Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

             Life consists of numerous failures and unexpected incidents. Why? We don’t know. Perhaps as suggested from the principle of uncertainty by Heisenberg in the early twentieth century, the world is simply consisted of a myriad of unpredictable nature that deters the life of every creature on earth. Surrounded by such inexorable opportunities and different backgrounds, a human, a creature of ‘sense and sensibility,’ exhibits various types of feelings, such as anger, ecstasy, fear, nervousness, and finally a hope.

Then what is a hope? In a strictly accurate sense, hope is just a fancy, imaginary concept that never exists, a hazy and mysterious but lovable and dependable object similar to a god in religion. Our minds seek out a place where we can rest upon to deviate from a reality we dwell in, a space-time filled with indefinite opportunities and irregularities. In that perspective, relying upon a hope seems so irresponsible, as one can never predict the eventual truth of reality by believing a hope unless he or she is an omnipotent god. That viewpoint is exactly what I’ve been keeping so far – hope is futile, but not after I read Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. (I read the book first before I watched the movie.)

Stephen King was indeed a shocking fiction writer. How can anyone think of a story about an innocent convict escaping a ward by poking the wall for more than twenty years? Andy, the protagonist of the story who succeeds in prison break, is definitely a stone-like figure with an almost abnormal consistency and persistence that a typical human being can never possess. Maybe, he was just ‘born’ with those characters that the writer fragmented for the story. Maybe, that was the sole reason why he could break out of the wall with his own will. But, what I found out from the story was that, whether he was a Christian who favored Bible or a geologist who knows every kind of rock in the prison baseball yard, he was a firm believer of the existence of ‘hope’ that nobody in the prison, including his best friend Red, ever did. Twenty years of long and lonely journey of staying inside the ward was truly a sufficient amount of time to carry out a mental breakdown. However, there was always a fierce coldness and passion inside his eyes, and inside the grandiose picture of Rita Hayworth that hided the nature of hope embodied in the reality.

Maybe, succeeding a miraculous escape in a strictly guided ward is quite a radical example about the power of hope. I still can’t firmly acknowledge that “hope is a good thing”, as Andy remarked in the book. But, I realized one thing’s quite true after all – believing a hope is never an irresponsible action that I could take, as belief exerts a will, a will exerts an action, an action exerts a change, and a change makes a life. Hope is the most responsible action that I could take for sure.