Ability as ‘performance’: analyzing the able-ness of ‘life’ through a critical study of The Shawshank Redemption and The Dark Knight

This article deals closely with the relation between the ability and state of being alive. It asks an elemental question: what does the word ‘life’ remind us of? While ‘life’ may generically be defined as the ability to do all that signifies the act of living, a more political way of defining ‘life’ would be to consider it as the medium of being alive as human or, an individual person’s existence. The generic definition of ‘life’ given above may suffer from reductionism if ‘ability’ is interpreted as a thing-in-itself, natural to mankind as an inherent, embedded process. This article, therefore, aims to analyze life by stepping out of this biological method of understanding and concentrates on the socio-economic and cultural nexus in which the ability to do is produced. It has chosen cinema as a medium of analysis because cinema does not dwell in a (cinematic) utopian space of its own, but it represents reality as much as it affects reality through the audio-visual experience of the audience.