"The window the medical examiner allowed for Thalia's time of death was 8:00 p.m. to midnight, with the beginning of the slot curtailed by the musical-the reason the show's exact end time had become the subject of infinite fascination online."
Bodie Kane is the first-person narrator and protagonist of the story. She has found success both in academia and media culture with her analysis of film studies. She has attained this success while also dealing with the lingering trauma associated with the murder of her college roommate and the subsequent arrest, trial, and conviction of a man who quite possibly was innocent. It is that murder which and the question of who committed the murder that forms the foundation of the narration. This quote comes very early in the book as Bodie is watching a videotaped performance of a college musical theater production filmed two decades earlier on the very night that roommate was murdered. The chronological distance between the past and the present is manifested in the fact that she is watching a video shot on VHS that has been uploaded to YouTube. This becomes the structural backbone of the storytelling in which the technology of the present is used to investigate a murder committed the past. Technological advancements aside, however, investigations still must rely upon solid forensic realities like timelines, and medical examinations, and opportunity.
“They made Omar out to be a bad person all-around. This one accusation wasn’t enough, they have to say he was dealing drugs, he was a violent man, he was sleeping with students. They paint a whole picture. They talk about him as if he came from nowhere, as if he had no family.”
Omar Evans is Sheila's son. He is the African American athletic trainer working at the college who is the man arrested, tried, and convicted for the murder of Bodie's roommate, Thalia. His mother's reflection upon how her son was treated is not just specific to his case, but a comprehensive indictment of the way law enforcement operates in America. This is a fictional tale of an all-too-familiar story that happens in real life all the time. Under pressure to solve the murder of a particularly sympathetic victim, the police are willing to follow the path of least resistance. This means finding a suspect that is easily implicated and building a case against him based not on solid evidence against him for this crime, but behavior in the past that strongly aligns with the criminal implication. The words of Omar's mother reflect the words of actual mothers and wives and daughters that speak to systemic corruption of investigative techniques.
"During World War II, Rita Hayworth was the most popular pin-up for GIs. (There's a reason that's her poster on the wall in The Shawshank Redemption.) She'd been forced into show business (by her vaudevillian mother, her dancer father), and she was introverted, reluctant, dogged by her public persona. She was born Margarita Carmen Cansito, with dark hair. They turned her into a redhead. They did electrolysis to raise a hairline they considered too ethnic."
Bodie's media culture success is mostly in the form of a popular podcast. The subject of her latest podcast is the real-life bombshell sex symbol and actress, Rita Hayworth. The reference to the film adaptation neglects to mention that the literary work by Stephen King upon which it was based is actually titled Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. This quote is highly suggestive of the fact that the iconic Hollywood star known as Rita Hayworth was a reinvention of the young woman she had once been. This is thematically central to the story in which both the younger and twenty-years-older version of those people are illustrated. In addition, the fact that young Margarita was exploited and abused also fits in within the novel's exploration of how women are almost groomed to become the object of obsession. And also how little this has changed over the decades.
