Shawshank, Titanic and the Plague of 2020

“Why are the cases still going up?”, “Will my friends and family be safe?”, “Will they remember me?”, “Oh God, the global economy is in tatters.”, “Will I still have a job in a few months’ time?” “Should I apply for another job?” “Who is even hiring?”. Some nights, my mind is just racing with all these questions and more. The worrying and the down days personally seem to come in waves with some days worse than others…

In Shawshank Redemption, the 1994 prison drama, Red (Morgan Freeman) narrates how after the first night in prison, the first few weeks are the hardest and even after that there are many long days and nights. It’s insensitive staying in the comfort of one’s home and comparing it to being in prison, but it’s true. The levels of anxiety during this pandemic are somewhat comparable. The first couple of weeks after the lockdowns were suddenly announced were such a mental mess and the news of all the suffering around just made things worse. But then, like Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), the main protagonist, I found some small projects around the house to work on, found my own “rock hammer” to chisel away. I was also fortunate enough to keep working from home. So, the 130 days since the lockdown was first announced have somehow flown by speedily. 

Staying at home like in Shawshank, has given me so much time to think, a little too much if you ask me. But it has allowed me the time to examine myself and my very human limitations and emotions, and that it’s okay not to have all the answers. There is a scene in the movie where Andy works out a deal with the prison guards to get beer for his fellow prisoners, his “colleagues”, and then he just sits there smiling. After months of staying at home, when I finally saw a couple of friends for my birthday or when I shared a meal in Koshy’s with a friend, the moment felt so special, so rare, I was just smiling stupidly. I don’t think my friends noticed it, but I was just so glad to be there in that fleeting moment. 

The other incredibly freeing moment in the movie is when Andy manages to play Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro over the PA. I don’t think I ever really appreciated this moment in the movie until I watched it this week. There is something incredibly elevating and freeing about it, it truly does make the walls disappear, albeit for a moment.

During the lockdown, I somehow stumbled upon Pavarotti for the first time on YouTube and the movie’s narration captures the feeling of listening to such music so aptly. 

Red: “I have no idea to this day what them two Italian ladies were singin' about […] I tell you, those voices soared. Higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away... and for the briefest of moments -- every last man at Shawshank felt free.”

Towards the end of Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman’s Red unearths a tin box with a picture of a ship that looks a little like the Titanic. Reminded by this, I decided to revisit James Cameron’s Titanic and watch it this week for only the 3rd time in my nearly three decades of living. The first time was in Sangam Theatre in ’97 or early ’98, when my mom made me turn around and face the projector for “the scenes”, the second time was in primary school, on TV, with my grandma, when dinner was timed to perfection. My grandma was not very well-versed in English so I stayed back in her place that night to “explain” the movie to her even though I only spoke English. I don’t know how I did it, but she was full of praise when my parents returned the next morning. I remember feeling quite proud of myself. 

Titanic is successful in a strange way. We know right from the outset that there has been a tragedy and yet we smile as hundreds of men, women and children wave from the decks as the ship sets sail from Southampton. Over the years, I have consciously avoided this movie because it makes me tear up, and it’s not a very macho feeling. The Aristotelian reasoning for watching a tragedy is because it’s cathartic which is probably true, but in the middle of a pandemic, I’m not too sure about it. There is a massive tragedy unfolding and we see the hopeless romance of Jack and Rose, helplessly carried by it. I feel it is all too familiar, with the virus rampaging around the world and I can’t even go out and help for fear of contracting the disease and spreading it to my near and dear ones. This feeling of helplessness and lack of control of the situation is exasperating. Later, when calmer minds prevail, I see that my sphere of control was always just as small and that being outside and travelling just gave me an illusion of control. As a friend put it, our way of fighting is by staying in, not everyone can afford to do it but if you can, you should.

Our PM, with his new Titanic captain-esque beard, isn’t really inspiring confidence in me. I feel the advertising and show of doing something seems to have taken centre stage. But then again, like with the iceberg, the problems associated with the pandemic have become too large for any one person to step up and deal with. Some countries have dealt with it with great coordination between federal and state enterprises, stringently testing and efficiently contact tracing. Others have controlled the disease with harsh lockdowns. But what fits the Indian model with its crowded cities and massive poverty? We’ll probably only be able to say in hindsight.

On RMS Titanic, of the 2224 passengers on board, only 710 people survived, with proportionally more people from the upper classes surviving. To be honest, these numbers are a little too mind numbing, a little too theoretical. The narrator in Albert Camus’ The Plague wonders the same, when he hears about 5,000 deaths and he wonders how the average human can comprehend these numbers. I have to agree, despite being complex organisms, I think for the average mind, our grasp of numbers is limited to the functions we can perform on our fingers. The visual form helps us. A dozen or more and we are crossing into the theoretical. This kind of explains our collective lack of empathy for the victims of large tragedies. We find it easier to grieve the loss of a celebrated actor who we have watched on screen once, rather than the thousands that the country has lost.

The only way around it as I see it, is to tell stories of these people as individuals and not as a collective. The reason we emote so strongly with the Titanic (1997) even though it is fiction, is because at the core of it, it was just the story of a woman telling people about her experience, from her point of view. Even with the real RMS Titanic, we see how people have since come together to tell stories of those who lost their lives in the tragedy. Wikipedia’s incredible collaborative work has even given us the names of almost every passenger on board the RMS Titanic and where they were from among other things. 

We need to remember our dead, and listen and tell their stories because it soothes the pain of those left behind, the countless people who didn’t even get a chance to hold a proper funeral. Time will make the scars of this pandemic fade but we should never forget. Like Rose and Andy, we’re called to be resourceful and even more so to be humane at this point in time. 

We may not all be on the same ship, but we certainly are on the same turbulent sea.