You could be forgiven for forgetting about the harmonica in The Shawshank Redemption, but thematically and symbolically, it is right at the very heart of Frank Darabont’s 1994 prison drama based on a short story by Stephen King. The movie gives us one of the great onscreen friendships in the history of cinema, between Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) and Ellis Boyd ‘Red’ Redding (Morgan Freeman), over the course of their 20 years in Shawshank State Penitentiary.
Andy is a former vice president of a bank, wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and her lover and is sentenced to life in prison to be served in Shawshank. Andy finds hobbies and jobs in prison to occupy and benefit himself, such fashioning chess pieces out of rocks, helping fellow inmates get their diploma’s, offering financial services to the prison guards, getting books for the prison library. He strives to make life better for himself and his fellow inmates and friends because at his very core he wants to preserve his humanity and hope while he serves out his time. When he gets the chance he plays music over the loudspeaker for all his fellow prisoners and earns himself 2 weeks in the ‘hole.’ When he gets back from the hole, he tells his friends it was the easiest time he ever did because he had Mozart to keep him company. Shocked, they ask if they let him bring the record player down to the hole to listen to music down there. Andy tells them he listens to it from memory because it’s all in his head and he feels it in his soul. Red tells Andy he used to play harmonica as a younger man, but didn’t see any point in continuing to play in prison. Andy tells Red that’s when it’s the most important to have music. For Andy hope and music are the 2 things they can never take from you in Shawshank.
Red on the other hand doesn’t feel he can make it out there in the real world. When Brooks freaks out about being released after 50 years in Shawshank and eventually commits suicide, Red is the only one who understands what Brooks was feeling and going through. He explains to his friends that Brooks became ‘institutionalized’, explaining that at first you hate the prison walls around you, but after a while you start getting used to them and eventually get to depend on them. Now why does red know this? Because he’s been in Shawshank almost 30 years himself and is pretty well institutionalized himself. He knows exactly how Brooks was feeling because he has gotten pretty used to the walls of Shawshank himself and has relinquished and has long since forfeit any semblance of hope he might have once had. But then there’s that harmonica his friend Andy gave him.
Before Andy escapes, he makes Red promise, if he ever gets out, to go to a particular tree next to a long stone wall in Buxton, where Andy has buried something he wants Red to have. Andy tells him of Zihuatanejo, the town in Mexico he would go to if he ever got out of Shawshank. Red try’s to tell Andy he’s being silly hanging on to such hopes, but that night, Andy makes good his escape. The next year when Red finally gets released, we see him go through the same process as we saw Brooks go through earlier when he got release, and with what we know about Red’s feelings of institutionalization, the parallels make us worry that he might be headed towards the same fate as Brooks, hanging himself in that room.
But there was the promise he made to Andy, to dig up whatever it was he buried for him. So Red sets of for Buxton and searches that field for the stone wall and Andy’s tree. After searching for some time, he finally sees the tree, and at that moment the musical score of the movie changes from a traditional orchestral arrangement to, yes, a harmonica. We have not heard the harmonica in the score in the movie up to this point and it is not heard again after. So why do we hear the harmonica at the moment that Red sees Andy’s tree? Andy gave Red that harmonica earlier in the movie, symbolic of hope. Music and hope are thematically intertwined in the movie and for Andy as the things they can never take from you, and that is precisely what he wants to give back to Red. Andy leaves a note buried with money asking Red to join him in Zihuatanejo, and ends it by saying that hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things. In the very next scene Red says “I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.” After years of trying, Andy has succeeded in giving Red hope, and what more precious or beautiful gift could a person ever give their friend. And it’s all in that Harmonica.