100 Greatest Fictional Villains: Warden Norton

Appears in: The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Setting: New England, 1940s-1960s

Villain Type: Greedy, abusive, corrupt authority figure.

Obviously, the smirking, sanctimonious, viciously genteel Warden Norton (character actor Bob Gunton’s best role) is not the main antagonist of The Shawshank Redemption. That honour goes to the grim presence of Shawshank itself; vast and stern and pointlessly, pitilessly cruel towards the wretches caught up, rightly or wrongly, in its grip. Norton is more that unhappy institution’s human sidekick, a figure of towering hypocrisy whose façade of righteousness and discipline is a mask for the most banal of motives. He doesn’t care about an orderly prison beyond the minimum needed for convenience (indifferent towards the sadism of guards and inmates alike) and he certainly doesn’t care about instilling moral values. For Norton, Shawshank is a means to an end; that end being nothing more than a corrupt buck. There are few things more simultaneously despicable and pathetic than a man prepared to lie, threaten and kill for the sake of getting rich, but a man prepared to lie, threaten and kill for the sake of getting rich who ALSO engages in totally insincere religious posturing has got to be one of them.

In retrospect, Norton was actually the perfect foil for good old Andy Dufresne. While Andy is a degraded convict in spite of his innocence, the Warden is a thriving pillar of the establishment, despite his guilt. Where Andy has to survive by his wits with scarce resources, the Warden has the full backing of the state, and addresses his problems with brutal directness (the cause of his richly-deserved downfall, as he overestimates his ability to simply break anyone in his path). Whereas Andy has a yearning for freedom that leads him to a transcendent redemption, Norton is quite comfortable to stay ensconced in his prison office and hoard his fraudulent gains. The chilly glare and severe glasses don’t make him some kind of evil mastermind; his effectiveness as a villain stems from the prosaic nature of his plan. He’s a figure of worldly, everyday evil, and that look of dull shock on his face when he realises Andy has vanished into the howling night, where someone like him can never follow, makes the film’s climax all the sweeter.

One of the many, many things to like about the Shawshank Redemption is that it pulls off one of the most perfect movie revenges ever. It makes the total defeat of the bad guy seem satisfying and earned; Andy completely DESTROYS the Warden, and he does it without ever doing anything as dull-witted as sinking a fist into him or ridiculing him. He just takes his licks in solitary, absorbs the fact that the Warden has had a young man killed (thereby scotching any chance of proving Andy’s innocence, in order to keep him in prison doing the Warden’s crooked finances), and calmly, confidently sets about arranging the means to blow open Norton’s massive fraud, setting up his own escape at the same time. That put paid to the obtuse son of a bitch.