10 films for a senior high student: ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ and ‘The Truman Show’

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By John Anthony S. Estolloso

(Part 1 of 5)

Both ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ and ‘The Truman Show’ are established cinematic classics and while they may seem dated to the younger set, they retain a freshness of thought resonating through generations of both amateur and serious film enthusiasts. Even so, both were not top billing during their releases. Then again, a long queue outside the theater does not necessarily reflect the quality of the film.

Owing much to the appeal of its narrative, The Shawshank Redemption endures as a masterpiece of cinematic storytelling. Central to the plot is Andy Dufresne, wrongly sentenced to prison for the murder of his wife. Resigned to his fate, he enters the jail and through the years of his detention, comes to terms with incarcerated life: its desolations, corruptions, and its dehumanizing effect to inmates.

Shawshank Prison becomes venue to a collective redemption story – even if it means Dufresne’s eventual breakout from what confines not only his person but his humanity as well. In sidestepping the corruptors of the law, he unmasks a much deeper rot in a system that institutionalizes venality and in turn, questions the role of prisons as reformatories of character or as dens of depravity.

How director Frank Darabont retells Stephen King’s novella as a cinematic parable is a masterclass of storytelling. For whatever the critics might have missed on its premiere, Shawshank is one of those films which never won a statuette from the Academy but will always be celebrated for its honest albeit sentimental take on transcendence: the greatness of the human spirit prevails despite cruelty or prison walls.

Contrastingly, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show offers a different perspective of a jailbreak. Unwittingly, main character Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey, in all seriousness) is the subject of everyone’s conversation and the object of everyone’s attention. Oblivious that his life is caged in an Orwellian panopticon serving as prime Huxleyan entertainment for everybody else, he must arrive to an epiphany of his unrealities before breaking out through the walled-up enclosure of his movie-set life and onto an existence which hopefully is more real than what he lived through.

At its time, The Truman Show is a cinematic allegory, one adapted from literary forebodings of a dystopian society caught up in a prison of its own making. The film remains so until we realize that we are living out the narrative of Truman Burbank, and that every friend and follower on social media becomes the unmindful audience to an artificial reality show of our own curation and design. One needs but scroll through the Facebook wall of young parents who flaunt every waking and sleeping moment of their offspring, or of Instagram personalities who cannot seem to quench the thirst to be seen and heeded. In response, followers offer their apathetic adoration: what better way to forget one’s own problems than to immerse into somebody else’s woes?

Both films offer a compelling argument about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For Shawshank, it is the physical confinement that paradoxically deprives liberties while offering a soulful humanity within prison walls. Truman’s confinement is more restrained and subtle – at some point in the film, one has to ask who was really enmeshed: Truman in his perfect little world surrounded and manipulated by cameras or the brain-dead audience who finds it great entertainment to follow the unremarkable life of a naïve individual.

Dated the films’ qualities may be, they still resonate with present circumstances, especially with the rat races of the classroom or workplace. Whether chained to the relentless pursuit of medals, honors, and titles, or ensnared in the insatiable need to document everything ‘at the moment,’ womb to tomb, viewers of both films are cautioned and invited: break out of the figuratively materialistic and shallow constraints that hold back what makes us human and humane.

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Great films ought to provoke and inspire viewers. They provide a literary depth that lifts from the lines and pages of the narrative, interpretations which enflesh the author’s worldview or endow this with different perspectives and understandings. More than sheer entertainment, they lend a modicum of permanence to performances which aspire to the ideal of a ‘total work of art’, that these may be experienced again and again. What literature holds in its pages, films elevate to the aesthetic purposes of the heart and soul, and their need to be taught the knowledge of themselves, beyond special effects or computer-generated images.

(The author is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools in the city. Posters are from IMDb.)