Why We Couldn’t Stop Watching the David Sweat and Richard Matt Fugitive Drama

Convicted murderer David Sweat, left, was captured on Sunday, three weeks after he had escaped from an upstate New York maximum-security prison with Richard Matt, right, who was shot and killed by police officers on Friday. Their escape and the dramatic manhunt that followed gripped America. (Photo: New York State Police) 

Comparisons to Andy Dufresne’s elaborate escape in 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption began almost the moment word hit the media that convicted murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat had slipped away from New York’s largest prison late on June 5.

“In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank Prison,” Morgan Freeman’s Red explains in the film. “All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I remember thinking it would take a man 600 years to tunnel through the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than 20.”

A poster for The Shawshank Redemption. (Photo: Columbia Pictures)

Flashing back to reality, Matt and Sweat used power tools provided by prison workers to break out, cutting through the walls of their adjoining cells. Under the cover of darkness, they then slid into the depths of the prison and out a manhole to freedom.

“Daring ‘Shawshank Redemption’-style escape,” the New York Post said.

“An epic prison break that brings to mind the film The Shawshank Redemption,” said Mashable.

After Matt was killed in a shootout with police on Friday, more than 1,200 law enforcement officials joined the search for Sweat through dense woods along Highway 30 in Malone, N.Y. — a hide-and-seek effort that lasted longer than most thought, drawing comparisons and nods on Twitter to the 1993 Harrison Ford film The Fugitive.

America was enthralled with this case, right up until Sweat was finally captured near the Canadian border on Sunday afternoon. And now that he’s finally in custody, reportedly alive, the drama may continue to draw attention and comparisons to more fictional figures.

Why we can’t look away

Why were we so captivated by the criminals’ escape? And why did we keep comparing it to Shawshank? Because the engrossing elements of real-life drama and fictionalized entertainment are exactly the same, according to Art Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Most of us lead lives that are devoid of real danger and even significant risk,” he tells Yahoo Health, “so we use media as an outlet for our desire to be exposed to some risk and danger. In many ways, the impact of fictional accounts of crime and war is quite similar to that of real-life stories: We get an opportunity to experience a rare event that is dissimilar from our daily existence.”

A poster for 1993’s The Fugitive. (Photo: Warner Brothers)

Matt and Sweat’s escape, says Markman, was highly improbable. The magnitude. The planning. The precision. And then the element of danger that followed — two escaped convicted murderers, hiding from authorities — had us glued to our screens.

Once we’re already engaged, we’re apt to make those cinematic or fictional connections. Whether it’s real or fake, we remember and thrive on drama. “Great fiction captures a story arc that resonates with us,” Markman says. “When we see a real-life situation that has the elements of great fictional narratives, that captures our attention.”

For a moment, viewers can get wrapped up and a little lost in a story, like the Shawshank-esque one that played out in New York all June. Markman says that after people begin to recognize the similarities between a real event and a piece of fiction, “they may focus on those details that are similar between the two and miss potentially important differences.”

The Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black depicts the daily interactions and sophisticated social system of life within prison. (Photo: Netflix)

Some may have felt they knew Matt and Sweat because of the connections between Shawshank, The Fugitive, and the many other popular prison dramas in movie theaters and on television. Thanks to the intimate details the media pieced together of the prisoners’ life inside prison — an ecosystem that we feel familiar with thanks to shows like Orange Is the New Black —  we know that Sweat supposedly had a cozy relationship with prison employee Joyce Mitchell. “We used to call her his boo,” a former inmate who spent time with Sweat and Mitchell in the prison tailor shop told ABC.  And when Mitchell was arrested for allegedly aiding the prisoners in their escape, the New York Post unceremoniously coined her the “shawskank.”

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In fact, don’t be surprised if this escape is remembered as “the Shawshank prison break” for some time — even though there were big deviations from the movie’s plot and fictional escapee Dufresne.

This is something that Tim Robbins, the actor who played Andy Dufresne in Shawshank, pointed out to Conan O’Brian earlier this month: “For me, it’s a different story,” he insisted. “Andy was innocent.”

We understand the villain — or we think we do

So why connect to a story with a “villain” at the center? Sometimes it’s because these tales play into a societal theme, says Chris Ferguson, an associate professor and the chair of psychology at Stetson University in Florida.

“Both stories [the New York prison break and Shawshank] are being distorted to fit with kind of a larger social narrative: being able to find freedom in oppressive circumstances, and dissatisfaction with authority,” Ferguson tells Yahoo Health. “The escapees, whether fictional or real, good guys or bad guys, are all sticking it to the system, if only for a little while — and since most of us who aren’t in the 1 percent feel as if the system is rigged against us, it’s tempting to feel empathy for anyone who can get one over on it.”

This might even cause some to sympathize with or root for the “villains,” says Ferguson — even though both were convicted of murder and shouldn’t be idealized. “Obviously, we’re glossing over the negative details of these inmates to do so, but that’s kind of how social narratives work,” he explains. “We look for cases, whether real or fictional, to fit our narratives and ignore inconvenient details.”

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No villain is totally unique either. On Twitter, on Facebook, or even in buzz among friends, we’re banding together in real-life dramas almost as “crime experts,” says psychologist Karla Ivankovich, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois, Springfield. We’re glued to our TVs and the Internet, waiting to read into the details with our friends and Internet pals. In other words: We’ve been there and seen this before, and we can talk about it in depth.

“Because so many big-screen and television dramas are based on real-life events, viewers believe they have become adept at predicting future actions of the villain,” she tells Yahoo Health. “So any tie to a fictional character gives us a preconceived notion of how the situation will play out — and viewers remain vigilant in watching the news in order to see if they were right.”

Predictable or not, we’re still hooked. “We are fascinated with the criminal mind,” Ivankovich says.

How fiction and reality are closely intertwined

In the New York fugitives’ case, as in others, it was easy for audiences to connect the dots between cinema and real-life drama … so why do the lines between fiction, reality, and entertainment blur so easily?

Because every story of interest feeds into the same thing, says Ivankovich, who insists the most important piece of the media frenzy surrounding Matt and Sweat is this: “We live off of the ills of others. If there is any question about this, simply look to the ratings for popular television or immediately after a horrific event. By a landslide, reality TV has taken over our viewing pleasure. We are obsessed with Keeping Up With the Kardashians and reality television.”

The Hunger Games trilogy, starring Jennifer Lawrence, was based in part on reality television. (Photo: Lionsgate) 

Indeed, reality TV and the Iraq War even inspired author Suzanne Collins to pen the fictional Hunger Games trilogy. “The Hunger Games is a reality television program,” she said in an interview with Scholastic. “An extreme one, but that’s what it is. And while I think some of those shows can succeed on different levels, there’s also the voyeuristic thrill, watching people being humiliated or brought to tears or suffering physically. And that’s what I find very disturbing.”

“There’s this potential for desensitizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn’t have the impact it should,” Collins went on. “It all just blurs into one program.”

Our obsession with drama and danger is a multifaceted issue — perhaps one we can lose ourselves in, just a little bit, with each new episode of Dateline or high-stakes thriller film. Ivankovich points to the fictional heroes in shows like CSI or Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, which her students often say they aspire to become. In real life.

Is fiction motivating crime?

Thankfully, though, dramatizations aren’t likely inspiring criminals to commit new offenses. “Fiction doesn’t cause us to do anything we wouldn’t already do,” Ferguson says. “At this point, we can be increasingly certain that fictional media doesn’t cause us to engage in dangerous behaviors; fictional media markets to our preexisting motivations.”

Related: What Your Brain Looks Like When You Think You’re Going to Die

But fiction and reality do seem closely connected at times. Ferguson says it’s tempting to blame violent or negative media for crimes that seem to nod toward works of fiction — like, for instance, the 2012 shooting at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo.

But if we do that, he says, we’re pointing the finger in the wrong direction. “These motivations come from within us, whether good or evil,” Ferguson explains. “Even in a case like Aurora, where the shooter sort of dressed like the Joker, if you could wave a magic wand and make the entire Batman franchise vanish as if it never were, would the Aurora shooting have still happened? Absolutely. He just wouldn’t have dressed like the Joker.

“We look for fiction to fit our inspirations, not the other way around.”

Most of the population doesn’t act on fantastical or dark imaginings. Ferguson points out that, although fictional violence has skyrocketed in recent decades, violence in society has plummeted. “Youth violence is down 90 percent,” he says. “Despite decades of scholars trying, it’s been impossible to link fiction to crime in meaningful ways.”

At the end of the day, most of us can separate fantasy and reality, says Markman, despite the similarities we notice.

“However, fiction can influence the way people think and act,” he explains. “For example, when fiction expresses an attitude that is not currently mainstream, it can make that attitude seem more acceptable.”

And maybe make us feel a little less alone, says Ivankovich. As humans, we all search for connections to those larger narratives around us — ones masses of people take part in, whether good, bad, or sad. “If we can join in with a concept, theory, or event, we feel a part of something,” she says. “When Princess Diana died, when the World Trade Centers toppled, people were glued to media sources because they felt a part of something.

“Media is designed to get our attention and to keep it,” Ivankovich says. “Pain and fear are elements that join people very quickly.”

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