Was John Coffey the second coming of Jesus in ‘The Green Mile’?
Frank Darabont and Stephen King have proven to be a match made in heaven, with the filmmaker going three-for-three on adaptations that are wildly different in terms of style, tone, and genre. The Shawshank Redemption is uplifting, The Mist is haunting, and The Green Mile is heartbreaking.
An epic in every sense of the word, the 189-minute drama took great care and spent plenty of time establishing its key players, their motivations, and how they fit into the richly detailed and unforgiving world of the prison system in 1930s America.
The Green Mile is cloaked in thick layers of darkness, but there’s always a glimmer of light waiting to burst through, whether that’s Tom Hanks’ optimistic Paul Edgecomb or Michael Clarke Duncan’s John Coffey, the death row inmate who ends up changing the former’s life forever when unexplainable events begin happening.
A critical and commercial success, The Green Mile secured four Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’, and even now, thinking about the gut-wrenching final scenes is more than enough to bring a tear to the most hardened of eyes. With that, let’s get into the details…
Who is John Coffey in The Green Mile?
Clarke Duncan’s Coffey ends up being arrested, accused, and ultimately convicted of brutally murdering two young sisters. He certainly has the dimensions to convince a jury he’s capable of being a killer, but his personality suggests the complete opposite.
The living definition of a gentle giant, Coffey forms a close bond with Hanks’ Edgecomb, discovering the death row inmate possesses gifts that exist beyond the realm of human comprehension. A powerful drama with several obvious fantastical elements, it’s not difficult to read between the lines and view The Green Mile as a biblical allegory, with Coffey filling the part of Jesus Christ.
The shared initials are a bit of a giveaway, but there’s plenty more evidence to suggest King was adhering to scripture when creating the character. For one thing, his origins and background are left entirely unexplained, with the discovery of Coffey holding the victims he was accused of killing the first anyone had ever heard or mentioned of him.
Did John Coffey do it?
At first glance, Coffey didn’t stand a chance of protesting his innocence when he’s discovered cradling the bodies of two girls who were killed in the most harrowing of circumstances. Essentially, it’s his word against the justice system, and there’s nothing definitive that can prove his innocence.
However, Edgecomb harbours suspicions from the very beginning that Coffey is innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted and eventually killed – and his assumptions are proven to be entirely correct when Hanks’ character experiences a vision shown to him by the inmate he’s befriended.
As revealed to him in the vision, Sam Rockwell’s ‘Wild Bill’ Wharton was the true culprit all along, but it’s too late to stop events that are already in motion. Edgecomb suggests letting him go free, but Coffey tells him his impending execution is an act of mercy, with the world a cruel place that’s left him in constant pain and suffering from the horrors humanity inflicts upon itself.
Is John Coffey an angel?
He has the ability to heal the sick and resurrect the dead to a certain extent, as seen with Mr Jingles, while his demeanour is that of someone who doesn’t possess a bad bone in their body and can’t sanction the notion of being disrespectful, even towards the people going out of their way to make his life a living hell.
When he’s sentenced to death by electric chair, not once does he even attempt to fight the ruling, hinting that perhaps he was there to fulfil the specific purpose of spreading his message, changing people’s lives, and displaying gifts that border on miracles, knowing full well it would end with his death.
Being strapped into the chair beforehand is even equivalent to Jesus being nailed to the cross, at least as it applies to the time period in which The Green Mile takes place. Combining that with his otherworldly gifts, it’s not a stretch to interpret Coffey as having performed several miracles before being sentenced to death by those who mistrust, disbelieve, and fear him, furthering those biblical undertones.
Even if he’s not the second coming, it’s there to be inferred, at the very least, he might be an angel sent down from above to try and make the world a better place in any way that he can.
Did Stephen King confirm John Coffey was the second coming?
It’s hardly a far-flung theory, considering King admits it was entirely deliberate. Calling Coffey “an innocent man likely to be executed for the crime of another” in his memoir On Writing, the author “decided to give him the initials J.C., after the most famous innocent man of all time”.
While that isn’t an admission that the entirety of The Green Mile was crafted as his own spin on the second coming, it does at least make it clear that King was entirely aware before the source novel had even been published people were going to draw that conclusion and make those comparisons.
The author may not have gone in with the explicit intentions of having those parallels drawn, but there are enough similarities from both a character, narrative, and thematic perspective to make it much more than a straightforward case of giving them the same initials and leaving the comparisons at that.
