Pandora's Legacy

(The Shawshank Redemption spoilers lie ahead--consider this fair warning)

Gordon, here, pointed me towards a post by logan on his blog house of the ded on one of my (and many others') all-time favorite films--The Shawshank Redemption. Logan points out how hope is really the film's central theme, and he's certainly right. But his post got me to thinking about how the film's treatment of the theme, while wonderful in its own right, reminds me so strongly about another of my favorite works of art--the musical Man of La Mancha.

Like Shawshank, Man of La Mancha also has as its central theme one of hope, one that illuminates how the power of hope can help to get one through even the worst of times. Andy, in Shawshank, gets through decades of false imprisonment, brutal rapes, and other indignities because he has hope, and that hope sustains him. The theme isn't exactly buried; Andy basically comes right out and defines it for us in his letter to Red: "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."

Man of La Mancha may not be so explicit, but its treatment of that famous literary character, Don Quixote, hinges on much the same point. Don Quixote is seen as mad by the rest of the world because he refuses to acknowledge reality, preferring instead to believe in a better, more noble world, even in the face of the opposite. This is, to me, a kind of hope--he has hope in the world and in people, even when it's not justified at all.

The crucial difference in how the film and the play treat this theme lies in their endings. Andy escapes from Shawshank, and Red, in the end, embraces the hope Andy has taught him about and travels to see him, to see if "the Pacific is as blue as it is in [his] dreams." Both Andy and Red go through numbing hardship, but their belief in hope sustains then and, (and here's the rub) in the end is rewarded. In Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote's stubborn belief in a better world is hardly justified. The message of the play is, to my mind, even stronger than Shawshank's--that hope is a remarkably powerful thing, not because "dreams do come true" or because there is a light at the end of the tunnel and hope can get you to it, but because of how it can give you strength even when there is no light at the end of that tunnel.

The theme of La Mancha is powerfully voiced by its most famous anthem--an anthem that has been turned to cliche by far too many bombastic, smug, and kitchsy renditions to count (curse you Robert Goulet!). But listen to the lyric, closely. It's not "The Highly Unlikely Dream" or "The Seemingly Insurmountable Dream." It's "The Impossible Dream." The song's, and the play's, point is that believing, and striving towards something that you know you can't have, has remarkable power. It's almost counter-intuitive. Don Quixote dies at the end of the play; his dream has not come true, his hope has not been justified. But in the way it inspires the wretched, debased woman he insisted was a breathtakingly beautiful and pure maiden, the dream has, in some sense, come true. And that's the true power of the play and its message.

The original ending of Shawshank was to have been that penultimate shot of the bus Red is on rolling on down the road. There wasn't originally the little nicely tied bow of Red getting to the beach and greeting Andy that the film leaves us with. The studio, correctly I think, insisted that the film couldn't end without letting the audience know if Red made it or not. And the ending as is well-earned--I, for one, love seeing Red's hope fulfilled. But the message, that hope is the "best of things," would probably be just a little bit more powerful if it was left open-ended--if we were encouraged to believe that Red's hope was a good thing no matter what the outcome.

Don't mistake me--I'm not trying to argue that Man of La Mancha is somehow better than Shawshank because of this. What I am saying, though, is that its message about the power of hope is actually a more striking and powerful one.

Until Whenever