The Shawshank Hero’s Journey

The Shawshank Redemption has been the number one rated film on IMDB for over 16 years. It turns thirty this year. I had the honor of visiting Mansfield, OH, where the bulk of production took place, to celebrate the anniversary. Many cast and crew members, including Director/Writer, Frank Darabont, were there. Stephen King wanted to attend but couldn’t so he sent along a video which played before the first panel event at the beautiful and historic Renaissance Theater in downtown Mansfield.

Mansfield is a small city (population 46k), located half-way between Cleveland and Columbus. Darabont shared that the film has brought in over 200 million dollars in visitor revenue for Mansfield over the past three decades. When you add in the film’s slow start - it was largely considered a box office dud - that’s incredibly impressive.

In full disclosure, it’s my favorite film of all time. The reasons are many, and not terribly unique: the friendship, the sense of justice and comeuppance, the depth of Andy’s struggles and his incredible resilience to continue forward using time, pressure and hope. Andy’s journey has given light to my own journey, which has often felt like a dark, shit-filled pipe. The hope that I, too, can come out the other side with my arms raised high, baptized and washed free by the pouring rain, with nothing but Zihuatanejo in front of me is thrilling. It’s something I hold on to in dark times. This is an example of Cinema Therapy - seeing something in a film that relates to one’s personal life.

One of the dark times in my life was when my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD) in 2001. We found out more about it in 2004 when we went on a two month, 20,000 mile road trip to see a game at each of the 30 Major League Baseball stadiums (image: www.bosmovie.com). We met people with, affected by and serving the PD community along the way. We were told there would be a cure within 10 years. We believed them. In 2014, when no cure had arrived, we knew we had to shift focus from just hoping to getting busy living with the best we had available to us. 

PD can eat you alive. It’s a persistent, evolving, ingracious ass hole of a disease. When I started to notice my dad shutting down or saying no to things he previously said yes to, that was the first sign of what I now call the Parkinson’s prison. Talking to thousands of other people with PD over the years, that viewpoint has been validated. Muhammad Ali said, “I'm a prisoner in my own body”. 

So why do we connect so deeply to storytelling? As a species, we’re built for it. It’s how we communicated, learned and grew since the days of the cave dwellers drawing the stories of their hunts on the walls. During my PhD studies in the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences program at UNLV, I proposed a program to help people with PD explore their story of what it means to have PD against the framework of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Campbell was an academic who looked at the history of all human stories and found that we’re telling, essentially, the same story, over and over again (see: “monomyth”). It has different faces, masks and archetypes, but they all have standard events we can point to. The emotional and psychosocial issues associated with PD are becoming well known but interventions to specifically address them are few and far between. 

We offer The Shawshank Hero’s Journey as a way of addressing those issues. It’s a 16-week online course that meets once a week for 90 minutes per session. All classes are recorded for those who can’t make it to the class. Participants write one page per week about their own journey, with the goal of having a narrative they can share by the end of the course. 

The class is open to everyone. We highly encourage friends and family members to sign up together to enrich the learning experience. If you have any questions, please contact me at yesandexercise@gmail.com. 

My best to you,

Robert Cochrane, PhD

www.yesandexericse.org