The main issue finally of the Wheeler’s firing of Andy was his dissembling (in their view), that he wasn’t who he purported to be, that he pretended to be one of them when he wasn’t. Once he was exposed, they scramble to assert their difference from Andy, which suggest they fear the lack of difference there really is between them. Visibly, we watch the firm interact in all-male enclaves of the top floor offices, boardrooms, and bath house, which look remarkably similar to contexts some might imagine Andy. All the more reason for their quick action to distance themselves from him once he’s discovered.
Andy’s testimony that Charles Wheeler (Jason Robards) was the lawyer he thought he most wanted to be like, indicating it was actually Andy who was the one deceived, that Charles let him down when Wheeler revealed his truly small, vicious, and essentially unlawful (a true cut by another lawyer) nature. The final ignominy is the firm’s contention that they saw nothing of Andy’s illness and so couldn’t have been discriminating against him on that basis. Their lead (Mary Steenbergen) puts a mirror up to Andy and forces him to admit the lesions he asserted they saw weren’t really all that detectable; Joe Miller (Denzel Washington) asks Andy to take off his shirt to reveal what all know. Many (except Andy's family and, signficantly, Joe) look away, especially those former fellow lawyers in the firm, refusing to acknowledge, to see, the apparently Medusa-like sight of Andy’s lesions and ravaged body, which the film audience only sees reflected in the mirror Joe holds up for Andy.
