Daily Dialogue — June 11, 2017

“In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty. Oh, Andy loved geology. I imagine it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That’s all it takes really, pressure, and time. That, and a big goddamn poster. Like I said, in prison a man will do most anything to keep his mind occupied. Turns out Andy’s favorite hobby was totin’ his wall out into the exercise yard, a handful at a time. I guess after Tommy was killed, Andy decided he’d been here just about long enough. Andy did like he was told, buffed those shoes to a high mirror shine. The guards simply didn’t notice. Neither did I… I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a mans shoes? Andy crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can’t even imagine, or maybe I just don’t want to. Five hundred yards… that’s the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile.”

— The Shawshank Redemption (1994), screenplay by Frank Darabont, novella by Stephen King

The Daily Dialogue theme for next week: Triumph, suggested by Shannon Corbeil.

Trivia: There were numerous deleted scenes from the film, mainly cut for pacing purposes, including: A sequence where the convicts find Jake (Brooks’s pet crow) dead in a field sometime after Brooks has left the prison, and the convicts give Jake a funeral and burial. This deletion ends up providing a subtle thematic shift; as scripted, both Brooks and Jake represent the dangers of institutionalization, but as depicted on screen, Jake ends up foreshadowing Andy’s successful escape in the climax of the film. Tommy’s young wife visiting him, their conversations providing a more vivid illustration into why Tommy decides to turn his life around, and approaches Andy to work on getting his G.E.D. After Andy’s escape, an unfortunate guard is sent into his tunnel to see where it leads, and when he sees the sewage pipe broken, and smells the overwhelming odor of shit, he vomits — loudly. Red hears this happen from his own cell, and cracks up laughing. He’s sent to solitary confinement for two weeks, where he continues laughing, thus learning for himself what Andy (in the aftermath of the loudspeaker incident) had meant about “easy time” in the hole. Red’s feelings on the 1960s after he is paroled, as well as a panic attack in the grocery store, that sends him running for a bathroom cubicle that calms him down because it reminds him of his cell — thus making his choice to find the tree and rock wall more meaningful, because it runs counter to Brooks’ choice.

Dialogue On Dialogue: This is an unusual way to use dialogue in a moment of cinematic triumph: voice-over narration, both narrating the sag of Andy’s escape and providing a glimpse of the emotional experience Andy has as he crawls his way to freedom.