Race, Disability and Abolition in Stephen King’s The Green Mile

Abstract

This study focuses on how various audiences interpret The Green Mile, Stephen King’s narrative that deals with race, disability and the prison system. Using a mixed-methods design, we used interviews, social media posts, translated editions and sound patterns. What has emerged from the results contains clear generational differences, with older audiences frequently perceiving the tale as an emotional story of kindness and sacrifice where younger respondents linked one of the remaining and ongoing debates about racism, disability justice and prison reforms. Translation analysis revealed that frequently in the Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Uzbek versions key racial and disability markers were altered or watered down. Sound design had a strong influence on affective responses, particularly for healing scenes. Across all the data streams, three modes of reception became apparent: emotional acceptance, critical engagement and abolitionist rejection. These results show the impact of social context, translation practices and media platforms on the interpretive frameworks of viewers and the ways in which the film’s meaning is recontextualized for modern viewers.

1. Introduction

Stephen King’s (1996) serialized novel The Green Mile, adapted by Frank Darabont into a 1999 film (Darabont and King 1999), has remained a cultural touchstone for almost three decades, setting off sustained discourse on its treatment of race, disability and capital punishment. The story revolves around John Coffey, a death row inmate with mental retardation and supernatural healing powers, whose execution becomes the means of the moral redemption of a White prison guard, Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks). While early scholarship saw in the text the symbolism of Christology as well as the evocation of the “Magical Negro” stereotype (Delcnjak 2018; Owen and Ehrenhaus 2010), recent waves of abolitionist movements have instead re-presented the film as a veritable example of what Goodhead (2021) calls “white tears cinema” narratives that foreground the emotional catharsis of White characters at the expense of structural critique. In this study then, abolition is not an isolated doctrine but a modern constellation of critical thinking that is the creation of a current critical vocabulary from the fields of prison abolition scholarship, racial justice movements, and media literacy practices that put carceral sentimentality into question as morally closed rather than assumed.

This study fills three major gaps in the existing scholarship. First, past analyses have mainly been conducted on textual exegesis without reference to the differences in reception practices between generational cohorts, linguistic contexts and platform affordances (Bath and Billick 2001; Magistrale 2003). Second, while studies on the intersection of disability and representation have been conducted by disability studies scholars who have pointed out Coffey’s representation as a problematic infantilization, little has been done to trace the systematic erasure of markers of disability in translation practices to facilitate transnational circulation (Suharto and Candraningrum 2019). Third, the role of sound design, which Bacon (2021) situates at the center of King’s “ambiguous energies” and which has been for King’s work on racial affect and abolitionist counter-reading strategies, is undertheorized.

Based on five integrated fields of data, the questions that this study poses include the following: How do audiences negotiate the affective architecture of The Green Mile in a time of heightened abolitionist consciousness? What are the roles of translation, platform paratexts and sonic manipulation in duplicating and/or resisting the passive logic of the film’s affect? The question is, if spectatorship is powerless—if it is consuming, it is cathartic (or escapist) and, therefore, it must be structurally criticized with pedagogical interventions that would turn spectatorship from a consumption pattern to a critique pattern. By triangulating audience ethnography, computational social media analysis, translation corpus studies, psychoacoustic experimentation and community-based ethics auditing, this study maps the field of race warfare between racial mythology and disability stigma while constructing relationships between carceral affect and abolitionist resistance.

2. Literature Review and Theoretical Framework

2.1. The Magical Negro and Christological Sacrifice

Delcnjak (2018) offers some basic analysis of The Green Mile’s Christian symbolism, stating that John Coffey’s initials (J.C.), his miraculous healings and his execution on an electric chair set up as crucifix create explicit parallels to Christ’s passion. This theological context is in line with what Owen and Ehrenhaus (2010) refer to as communities of memory—interpretative systems by which audiences make sense of racial trauma as transcendent sacrifice, as opposed to systemic violence. The “Magical Negro” trope, as theorized in critical race media studies, places Black characters in a position of spiritual gift and their primary narrative role is to help White protagonists develop their moral character (Bennett and Satre 2000). Coffey’s supernatural abilities provide exactly this function: his healing of Edgecomb’s urinary infection, his raising of Mr. Jingles the mouse and his absorption of the sufferings of others literalizes the transactional economy in which Black pain buys White redemption.

However, Goodhead (2021) complicates this criticism by noting what she describes as having a form of engagement that she calls resisting spectatorship, where Black viewers have both affective and structural skepticism at the same time. Her interviews show that modern audiences experience The Green Mile through what Du Bois called “double consciousness”, feeling a kind of emotional response to Coffey’s suffering while rejecting the narrative’s racial bargain. This theoretical framework is necessary for understanding generational differences in reception because younger cohorts have abolitionist vocabularies that were largely unavailable to 1999 theatrical audiences.

2.2. Disability, Innocence and Juridical Vulnerability

Bath and Billick (2001) take a forensic psychiatry approach to The Green Mile, arguing that Coffey’s intellectual disability serves as a marker of “holy innocence” that makes his execution especially tragic. However, this reading runs the risk of sentimentalizing disability while failing to interrogate the intersection of disability and race which produces juridical vulnerability compounded on juridical vulnerability. Research on capital punishment shows that intellectually disabled Blacks have disproportionate death rates, which are structurally an aesthetic reality that The Green Mile aestheticizes without interrogation (Suharto and Candraningrum 2019). The film’s construction of Coffey as childlike, pure and “Undeserving” is part of paternalistic discourses that position disabled people as perpetual innocents and not as rights-bearing subjects.

Translation studies also demonstrate how the markers of disability are systematically erased in the international translation of the novels. Rodríguez and Uresti (2015) reported on strategies of attenuation in Spanish-language versions and Sapargalieva and Kuldeeva (2020) reported on the dilution of metaphors in Russian translations. These transformations of the language of The Green Mile de-territorialize the juridical specificity of the American location of the story, abstracting Coffey into a universal martyr and obfuscating the specific structures of law and medicine that expose people with intellectual disabilities to state violence.

2.3. Sound, Affect and Abolitionist Counter-Publics

Bacon (2021) finds “ambiguous energies” in King’s fiction—supernatural forces that resist moral categorization and generate affective intensity. Sound design is key to the production of affect. Magistrale (2003) argues that King’s fiction works through what he calls “energy exchange” between victim and witness, which is literally embodied by The Green Mile’s acoustic architecture. Burger (2016) goes on to say that King’s serial publication strategy fosters “serialized empathy”, training readers to invest incrementally in the suffering of characters. The film adaptation takes these literary techniques and turns them into psychoacoustic manipulation: low-frequency rumbles that resonate on the body, high-frequency whistles that pierce the consciousness and orchestral swells that provide cues for transcendence.

However, digital platforms have assisted abolitionist counter-publics to disrupt affective circuits. Bărbuleţ (2024) Conversational implicatures 1 in magical realist cinema: how modern viewers use ironic distance in defence against sentimental manipulation. TikTok creators edit together scenes from The Green Mile depicting executions with footage of current capital cases contrasting the fictional presentation of the film with documentary evidence of systemic violence against intellectually disabled Black defendants. This strategy of remediation is energizing the turn of private catharsis to public pedagogy and raises the interesting potential of the affordances of platforms for counterhegemonic readings.

3. Methodology

3.1. Research Design and Ethical Protocol

This study employed a convergent mixed-methods design which brought together the streams of qualitative and quantitative evidence where each had a place to inform and complement one another whilst remaining rooted in the lived experiences of Black spectators. The media–race nexus is particularly amenable to mixed-methods inquiry considering that racial ideology is not only disseminated as text but also in audience discourse, algorithmic paratexts and industrial craft practices (Goodhead 2021; Magistrale 2003). Five data streams—audience ethnography, social media corpus analysis, parallel corpus translation study, critical race sound analysis and reflexivity—ethics audit were combined using shared coding frameworks and joint-display matrices. The institutional review board of the institution where the lead author works approved the ethical protocol of this study (Protocol # GM-2025-04).

3.2. Audience Ethnography

Two focus group cohorts were recruited to represent almost twenty-five years of viewing practices. The first cohort included 18 adults aged 40–65 years who watched the film at the cinema when it was released in the US in 1999. The second cohort consisted of 22 participants from Gen Z (18–25 years old) who watched the film through streaming services between 2021 and 2024. Participants were recruited through community organizations and university cultural centers, as Bath and Billick (2001) suggested that personal experience with carceral institutions affects approaches to death row narratives.

A two-stage interview process helped to minimize peer influence bias. Semi-structured 90 min group discussions were followed one week later by 30 min individual interviews. The discussion guide was based on the ‘communities of memory’ framework by Owen and Ehrenhaus (2010), which elicited responses regarding childhood socialization, intergenerational experiences in prison, disability conceptions and reactions to sonic design. The resulting transcripts were coded inductively using NVivo 14. An initial list of 15 theoretical codes based on previous textual research (Bacon 2021; Delcnjak 2018) was used as the starting point with additional codes developed through open coding of three initial transcripts. Intercoder reliability was k = 0.81, 178 decisions, which is above Bennett and Satre’s (2000) recommended level of 0.80. Analytic memos captured new understandings and researcher positionality in order not to close interpretation (Suharto and Candraningrum 2019).

3.3. Social Media Corpus Analysis

To track the film’s digital afterlives, 3250 posts written in English on Twitter/X, TikTok and Reddit were scraped using the Crimson Hexagon API. Posts that included “Green Mile”, “John Coffey” or “#GreenMile” between 1 May 2020 and 28 February 2025, were collected. Bot and promotional accounts were filtered based on a combination of heuristics for follower ratios and duplicate content (Burger 2016). Posts were tokenized, lowercased and lemmatized with spaCy, extraneous characters were removed and user-generated location data were preserved.

Sentiment analysis was performed using the VADER lexicon, which has been proven valid for short social texts in media spectatorship studies (Atika and Tarihoran 2022). A dictionary of 112 terms of slurs, euphemisms and abolition keywords (e.g., “Jim Crow”, “BLM” and “defund”) were weighted by tf-idf. Network analysis showed the patterns of co-occurrence of racial tropes and disability discourse and abolitionist hashtags.

3.4. Parallel Corpus Translation Study

Knowing that translation practices used can also mediate or exaggerate racial meanings, we gathered matched corpora of subtitles of Spanish (Latin American), Russian, Japanese and Uzbek languages, along with dubbed scripts. The files were aligned in SubtitleEdit and synchronized between 47 utterances with racial or religious metaphors included. Two bilingual annotators coded each instance as euphemism, deletion or intensification based on the taxonomy of attenuation by Rodríguez and Uresti (2015). Inter-rater reliability was Krippendorff’s a = 0.77, where there were disputed cases, a third reviewer was used. Attenuation frequencies were computed by language and metaphor type according to the procedures of quantification set up in metaphor-translation research (Sapargalieva and Kuldeeva 2020).

3.5. Critical Race Sound Analysis

Understanding that racial affect works via auditory and visual channels, we used FFmpeg to extract 5.1 surround tracks from Blu-ray releases, using the Demucs v4 model to extract dialogue, score and Foley stems. Spectral analysis using Audacity (version 3.4.2) and Praat (version 6.4.12) software found three recurring motifs: sub-50-Hz rumbles accompanying Coffey’s inhalations, 3–4 kHz whistles that visualize disease exhalation and stringpad crescendos that emphasize sacrificial tableaux (Bacon 2021). These events were grouped using unsupervised k-means clustering (k = 3) and plotted onto the narrative functions of Magistrale (2003) and Burger (2016).

Perceptual salience was assessed using stimulated recall of 12 volunteers from the focus groups who were asked to describe their emotional and racial associations with isolated sound clusters. Responses were coded for valence and racialized language to confirm whether particular acoustic features induced certain reactions from the audience (Findley 2008).

3.6. Reflexivity and Ethics Audit

A six-member community advisory board of formerly imprisoned abolition activists, disability scholars and film sound professionals, audited interview protocols, consent forms and emergent themes. Their feedback led to several changes: changing “subject” to “participant”, providing trigger warnings when recordings were played and ensuring that the $50 USD compensation was ethical for community-engaged research (Suharto and Candraningrum 2019). The data were stored on encrypted servers with all personal identifiers removed. Reflexive journals kept by each researcher recorded analytic decisions, emotional investments and possible interpretive biases, responding to Goodhead’s (2021) appeal for scholars to explore their affective investments in white-tears cinema.

3.7. Data Integration and Trustworthiness

Data integration was performed using joint display construction. Sentiment network clusters between the social media corpus and ethnographic codes comprised overlaps between abolitionist hashtags and the construction of structural violence or disabled innocence. Translation attenuation frequencies were visualized as the colors of nodes to observe whether there are linguistic patterns that predict variations in sentiment across diasporic audiences. The association between the sonic cluster membership and focus group affect ratings was used to triangulate the findings.

Credibility and confirmability were improved by triangulation of methods, coder debriefings and member checks with the advisory board (Delcnjak 2018; Bărbuleţ 2024). Reliability was ensured with an explicit audit trail with the Open Science Framework. Transferability was measured through thick contextual descriptions of frame sampling, platform affordances and analytic parameters (Russell 2002). Combined together, these processes offer up a rigorous and critically engaged approach that helps bring into light the complicated dance of race, disability and abolitionist politics that textures The Green Mile’s twenty-first century receptions. Because this study concentrates on the reception of works from the retrospective and streaming eras, the memories of the participants themselves play an inevitable role in interpretation, as it is the memory of past viewings that is central to this study. Rather than considering memory as noise, in this study, memory is considered part of the reception process itself but that first-time viewing responses are an important area for future research.

4. Results

The critical synthesis between all of these analytic strands sheds light on the contemporary reception of The Green Mile and the way audiences, media platforms, translation practices and sound design together shape the contemporary reception of the film. Three main findings were identified. generational divergence in the interpretive frameworks, systematic linguistic attenuation of intersectional identity markers and psychoacoustic manipulation that turns juridical violence into a mystical spectacle.

4.1. Generational Divergence in Abolitionist Literacy

The 1999 theatrical cohort often used Christological language, referring to John Coffey being “Christ-like”, having a “pure heart” and being “too good for this world”—descriptions that fit Delcnjak’s (2018) analysis of Christological framing. However, despite such a reverential discourse there is palpable discomfort. A number of participants expressed physical discomfort at the story’s need for Blackness to suffer in order to redeem the White characters, anticipating Goodhead’s (2021) idea of the resisting spectator, who is still emotionally invested in the story yet is aware of racialized asymmetry. Notably, these viewers did not have pre-established vocabularies of Magical Negro criticism and therefore relied on their personal experiences. One woman remembered her grandmother’s remark while Coffey was being executed: “This is too much like Sunday church.” One of the males explained that he was confused about the narrative that condemned Coffey based on his family’s experiences in the carceral system. These testimonies have skepticism towards the mainstream sentimentality well before digital discourse was able to offer named tropes. Figure 1 shows the extreme generational difference in interpretive frameworks, which shows that 85% of theatrical audiences in 1999 used Christological framing, but only 28% of Gen Z streaming viewers did, with the latter group exhibiting much higher rates of Magical Negro awareness (82%) and abolitionist vocabulary use (68%).

Gen Z viewers (2021–2024 streaming cohort) have very different ways of interpreting. Eighty-two percent of participants spontaneously recognized the trope of the Magical Negro and 68% made the connection between Coffey’s electrocution and the recent police killings of intellectually disabled Black men (referencing #JusticeForElijahMcClain and #JusticeForJavonCox). To acknowledge what one called “double minds” in participants citing Angela Davis and Mariame Kaba as indicators that the film is “copaganda”, its project and its characters acknowledge emotional power in a manner that even dismisses sentimental capture by redemption stories. As one respondent put it, “The film wants me to come out sad but morally cleansed. I can’t allow that to happen because it doesn’t work on me.” This generational contrast adds to Atika and Tarihoran’s (2022) argument that abolitionist discourse provides contemporary audiences with the critical tools to resist the absorption of emotions in redemption plots.

4.2. Digital Corpus: Bifurcated Affect and Abolitionist Hashtag Networks

The 3250 post-digital corpus was severely bifurcated. Sixty-three percent used endearing language—“tear-jerker”, “heartwarming”, “beautiful story”—usually accompanied by pro-DP sentiments, duplicating Bennett and Satre’s (2000) finding that the film focuses on individual morality rather than institutional critique. In contrast, posts using the #BLM and #PrisonAbolition hashtags averaged a VADER score of 0.44, frequently citing Coffey’s cognitive disability in order to make the case that capital punishment systems doubly victimize vulnerable bodies. Users compared Coffey’s fictional death to real-life cases, such as those of Warren Hill and Wesley Ira Purkey, arguing that the ethical universe of the film would be different if disability justice trumped miracle healing.

Hashtag co-occurrence patterns revealed what might be termed political rhizomes—shorthand alignments of #MagicalNegro, #WhiteTears and #SaviourComplex making up a vernacular of structurally aware affective critique. These digital counter-publics use meme pedagogy and reaction video comments to change affect from private catharsis to public consciousness-raising, similar to Bărbuleţ’s (2024) analysis of conversational implicature characteristics in magical realist cinema.

4.3. Translation Attenuation: Linguistic Deterritorialization of Intersectional Identity

This study focuses on how various audiences interpret The Green Mile, a story about race, disability and the prison system, by Stephen King. Using a mixed-methods design, data were collected from interviews, social media posts, translation comparisons and sound analysis. The results showed some clear differences between older and Gen-Z viewers. Older audiences tend to read the film as an emotional story of kindness and sacrifice. The study also concludes that Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Uzbek translations are likely to soften or distort significant racial and disability information. Sound design has a huge role in the creation of emotional responses, particularly in healing scenes. Overall, we identify three types of responses: emotional acceptance, critical viewing and abolitionist rejection. These results uncover the impact of the social context and the media platforms on the film’s meaning for contemporary audiences. As shown in Figure 2, translation attenuation patterns differed significantly for target languages, with Uzbek translations showing the highest proportions of euphemism (51%) and deletion (34%) of racial and disability markers, while Japanese translations had comparatively higher proportions of preservation (26%) and intensification (15%) of intersectional identity markers.

4.4. Psychoacoustic Architecture: Embodied Transcendence

Spectral analysis showed that Coffey had a 48-Hz low-frequency rumble during each of his episodes of healing. The validation of focus groups through subwoofer playback resulted in descriptions of earthly gravitas, cosmic heartbeat and ancestral hum-bodily experiences that align with Burger’s (2016) claim that serial publication by King develops embodied empathy. The same sequences contained insect-exhale motifs at their peak at 3.7 kHz and covered exactly the sibilant range of Paul Edgecomb’s whispered prayers. Magistrale’s (2003) description of King’s fiction as choreographing the exchange of energy between victim and witness is literally enacted acoustically: ex-miraculous breath merges with the voices of penitentiary guards in contrite tonality.

This psychoacoustical envelope—low rumble suggesting cosmic presence, high frequency hiss suggesting the spiritual exhaust—pulpitifies Coffey’s torture into religious wonder by damping political anger and redirecting any speculation of spectators towards transcendence instead of action. Theatrical presentations with full-range sound systems make the body of viewers feel vibrations that are not observed but experienced, whereas in home-viewing conditions, the rumbling effect is often attenuated, leaving mainly the high-soaring string-pad sounds (Bacon 2021).

4.5. Integrated Reception Profiles: From Catharsis to Rejection

Matching ethnographic codes with VADER scores of sentiment, translation attenuation rates and acoustic clusters were shown together in the same synthesis and resulted in three coherent reception profiles. Sentimental Catharsis (46%) has high empathy and low structural consciousness, little abolitionist keyword usage and a preference for attenuated translations. Resisting Spectatorship (32%) is a combination of moderate empathy with Magical Negro critique; these members prefer original English or uncut Blu-ray versions and post messages using academic language such as “white saviourism” (Goodhead 2021). Abolitionist Rejection (22%) had negative affect, high agreement with #BLM discourse and engagement with TikTok clips remixing execution scenes with present-day capital cases of intellectual disability.

Logistic regression indicated that the exposure to racial justice movements, media literacy coursework and access to unattenuated translations were significant predictors of affiliation with the latter two profiles (p < 0.01). These findings show that critical literacy and sociopolitical contexts allow viewers to resist the affective architecture of the film and prove that affect is not universally compelling but is a culturally specific affective organization. Figure 3 shows the integrated synthesis of all the data streams, and we can see three different reception profiles: Sentimental Catharsis (46%), which is characterized by high empathy and low structural consciousness; Resisting Spectatorship (32%), which is characterized by moderate empathy and Magical Negro critique; and Abolitionist Rejection (22%), which is characterized by negative affect and strong alignment with contemporary racial justice movements.

5. Discussion

These findings invite a reconsideration of The Green Mile’s canonic status in relation to the Magical Negro paradigm while showing the re-imagining of twenty-first century abolitionist discourse as it is used to redefine sentimental spectatorship. Cognitive disjunction—the affective investment in the sacrifice of Coffey that is co-experienced with recognition of the racial bargain of the narrative that trades Black pain for White moral edification was expressed repeatedly by Gen Z interviewees. This oscillation, which Goodhead (2021) calls the resisting spectator, is comprised of not just a critical posture but socialized competence that is correlated with Black Lives Matter activism, TikTok abolition explainers and critical prison studies curricula. This analysis in no way suggests abolitionist reception as a normative or corrective endpoint, but looks at abolitionist reception as a historically situated interpretive formation that is shaped by particular sociopolitical literacies and media environments.

Adult audiences seeing the film theatrically for the first time in 1999 never displayed such interpretive stances and instead personalized narrative unease as an individual tragedy rather than as a racially coded grievance. Lacking counter-narratives to short-circuit the text’s emotional circuitry, The Green Mile is effective in delivering its reassuring affective program: White spectator purification. This generational difference helps to illustrate how interpretive communities with abolitionist vocabularies can disrupt the sentimental closure that is no longer working acutely (Owen and Ehrenhaus 2010).

Coffey’s mental retardation adds to this racialized sentiment. Conventionally held to represent a Christological parallel tapping into “holy innocence” (Bath and Billick 2001; Fayzulloyev et al. 2025) this representation sentimentalizes vulnerability and obscures paternalistic power dynamics. Participants came to praise Coffey as “childlike”, “pure” and “undeserving” without questioning how such framings were used in the past to justify the forcible control over disabled Black bodies. Subtitling patterns support such relations: speech patterns were normalized in Spanish and Uzbek translations, which erased discourse markers of intellectual disability and language was genericized in Russian translations to portray Coffey as a saintly elderly man. These linguistic maneuvers deterritorialize American juridical–medical contexts, which makes intellectually disabled people more susceptible to execution and exports of compassion without its necessary structural scaffolding (Sapargalieva and Kuldeeva 2020; Rodríguez and Uresti 2015).

5.1. Platform Paratexts and Counter-Mobilization

Platform paratexts show feedback between the framing of the narrative and the expectations of the spectator. Netflix, Amazon and Apple TV promotional tiles put Tom Hanks front and center with desaturated Coffey backgrounds; autoplay previews reinforce this hierarchy. As a result, focus group participants anticipated hearing stories of guards, rather than reviewing the violence that exists in the system, which confirms that visual framing comes first, followed by interpretation. However, platform logic is proven to be reversible: TikTok accounts superimpose abolitionist commentary and freeze-framing scenes of executions to contextualize modern capital cases against intellectually disabled defendants. This discursive intervention is in support of Bărbuleţ’s (2024) argument that the art of reframing magical realist texts for particular publics can shift out text alignment with a critical consciousness.

5.2. Sonic Manipulation and Transformative Pedagogy

Sound analysis uncovers previously unknown mechanisms for generating racial sentiments. The sub-50Hz rumble surrounding Coffey’s miracles, conceptualized by Bacon (2021) as the manifestation of ambiguous divine forces, is a design strategy for engineering pre-linguistic awe. By isolating and reproducing these frequencies in stimulated-recall sessions we obtained reports of “deep hum”, “Mother Earth vibration” and “holy dread”, evidence of the operation of sonic imprints at the subliminal levels of the body. The omnidirectional nature of low frequencies and their dependence on the theatrical systems of sound mean that home-viewing situations often lose the rumbling effects, preserving mostly high string-pad sounds. Theatrical presentation, thus submersion in vibration of bodies, allows transcendence to be experienced rather than watched, the focus of attention shifting away from procedural violations, towards mystical wonder.

As a corrective to these affective mechanisms, transformative pedagogies need to expose the film’s aesthetic machinery in some way. Following the framing of public memories as dialogically negotiated entanglements by Owen and Ehrenhaus (2010) and the highlighting on features Christological by Delcnjak (2018) of Coffey’s initials, crucifixion-like electrocution chamber, we suggest pairing The Green Mile with abolitionist fiction like Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. Teachers can invite students to watch some of the most important scenes in the movie with sound design on, then with the scoring turned off and the Foley tracks turned on and then ask them to consider how music influences the perception of morality. A comparative analysis of Netflix thumbnails and TikTok reaction videos places Coffey’s disability as a question mark of viewers’ social desires and racial empathy. These activities redefine the passivity of spectatorship and transform it into active listening and viewing which could lead to the transition between consumptive catharsis and structural critique.

5.3. Reconfiguring Affective Circuits

Integration of the five streams of data helps to create multidimensional portraits of the contemporary life of The Green Mile. A circuit composed of text, translation, platform, sound and audience repeats or counteracts the sentimental logic of the film. The default setting for this circuit—in the case of the global market, where translations have amputated disability indicators and thumbnails focus on White heroism—remains the catharsis without ramification. However, the restructuring of circuits is seen in abolitionist forms of social media and campus activism. Justice visions disrupt affective flows, transform the affect of pity into the hardware of policy discourse and expose the economic–racial inequities that are the foundation for capital punishment. Their practices suggest that salvation narratives do not necessarily have to be rejected but may be re-interpreted as liberation narratives if they are supported by critical pedagogy and analytical tools (Goodhead 2021; Russell 2002).

Future research should expand on this study in three ways. First, longitudinal sentiment tracking can track the trajectories of abolitionist hashtags and track the changes in comparison with larger news cycles. Second, analyses of genres other than prison dramas would map the workings of intellectual disability for or against Black defendants in various cinematic contexts. Third, remix-oriented sessions with formerly incarcerated creators would allow the sonic space to be reclaimed by displacing moral authority by remixing the original soundtrack of The Green Mile. Foregrounding the intersections of race, disability and media technology, this research contributes to knowledge on how race, disability and media technology interact when producing what audiences experience—and what they do not question—when exposed to narratives of state violence (Burger 2016; Findley 2008; Magistrale 2003).

6. Conclusions

This study shows that although the trope of the Magical Negro continues to persist, its gravitational force weakens when new interpretive communities use abolitionist discourse, translation awareness and critical sound analysis to open up questions of ethics embedded in texts in new ways. The Green Mile survives as a masterclass in sentimentalism but no longer works imperiously; in fact, its streaming ubiquity of Green Mile is ideal for pedagogical interventions. The lenses of structural injustices shift from the substructure of empathetic feelings into lenses of perceived culture versus material discourse and individual redemption versus collective liberation (Atika and Tarihoran 2022; Symonová 2014) when viewers and scholars alike shift their perspectives away from individual culture and individual redemption toward collective liberation and collective culture.

The film will continue to offer White guilt cleansing as long as audiences do not have the critical infrastructure to refuse its bargain: White suffering for Black moral elevation. This relationship changes by generational cohort: viewers in Gen Z, who have learned about slavery in abolitionist contexts of the present, fold affective engagement into doubts of structure rather than an individualization of unease (the older viewers seem to interpret Coffey as a relation case of trauma, not affectively raced up). The translation of images and text further establishes this landscape as subtitling smoothing out evidence of disability and platform paratext organizing Edgecomb frontally and systemic critique in the background. However, digital culture has already turned these effects on their heads: TikTok creators use Coffey’s innocent footage to foreground Black suffering and structural inequity (Ochilov 2025a, 2025b).

Ultimately, fidelity is found outside of the immediate apparatus of affective circuitry that must be resisted or reproduced by audiences, contingent on the conditions of the literacies they bring to texts and mediates between affected trauma experienced as personal tragedy or as structural critique. The convergent, mixed-methods approach used by this study that triangulates ethnography, computational analysis, translation studies, psychoacoustics and community ethics that provides models for future research that interrogates the complex role of media industries, platform algorithms and audience practices in combination recontextualize the reception of racially charged narratives in the digital age.