Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Analyzing a Single Story--A ED Blog Post 4


Jeremy Todd
November 13, 2012
A ED Blog Post 4

            The film that I chose to analyze in this post is one of my all-time favorites, The Shawshank Redemption. The 1994 film starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman is a story about a wrongly accused banker Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) who is sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his wife. While in prison he meets Red (Morgan Freeman) who befriends him and together they brave the corrupt world behind bars. With an ingenious plan, Andy outsmarts the warden and escapes from prison and exposes the corruption that was ever-present inside the walls of Shawshank Prison.
            I chose this film to analyze an example of a single story because throughout the film Andy is grouped with all the other criminals and treated as a murder even though he never killed anyone. In addition, the other characters in the movie all show remorse and personal change after being in prison, but the warden and guards fail to recognize the strides that most of the prisoners have made since being locked up. The single story that applies to Andy perpetuates the stereotype of criminals that in no way applies to the shy, mild-mannered Andy Dufresne. This single story provides a limiting view of Andy’s life, only the view of him as a vicious criminal. However, the film creates the plot in such a way that challenges this single story and shows that there is much more to Andy Dufresne than is described by this single story.

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