As faithful followers will have guessed, I’m a big movie fan. One of my all-time fave flics is The Shawshank Redemption. But I discovered there was a lot I didn’t know about the academy-award-winning film when I came across a post at Explored Planet (EP) the other day…
Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) with Jake the crow in the Shawshank Prison Library…
The Shawshak Redemption is the story of one man told by another. The narrative spans something like 30 years. The main character is Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a banker who is sentenced to ‘life’ after being found guilty of killing his wife and her secret lover. The narrator, his closest friend in prison, is Red (Morgan Freeman), who is also ‘in’ for life.
Many other characters are offered up for our consideration. Perhaps none of them is more enigmatic than Brooks (James Whitmore), an elderly man who is also serving a life sentence, who has earned a ‘trusty’ post as Prison Librarian.
Where it gets a little weird…
EP explains: “In the film, […] Brooks has a pet crow. Because they were working with a live animal, the scenes with the crow were heavily monitored by the American Human Association.
“In the scene when Brooks feeds his crow a maggot, the AHA stepped in claiming that it was cruel to the maggot and that they would have to use a maggot that had died of natural causes. Amazingly, the production team found a maggot that met the AHA’s standards and the scene was filmed.”
Wait a minute…
My first thought was, “Hey! If I found a maggot in my bread, I’d just pick it up (using a napkin, of course) and toss it. End of story.
And what’s with the hyper-sensitivity about insects, anyway?
Millions of folks swat hundreds of millions of flies and mosquitoes every day. And the AHA makes nary a peep. Why?
Food involved
Maybe it’s because Brooks asks one of his mess hall buddies if he can have a maggot that has crawled out of the remains of another guy’s dinner. Dufresne is clearly disgusted, thinking Brooks is going to eat it himself. “I’ll just keep this for later,” the older fellow grins. And Andy is left on tenter hooks until sometime after, when he discovers that Brooks has a bird, named Jake, who just loves fresh, live grubs…
My take
My view of what some (many?) would call over-zealousness by the AHS can be summed up in the immortal words of Alfred Lord Tennyson, from his epic poem, The Charge Of The Light Brigade: “Ours is not to reason why, / Ours is but to do and die.”
The famous phrase is meant to convey a message of strict obedience and duty, where questioning orders is considered secondary to carrying them out. Which puts it in the same category as the ‘zero tolerance’ principle. Perhaps a noble principle in the early 19th century. But shockingly out of place in 2025…
~ Maggie J.