of Andy sanding a boat on the beach as Red meets him again is not present in the novella; that ends with Red on his way south to meet Andy, the matter of whether they found each other again left ambiguous.
Dialogue On Dialogue: The Brooks subplot is one of the best in movies. He functions as a Negative Mentor, creating a path toward “Get busy dying,” an option Red confronts when he is a free man still feels the grip of instituionalization. Instead he chooses to “Get busy living” because of a promise he made to Andy — Red’s Attractor.