The last time I was "Shawshanked"...

The other night I fell asleep in bed watching the 11 o’clock news.  An hour later I woke to discover my husband still awake beside me.  “What are you watching?” I asked sleepily, to which he replied, “’Knight and Day’ with Tom Cruise.”  I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

My husband had been “Shawshanked”.

I first heard this term at a party last summer. “I got ‘Shawshanked’ last night by ‘The Departed’,” a friend lamented.  Though I’d never heard the term before, I knew exactly what it meant even before looking it up on The Urban Dictionary website. “Shawshanked: the condition of having been sucked in by a highly watchable movie while channel surfing or walking past a TV. Originally derived from The Shawshank Redemption.”

Sound familiar? Who hasn’t been “Shawshanked” at one time or another?  You’re watching television while lying in bed, or folding laundry catching up on paperwork.  As you scan through your two or three hundred channels, you discover “Apollo 13” is on.  It doesn’t matter that you’ve seen the movie in its entirety umpteenth times, not counting all the snippets you’ve caught over the years.  You think to yourself, “I’ll just watch that amazing launch scene one more time…” and before you know it two hours have passed and you’re watching Tom Hank’s exhausted, smiling face as he waves from the safety of an aircraft carrier.

You just got “Shawshanked”.

“The Shawshank Redemption” has to be one of the most watchable films of all time, Nominated for seven Academy Awards, the film features inspired performances by Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, and was also instrumental in launching the career of screenwriter and director Frank Darabont, who went on to make ‘The Green Mile” and “The Walking Dead.”  Aside from being a true classic, what is it about “Shawshank”, and films like it, that sucks us in time and time again?

Is it because channels like TNT and TBS and AMC rebroadcast these films over and over again, drilling them deep into our DNA?  American Movie Classics hosts “Can’t Get Enough…” marathons, showing five nights of the same movie back to back in primetime. “Can’t Get Enough” marathons have included films such as “The Matrix”, “Rocky” and, of course, “The Shawshank Redemption”.  Common sense dictates that this should have the opposite effect on viewers, turning them off because the movies have been broadcast ad nauseam.  Shouldn’t you be inclined to be “Shawshanked” by a more elusive film? Shouldn’t absence make the heart grow fonder? Apparently not.

My personal “Shawshank” list includes the aforementioned “Apollo 13” and, I’m embarrassed to admit, “The American President”.  There’s something about this film, which stars Michael Douglas and Annette Bening as a widowed U.S. president and a lobbyist who fall in love, that sucks me in every time.  Though it may not be a “classic”, the combination of Rob Reiner’s direction, Aaron Sorkin’s witty dialogue and the chemistry between the two romantic leads “Shawshanks” me every time.  Though the film has fallen off in popularity, there was a time when I just couldn’t get enough of “The American President”.   I can’t count the number of times my husband walked in the room, saw me watching it, rolled his eyes and walked out.

Now if you’re wondering just where the term “Shawshanked” originated, I’m happy to report that the brilliant creator resides right here on the south shore: Jerry Thornton.  Jerry is a hilarious writer and comedian, known to many (especially my husband) for his posts on Barstoolsports.com and his creation of the very entertaining and addictive site, Moviequoter.com.  I discovered this fact when a Google search turned up the Twitter page “#shawshanked”, a page created by Jerry.  I should have known, with his sharp sense of humor and his passion for film, that Jerry Thornton would be the one to introduce “Shawshanked” into our pop culture.

Regarding my husband, I discovered one more important thing about being “Shawshanked”: The movie doesn’t necessarily have to be good to suck you in. My husband admitted that “Knight and Day” wasn’t worth the sleep he lost watching it.  And yet, he still stayed up till 2am.

Shawshanked!