The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
Power, Authority, and Influence in ‘‘Cool Hand Luke’’
Movies set in prisons usually dramatize ways in which crime does not pay and criminals
do. Beyond that public service, prison-settings afford film-makers ample range to juxtapose life
inside institutions with life outside.2 Such films can haunt film-goers if society's crimes against
cinematic outlaws parallel society's treatment of everyday innocents or if sinned-against too
greatly resemble sinners.
In this essay, I consider one such haunting film, Cool Hand Luke.3 Cool Hand Luke
overtly contrasts prisoners with imprisoners to the detriment of the latter if not the glory of the
former. Beyond that contrast, so familiar that it long ago lost its irony, Cool Hand Luke exposes
an ‘‘economy’’ of communication by which repression is rationalized and conformity justified to
create walls figurative and political within which film-watchers are interned and interred. An
obvious message of this Sixties classic is that we should distrust all whose talk of justice
accessorizes their powerful impulse to punish.4 A subtler message of the film concerns crimes
that ‘‘madmen in authority’’5 commit every day and the glory and the folly of those who resist
and demystify those crimes.
1
FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE
The straightforward story-line of Cool Hand Luke encourages cursory interpretation.
Lucas Jackson, imprisoned for a petty violation, impresses members of his chain-gang by
resisting the brutish convict ‘‘Dragline.’’ Once he has proved his mettle, he becomes ‘‘Cool
Hand Luke,’’ an inmate who can out-work, out-eat, and out-blaspheme other men condemned to
hard labor. When Luke bucks prison officials, they undertake to bring him into line. He escapes
twice but they catch him and torture him. Just when Luke has been broken by his tormentors and
stripped of the respect of worshipful inmates, he escapes a last time and induces a malevolent,
masked boss to shoot him dead. Martyrdom re-establishes Luke's legend among prisoners and
viewers.
True, such a story rehearses an establishment-bashing recipe hackneyed by the 1960s.
First, induce sympathy for an anti-hero who challenges unimportant or unjust rules. Next, relate
the rules to a social structure in which ‘‘. . . every cop is a criminal / And all your sinners
saints.’’6 Then drive self-parodying defenders of conformity to destroy the anti-hero, who long
since has been apotheosized into a lovable rogue exposing the inanities of his and our time. Roll
the credits as film-goers return to lives of quiet desecration.
If Cool Hand Luke did no more than follow the recipe above, critics would be correct to
score the film for petty existentialism,7 trendy alienation,8 and cheap impieties.9 With due
respect to critics, I do believe that such criticisms miss more of the movie than they hit. Cool
Hand Luke extols a theory of expressive and repressive crimes. Indeed, the movie and the theory
interrelate crime and punishment, power and powerlessness, and permanence and change, all
through failures to communicate.10 Cool Hand Luke is about Camus but about Orwell as well.
A Failure to Communicate
When ‘‘The Captain’’ [Strother Martin playing the highest official in the road-prison]
drawls out the most enduring line of the movie, audiences tend to chuckle at incongruities
between his utterance and his situation.11
[The Captain stands to the side as a Boss fastens leg-irons on Lucas Jackson, recently
captured after his first escape.]
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
2
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
CAPTAIN
You gonna git used to wearin' them chains aftera while, Luke, but you never stop listenin' to
them clinkin'. That's gonna remind you of what I been sayin'. For your own good.
LUKE
Wish you'd stop bein' so good to me, Captain.
CAPTAIN
Don't you never talk that way to me! . . .
[after striking Luke and impelling him down a small slope, The Captain regains his composure
and addresses the other convicts:]
What we've got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach . . . So you get
what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it! And I don't like it
any better than you men.
This famously fatuous confrontation sets up the picture's predictable denouement:12
[Dragline, a convict, stands in the doorway of a small church, speaking to Lucas Jackson, who is
surveying police cars surrounding the chapel.]
DRAGLINE
They caught up to me right after we split up and they was aimin' to kill you, Luke. But I got 'em
to promise, if you give up peaceful, they wouldn't even whip you this time.
LUKE
[flashing his familiar smile]
Do we even get our same bunks back?
DRAGLINE
Why sure, Luke. . . . They're reasonable, Luke . . .
[Luke smirks at Dragline's assessment, then opens the window of the sanctuary and surveys the
assembled officials before he raises his voice.]
LUKE
WHAT WE GOT HERE IS A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE. . . .
[Instantly, a shot rings out and Luke staggers under the impact of a slug that spatters his blood
across the window. Shot in the throat, Luke no longer speaks but nonetheless smiles.]
Let us concede that the repeated catch-phrase encourages viewers to glide across the
surface of Cool Hand Luke as if it concerned only gaps between generations or between officials
and citizens. The film's makers may have suffered their own failure to communicate due to the
very accessibility of this ‘‘hook.’’ If, as I believe, this movie may also be seen as a fable about
power, authority, and influence, Cool Hand Luke embraces far more than sophomoric
sentimentality.
Communicating Power, Influence, and Authority
We may get more out of Cool Hand Luke if we observe in the film three basic, political
relations: influence, authority, and power. David V. J. Bell has defined each relation in terms of
the mode of communication distinctive of each.13 Bell admits that these three are ambiguous
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
3
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
terms that invoke overlapping ideas. Still, he insists that we may profitably distinguish among
communications that
a) threaten or promise in order to induce an audience to do what otherwise they would not do
[power];
b) command based on position and an expectation of being obeyed [authority]; and/or
c) persuade by revealing to an audience where their own interests lie [influence].
Stealing from Sheldon Wolin,14 I propose that these three relations offer those who battle
crime and criminals an ‘‘economy of violence.’’ We may state this economics simply: prudent
decision-makers will want to employ nonviolent influence as often as it gets the job done; to rely
on routine authority when influence would be inefficient or insufficient; and to brandish power
as an ultimate resort. Let us explore this economics briefly.
Influence ennobles both listeners by acknowledging their agency and speakers by casting
them as a fiduciaries. Influence fixes most responsibility on the decision-maker and appears to
overcome or to ignore hierarchy and to level speaker and listener.15 For an example pertinent to
this film, please consider the degree to which penal rehabilitation encourages trust and thereby
at least a temporary identification and convergence between captors and captives. We should
expect great reliance on influence whenever prison personnel are helping rather than herding.
Authority cannot but diminish the moral responsibility of the listener once incorporated
because authority entails command and command presumes hierarchy. An entitlement to be
obeyed, moreover, must be demonstrated if a purveyor of authority is challenged. Routine
supervision requires guards and orderlies to exercise authority, so ordinary control is ubiquitous
in institutional life. In prisons, penal discipline is essential, for wardens and guards must herd if
they are to help. Nonetheless, overuse of authority may fan resentment and resistance, so
prudent guards will invoke influence to quell indignation.
Emergencies may call for power, but overt manipulation of sanctions menace followers
and leaders alike by raising leaders too far above followers and reducing human beings to thralls.
The greater the distance from which threats and promises cascade, the greater their impact on
those at the bottom. Even a lowly listener who flips off the phrase ‘‘It's your world’’ may mumble to himself or herself an ominous ‘‘. . . for now.’’16 Use of power shades into abuse of power
so quickly that leaders may not perceive their transmogrification into tyrants. When influence
fails and authority falters, leaders will turn to power but the corruptions power works are close
behind. When power corrupts absolutely or relatively, some listeners—imprisoned or free—
move beyond resentment and resistance to revolt and revenge. To consider again the example of
prisons, penal repression is both necessity and luxury. Those who would help must herd, but
those who herd will hurt.
Both power and authority are useful, so both will be used. Because both are costly, both
will often be disguised as influence. Threats or bribes left implicit are tribute from power to
influence. Commands courteously phrased as suggestions husband sincere but officious authority for occasions when more respectful influence falls short of speakers' objectives. To conclude
with an example outside prisons, parents and other teachers may overpower their charges and
order them about for a while, but enlightening their sense of self-interest encourages civility and
inculcates citizenship.
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
4
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
Power, Authority, and Influence in Prison
Certainly, Bell's insights apply to law and legal relations, especially in penal institutions
that must attend to repression and discipline before rehabilitation becomes a priority. Although
prisons worry less about justification and more about order than more genteel institutions, even
prisons can depend neither on unrelenting restraints nor on unrestricted reinforcement. Universal
repression creates a Hobbesian battle-zone that cannot be sustained without troops and materiel.
Less repressive power, such as granting and withholding favors, works when employed sparingly
but becomes expensive, especially if leaders are expected to monitor followers and administer
negative and positive sanctions equitably and consistently. Legal orders outside prisons build on
and attempt to justify violence through regularity and responsiveness because sanctions are so
extravagant.17
Instead of the brutality and bribery of power, we expect wardens and guards in penal
institutions to formulate rules and norms that inmates may internalize. We expect law to be
predictable in the wider society,18 and, if we harbor any hopes for rehabilitation or socialization,
we want inmates and citizens to learn to abide by similar rules and norms. At entry to prison, de
jure and de facto norms are authority with power neither far behind nor well hidden.19 Over
time, such norms may come to make sense to internees and may even be seen by them to express
their best interests.20 If so, rules may become influence, at least for some subjects some of the
time.21
If genuine influence cannot be attained, superordinates have an interest in appearing
readier to counsel than to command or to coerce. If officials can convincingly claim to be
pursuing the interests of charges, influence is a happier relationship that reduces officers' ‘‘social
altitude.’’ If the economy of power, authority, and influence works in prisons as well as in wider
society, then, we should expect power and authority to pose as influence.
COOL HAND LUKE AND PSEUDO-INFLUENCE
Cool Hand Luke concerns power and authority posing as influence far more than critics
have apprehended. Granted, this movie takes stances that we associate with puerile exuberance.
However, adolescents are most likely to feel the sting of power and authority exercised ‘‘for their
own good.’’ Let us reconsider Cool Hand Luke both in its immediate context [1967] and in its
enduring context [the economy of violence outlined above]. To assist us in remembering
restraints that most post-adolescents have long ago accepted, I intersperse lines from a poem
written by A. E. Housman22 when I believe that they spotlight important themes in Cool Hand
Luke. If similar attitudes danced in the heads of a poet in 1922 and moviemakers in 1967, we
must suspect that those attitudes are less trendy and more enduring than reviewers appreciated.
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
5
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
An Inventory of Motifs
Barely has Warner Brothers's logo faded when white letters spelling ‘‘VIOLATION’’ fill
an otherwise red screen. Director Stuart Rosenberg begins his fable with a close-up of a parking
meter, the head of which Lucas Jackson [Paul Newman] is cutting off with a large pipe-cutter.
The protagonist swills beer and decapitates parking meters late one night or early one morning.23
He pauses between long lines of coin-operated sentinels to drain one bottle, then employs the
church-key on the chain around his neck to flip another lid. When a patrol-car pulls slowly up
and an officer asks, ‘‘What're you doin' there, fella?’’24 Luke flashes an expansive smile, a motif
throughout the film. We should note Luke's ‘‘full piano’’ of a grin whenever it appears, for it
signals exuberance, mockery, or demystification as Luke's techniques for coping with imprisonment on the chain-gang and elsewhere.
When Luke is sentenced to a prison road-gang for two years for destruction of municipal
property while under the influence, his prank seems too paltry for punishment. This start
encourages film-watchers to search their stereotypes. Is the judicial system of drawing first
blood by incarcerating a drunken rebel?25 Is this still another parody of Southern justice?26 Has
a debtor been sent to prison, in effect, because he cannot otherwise repay society for the
beheaded meters?27
However, there may be more than existential exertion going on. Luke explains his crime
to an inmate as ‘‘settling up old scores.’’28 In settling his scores,29 Luke mocked a world inhospitable to such license and by his mockery induced that world to overreact, a second motif that
we should note when it reappears. Mocking pseudo-influence is a central theme of this film, in
my account.
Luke's response to restraint is so trifling that we see his hyper-sensitivity as a flaw too
ordinary to be tragic: rebelling against the slightest order, Luke asserts freedom in a manner that
guarantees that he'll have none. This film about individualism shows us so much about Luke to
admire but shows as well adolescent self-destruction. Luke's civil disobedience recalls Holden
Caulfield's opposition to phonies and exertion of authenticity: heroic and honest but foolish and
crazy as well.30 No wonder critics rebelled against what they took to be a trendy cartoon.
Why Luke does what he does is part of his and our ‘‘failure to communicate,’’ a third
motif in the movie. Luke will fail to communicate with The Captain, with bosses, with inmates
even, but not with many in the audience.31 Many movie-goers understood Luke, his message,
and his situation. Perhaps most identified with Luke against merciless prison-officials. If so,
then Luke was smiling from the screen, mocking rules and authorities in a manner that many in
the audience likely fathomed beyond the shallow appreciation of some.
Deposing Petty Authority by Exposing Power
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
6
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
Luke first takes on a prison authority as ‘‘street-level’’ as the officer who stopped his
slaughter of innocent parking-meters, Dragline [George Kennedy]. Before Luke's advent, Dragline had named inmates to match their personas. He had mediated disputes and kept the peace.
He had conducted conspiracies to exploit the modest leeways permitted the prisoners. From the
start of the film, Dragline distinguishes between free men [those who make rules] and prisoners
[those who submit to such power]. Inured to enslavement, Dragline has tried to use the little
freedom his masters have left him. Until Luke appears, Dragline had prospered as a collaborator.
Actual authorities allow Dragline and his syndicate to manage matters that do not concern prison
officials; in return, Dragline helps legitimize inmates' conditions. The movie does not explore
this exchange as, for example, The Shawshank Redemption did.
On his first night, Luke exposes Dragline as a boss wannabe:32
DRAGLINE
. . . All you Newmeats gonna have to shape up fast and hard on this gang. We got rules here an',
in order to learn them, you gotta do more work with your ears than your mouth.
[Luke snorts in derision and smiles.]
DRAGLINE
Somebody say somethin'?
LUKE
I didn't say nothin' [brief pause] Boss.
Dragline resents Luke's deft, quick demystification as any petty tyrant would but this time
lets Luke say a mouthful by saying ‘‘nothin'.’’ He threatens Luke after the next incident. When
a new man [Ralph Waite playing ‘‘Alibi’’] is duped into buying a non-existent job and spends a
night in a box the size of an outhouse, Dragline defends the bosses' decision: ‘‘ . . . he backsassed a free man. They got their rules and we ain't got nothin' to do with that. . . . ’’ Luke
quickly exposes Dragline's rationalization: ‘‘Yeah, them poor ol' Bosses need all the help they
can get.’’33
Dragline tries to use superior force to gain Luke's acquiescence. That is, Dragline responds to Luke's challenges to his authority by threatening power. He tells Luke he has a big
mouth and that Dragline may have to settle the matter in a fist-fight.34 When Dragline exacerbates tensions excited by a girl washing her car, Luke exposes him as a sadist. Luke has
challenged Dragline's authority directly. This occasions the fist fight, power. The Captain and
bosses allow a pecking order among convicts to be maintained by the same means that legal
authorities ultimately use, terror and violence.
The Importance of Being Impotent35
The car-washing may seem like an entertaining and exploitative36 interlude, but I urge
you to take it more seriously than critics have. Dragline glorifies ‘‘Lucille,’’ the girl washing the
car. [Dragline names even the girl!] He uses the impotence of the men, their inability to act on
their most basic desires, as a weapon against them to maintain his position as collaborator-in-
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
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Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
chief. Unable to lead free humans, Dragline settles for being the man most at home with his own
enslavement. Dragline's use of impotence [just one nothing in the film] clashes with Luke's
preference for making something out of nothing. This collision of philosophies leads to a most
revealing physical confrontation.
When Dragline batters Luke, the inmates cannot take such overt violence from one of
their own. They accept explicit and implicit violence from bosses and The Captain. They cannot
abide the violence of Dragline, perhaps because they see that it does not confer even authority,
not to mention influence. Dragline's sadism is overthrown because he cannot translate it to
anything more attractive than power. As Luke nears serious injury while butting Dragline's fist,
inmates begin to avert their eyes and walk away in disgust.37 As The Captain rises from his
rocking chair to stop Dragline from pounding Luke into the hospital, Dragline tries to carry his
outmatched opponent into the bunkhouse. Luke will not permit even that small act of contrition.
When Dragline capitulates by trudging away alone, Luke staggers about. Luke is still standing,
albeit staggering about as he was while deadheading the meters. Dragline has not threatened the
bosses' and The Captain's monopoly on life-endangering violence. Luke has seized leadership of
the bull-gang because Dragline did not back up his power-talk.
Luke precipitates a revolution among inmates by proving that Dragline cannot effectively
coerce because he lacks the ultimate sanction. When a prone and woozy Luke sees the chains on
a fellow prisoner's legs during the fight, he cannot stay down. Inmates see his character and
admire his strength. ‘‘You're gonna have to kill me,’’ Luke says. Dragline cannot. The bosses
and the Captain, we see later, can. Dragline lacks ultimate power and, having lost authority by
having to resort to power to fend off Luke's challenge, Dragline accedes to Luke's superior
authority and influence. Not a bloodless revolution, but note that the deviant, the criminal,
accepts the coup without killing Luke, but the forces of official order ultimately cannot.38
Throughout the first hour of the film, Luke eludes Dragline's power and achieves
influence through his ability to endure Dragline's hard fists, the hard road, and hard gambling.
Luke teaches his fellows that, if a man can take the punishments that power threatens and can
forego the rewards power promises, then ‘‘sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.’’39 Luke
unmasks Dragline's brutality with nothing but heart. He demonstrates he can work as hard and as
long as veterans on nothing but will. He bluffs Koko out of a big pot with a ‘‘handful of
nothin'’’ and a truckload of nerve.
‘‘Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand’’ sounds like existential posing or a Kristofferson lyric, but not if we listen and watch. Luke has more than nothing. He is a convict with
charisma, fortitude, and principle. Possessed of so few material resources that his brother
exhausts his obligations by dumping Luke's banjo40 at the prison, Luke has character. On that
character Luke soars above his peers then plummets to his death.41 His thorough-going
individuality is his flaw: perhaps mock-heroic, sometimes puerile, always romantic, and
eventually fatal.
Successful Communication: Example as Influence
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
8
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
Cut loose from family after a visit from his dying mother and indifferent brother, Luke
passes his time as leader of a new family. He takes over the syndicate. He teaches his fellows to
prosper through virtually innocuous disobedience.42 This, however, is an alpha male whom no
one need follow. If an inmate finds Luke's pastime to be in the inmate's interest, he may follow.
Luke shows internees that they can defy the bosses with impunity, not by shirking but by
smirking. Please recall the smile motif. Luke shows others that, by working harder and faster,
they can wield their hard labor to express individuality and control. Luke thereby transforms an
allegedly rehabilitative relationship. The state sentenced him to hard labor. He will make of that
labor an ode to exertion, if not to growth. Dragline had used inmates' resignation in their own
slavery to seize power and authority for himself. Luke uses influence instead. He shows his followers why his way confirms their dignity as human beings and confers some control over their
lives.
In a key sequence in the movie, the bull-gang completes tarring so fast that the bosses
have nothing for them to do. Luke thereby shows how to overcome authority and power safely.
‘‘Get the man!’’ Luke urges them, and they gain a sense of their own strength. In Dragline's
phrase, the bosses do not know whether ‘‘to smile, spit, or swallow.’’43 They summon no
authority-talk nor any power-talk to answer the bull-gang's assault on the Hard Road. Done
early, the inmates ask ‘‘What do we do now?’’ and Luke smiles broadly, sits on his shovel, and
suggests that inmates do ‘‘Nothin'.’’44 Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand. He who early
on told Dragline and Carr the Floorwalker45 that he had nothing to say seems to be saying
something.
An egg-eating spectacle provides another means by which Luke finds ‘‘something to do,’’
his explanation for cutting the heads off the parking meters and for his medal-winning exploits in
Korea. Luke proposes to eat fifty hard-boiled eggs in an hour. He occupies the attention of the
camp and, with success, wins the admiration even of those who lost money. Every cent in camp
rides on it, making it as important as anything belonging to the convicts could be. At the end of
the egg-eating, the convicts have been captivated and Luke is left smiling in a crucifixion pose.46
He smiles when an incredulous inmate insists that no one can eat fifty eggs. By doing what
others say cannot be done, Luke escapes the usual oppression of rules about what may not be
done. Such escapes are limited. They are not, however, meaningless or trivial to those who
despair of more enduring or expansive escapes.
Luke continues to exercise his individuality and courage, even when it draws him into
conflict with authorities much higher and more dangerous than Dragline. From the first, Luke
recognizes Boss Godfrey [Morgan Woodward playing the head boss, whom inmates call ‘‘The
Man With No Eyes’’ because he wears mirrored sunglasses]. When one of the new meats asks
whether Boss Godfrey ever speaks, The Man With No Eyes displays his eye with a rifle by
shooting an ascending game bird,47 leading Luke to observe, ‘‘I believe he just said
something.’’48 Luke later picks up a snake and The Man With No Eyes shoots its head off. Luke
prefigures his martyrdom by saying to his eventual executioner, ‘‘You shore can shoot, man.’’49
This bravado segues to a rainstorm in which Luke adolescently sasses God, ‘‘the Big,
Bearded Boss.’’50 ‘‘Love me, hate me, kill me, anything. Just let me know it!’’ he asks.51 A
puny prisoner commands the ultimate Authority to reveal even killing power to ease and to end
his confinement. This predicament, too, Housman anticipated:
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
9
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
I am unsure whether we are supposed to see the report of the death of Luke's mother in
the next scene as God's answer, but that seems to be how Luke takes it when he strums his banjo
and sheds a tear while singing this hymn:52
I don't care if it rains or freezes
Long as I got my plastic Jesus
Sittin' on the dashboard of my car
Comes in colors pink and pleasant
Glows in the dark cuz it's iridescent
Take it with you when you travel far
Get yourself a sweet Madonna
Dressed in rhinestones
Sitting on a
Pedestal of abalone shell
Goin' ninety I ain't scary
Cuz I got the Virgin Mary
Assuring me that I won't go to Hell
Thus, Luke makes it clear that he will take on authorities and even Authority. Still,
romantic as it is, his petty disturbance of the peace can neither be sustained by Luke nor tolerated
by the system. The Captain cannot hear, the head boss speaks only through the reports of his
rifle, and God appears to attend more to Luke's blasphemies than to Luke's complaints. What we
have here is failure to communicate! Luke will be worn down by his inability to reach his betters
and worn out by his inability to communicate with his peers.
Luke Exposes Pseudo-Influence
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
The Captain holds Luke off the road and in ‘‘the box’’ until Luke's mother is buried.
This outrages Luke.53 After all, the Captain could have delayed notifying Luke until Luke's
mother was buried or could have told Luke that she was buried when she wasn't. The Captain
claims that he sends Luke to an upright coffin54 for Luke's own good: ‘‘When a man's mother
dies and he gits to thinkin' about her funeral and payin' respects, before he knows it his mind ain't
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
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Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
right and he's got rabbit in his blood and runs.’’55 Luke questions The Captain's counterfeit
concern and challenges this pseudo-influence: power or authority disguised as influence. He
shows that what the Captain claims to be for the inmates' own good is in fact in the Captain's and
the bosses' interest.
From the death of Luke's mother and his isolation in the box until the end of the film,
Luke's disobedience becomes less mannerly demystification as his escapes become less fanciful.
Luke's smile grows more sardonic and his mockery less guarded as he conveys to prison officials
that they won't get his mind right. Luke backed down the bunkhouse bully by proclaiming,
‘‘You're gonna have to kill me.’’ Now he will extend to the bosses and The Captain the same
admonition, although he will fail to persuade them until he mocks The Captain's lament about
failure to communicate. The very strategy Luke employed to bring Dragline down he now turns
on the prison hierarchy and, eventually, God. Upset at his ill treatment, Luke coaxes power to
expose itself [the second motif, please recall]. Having directed the other convicts to exploit
captivity within bounds, Luke now charts his own path out of bounds.
Luke's small struggles, in fact, had made confinement more comfortable for inmates,
including himself. Once provoked, Luke no longer shows inmates freedom amid captivity.
Instead, he strives to escape enslavement because his nothin' seems to have become an uncool
hand. He no longer exercises influence. His escapes do not redound to the benefit of his fellows.
Indeed, his fans come to hate Luke for his dramatization of their desperation. He abdicates
influence to pursue his individual interests. He has reached an end of what he can teach the
others anyway. Where Luke is headed, the prisoners cannot or will not go.
Luke becomes a demystifying demon. When kindly Boss Kean [John McLiam]
apologizes for putting Luke in the box to keep Luke from escaping to attend his mother's funeral,
Luke mugs him, ‘‘Callin' it a job don't make it right, Boss.’’56 Luke does not acknowledge that
Boss Kean promises to say a prayer for Luke's mother, an act that might expiate Luke's banjohymn.
The Captain attempts to make of Luke's rebellion an irrational, self-defeating act so that
the other inmates will see repression as for their own good. Remember that that was how
Dragline explained Alibi's having to spend a night in the box in the early part of the film. The
Captain offers the single most memorable line of the film: ‘‘What we've got here is failure to
communicate.’’57
The irony of such a phrasing, of course, is that Luke cannot impart his view to the
Captain and it is Luke's view that the inmates share. The one-way communication in the camp is
the language of power masquerading as influence. Luke must oppose it or give up his vaunted
individuality. The Captain cannot hear Luke; Luke will not hear the Captain. This breakdown
in communication, the third motif, abets escape and retribution.
LUKE'S ESCAPES AND REVERSALS
Luke escapes three times in the final fifty minutes of the movie. These escapes mark
Luke's inflection from passive to active rebellion. Each escape is less playful and more
consequential for Luke, his tormentors, and his admirers. I shall highlight how each escape leads
to a reversal of one or more of Luke's achievements at the prison.
The reversals offer us the interesting hypothesis that ‘‘nothing’’ may be used to unmask
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
11
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
power disguised as influence but anything more than nothing will provoke reprisals. When the
powerful stay out of the game, sometimes nothing can be a pretty cool hand. When the powerful
choose to play, sometimes everything is a losing hand.
Escape and Reversal One
Immediately after emerging from the box after his mother was in the ground, Luke makes
his least cunning breakout. During an Independence Day celebration in the barracks, inmates
dance loudly. Bosses and trustees cannot hear Luke sawing through the floor. Dragline invites
Carr, the trustee who most directly supervises the barracks, to read a salacious passage, which
diverts Carr from Luke's flight.
That flight is remarkable for Luke's trademark smile and his frolicsome maneuvers. Luke
smiles in shot after shot. This may suggest his joy at even a moment's liberation. It may reprise
his exuberant and tireless roadwork. However, I interpret the shots in conjunction with Luke's
leaping from side to side along the same fenceline. Luke is playing a more serious game with the
trustees and bosses, but he is still mocking officials and their power.
As recounted above, when Luke is recaptured after his first escape, his sarcasm incites
The Captain to strike him. Unlike his climb to power by pulling himself up each time Dragline
knocked him down, Luke does not stand back up and say to The Captain what he said to
Dragline, ‘‘You're gonna have to kill me.’’58 Indeed, for the first time in the movie, the lowliest
authority, ‘‘Dog Boy’’ [Anthony Zerbe], verbally assaults Luke [although film-makers allow
Luke to back-talk Dog Boy because Luke is not thoroughly degraded after escape one]. Official
toleration of Luke's sardonic mockery has ended. Luke now wears leg-irons and the imprint of
The Captain's club. Luke's reversals have begun.
Escape Two and Reversals All Around
The first time Luke escaped, he enjoyed the complicity of Dragline and others. The
second escape showcases Luke's individual cunning. Luke uses more of his ‘‘nothin',’’ a length
of string that he begins to accumulate at lunch of the very day that he is returned from his first
escape. As Boss Kean testifies to Luke of Kean's religious faith [capped by a high standard: in
twenty-two years on the Hard Road, Kean has never killed a white man],59 Luke interrupts him to
ask to heed the call of nature. Luke then uses the string to keep shaking a bush to indicate his
presence after he has begun to flee again.
In this second escape, Luke combines clever tactics and cute touches, as with his first
escape. He dupes two boys into aiding his escape. He spreads chili powder and pepper across
his scent. Luke smiles at the boys and says, ‘‘You remember how them dogs do when they get
here so you can tell me about it some day.’’60
The inmates derived great pleasure from Luke's wily escape and even more from Luke's
next amusement. Luke sent them a photograph with showgirls at Luke's sides. The mere illusion
that one of them could be living the high life sustains some inmates.61
After he is captured the second time and returned, Luke tells the convicts about his
impotence against power and authority in the outside world: ‘‘Nothin. I had nothin, made
nothin. Couple towns, couple bosses. Laughed out loud one day and got turned in.’’62
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
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Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
Ironically, bosses had tolerated Luke's mockery far more in the prison than economic bosses
would do in ‘‘the Free World.’’ Luke's grinning and funning was tricky on the chain-gang but,
apparently, even more challenging in the everyday world of work.
Now, prison potentates must beat Luke or lose. They break him to stop his escape and to
stifle his example. To effect this reversal, The Captain again wields Orwell more than Camus:
Luke must get his mind right.63 In the prison context, as in our own lives, a right mind is often a
conformist, docile mind. Luke is reduced to being water boy and gofer for The Man With No
Eyes. Luke must be degraded, not so much for his own sake [after all, they could always just kill
him] as to instill in inmates the assurance that rebellion is foolish. The Captain and his
henchmen try to reform Luke to cow the bull-gang. If Luke capitulates, he will become a tool of
their propaganda, as Dragline had been at film's start.
After the second escape, we may spot reversals aside from this most obvious. The bosses
severely beat Luke before they return him to the barracks. This plot-development not only
reveals the forces of order to be more brutal than the scofflaws, but also allows The Captain to
absent himself from the sadism. The bosses confine Luke to the box with minimal rations.
When Luke emerges from extended solitary, trustee Dog Boy's abuse becomes less verbal [at
which, recall, Luke easily bested him] and more palpable. Dog Boy heaps food on the plate of
the man who could once eat fifty eggs and reminds Luke that if he does not eat it all, he goes
back in the box. To weather than this reversal, Luke depends on peers who finish their plates and
then ostentatiously eat from Luke's plate. The camera does not tell us whether Luke feels more
acutely his inability to feed himself or his inability to fend for himself.
A final reversal is most devastating. Just as Luke and Dragline believe that Luke has
survived his first week back, Boss Paul and Boss Kean alternate ordering Luke to get ‘‘his dirt’’
out of Boss Kean's imaginary ditch and, once he's created Boss Kean's ditch, to get ‘‘his dirt’’ out
of Boss Paul's yard. Amid this Sisyphean inversion of Luke's indefatigability, Luke charges Boss
Paul but is beaten down. This time, the camera shoots from behind Boss Paul and we see Luke
through the legs of Boss Paul—legs that do not have the chains that spurred Luke on in his fight
with Dragline. Reversal and inversion turn to rout when Luke, caned so severely that he is barely
conscious while lying in Boss Kean's ditch and his own grave, begs Boss Paul not to hit him any
more. Luke calls upon God and thereby secures the interest of Boss Kean, who had prayed for
Luke's mother and had suggested that Luke was being punished for his atheism.
Luke repents his sacrilegious insubordination and insists that he has his mind right. Boss
Paul warns Luke that death is the wages of backsliding from the right mind into which the bosses
have now baptized him. Enter The Captain. This kindly commander resurrects Luke from a
barely early grave with avuncular smarm: ‘‘OK, son. Go get shaved and cleaned up and get
some sleep. I reckon you need it.’’64
When Luke emerges from his would-be grave, he is too weak even to make it to his bunk.
He falls to the bunkhouse floor, alone and ignored by prisoners who once venerated him.
‘‘Where are you now?’’ Luke asks fellow slaves when they look away from his re-enslavement.
He showed them what they could be, but once broken, he exhibited their weaknesses. They
could accept that once, under Dragline's regime. Having tasted a more exalted existence,
however, they cannot abide the reminder of the Captain's and bosses' power. They reject Luke,
perhaps because they do not want to believe that his subjugation is their fate. The Captain and
the bosses have, at least temporarily, reversed Luke's renown.
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
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Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
Escape Three and the Final Reversal
Luke masterminds his final escape alone but, alas, Dragline impulsively hitches a ride on
the truck that Luke is stealing. That is, Luke not only must flee on his own [as he did the second
time] but must now bear as well Dragline's formidable bulk. Having been reduced to a waterboy
and having endured scorn from peers who now regard him as beneath them, Luke makes out of
‘‘nothin'’’ a climactic cool hand. Luke's foreshadowed murder reverses Luke's fall. Luke
completes the film as legend and martyr.
LUKE'S REVERSALS AND LUKE'S INDIVIDUALISM
Luke's reversals are telling. They consummate this fabulous study of power, authority,
influence, and pseudo-influence. Critics who scored Cool Hand Luke as a shallow tear-jerker
might accept my analysis of Luke's relations with officials, peers, and rules and maintain
nonetheless that this fable was facile. After all, who—aside from some snotty academic—gets to
mock authority and unmask power with impunity? Who—other than a poet—gets to
choreograph martyrdom so neatly and completely?65
What critics may have overlooked, in addition to political dynamics in the camp, was
Cool Hand Luke's dramatization of the agon of standing apart. This film displays both
opportunities and perils in that lie in resistance. Luke rose to primacy by going his own way.
Every step of his ‘‘path to the top’’ was dear. If this film joins dozens of American films in
glorifying the lonely truth-seeker opposed and oppressed by élite few and unworthy many, at
least it reiterates Housman's warning to those who would flout the laws of God and man:
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
We are all vulnerable to coercion. None of us can truly stand apart or by ourselves with
impunity.
Luke's individualism begins to fail him in various ways whenever he tries to exert his
will. Luke feels acutely restraints that his leadership imposes on him. He regards his followers
as cannibals: ‘‘ . . . stop feedin' off me.’’66 Still, even as the inmates grow disenchanted with
him, they defend him. He is still hero to some even as others lose their faith in him and in
themselves. His war against power and authority is their war, but they are ambivalent, just as the
movie is. As Luke begins to wear out, his hope fades and his energy wanes. Only then will God
and man leave Luke alone.
Going his own way, Luke has attenuated social ties that might sustain him. Proving
human, Luke loses ‘‘disciples’’ and sinks beneath the weight of society—both the murderously
repressive madmen in power and the pathetically oppressive subjects of authority now dog him.
For Luke, anything more than nothing is a hand that he cannot play cool.
The loneliness of individualism is emphasized by Luke's conversation with his dying
mother and his non-conversation with his brother. Luke must confront disappointing his mother,
Arletta, who loved him better than his brother. Arletta made it clear that Luke reminded her of
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
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Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
his father, who also wasn't much for sticking around. Luke pronounces Arletta's expectations
and love a heavy burden. She says she thought he was strong enough to bear it. We know from
what has already transpired in Korea, on the road, and in the fist fight that Luke is strong and
resilient. However, he is strong only at tasks that require him to be strong alone. Mother, family,
marriage, and ‘‘respectability’’ weigh on him too heavily for him to endure them. An irony of
this movie is that Luke bears the yoke of the chain-gang but cannot sustain the burdens that we in
the audience accept, usually, without a thought. Perhaps we accept pseudo-influence in the same
manner?
We see this again when Luke finally breaks. Having insisted on ‘‘elbow room’’ when the
convicts got too worshipful, he gets it when they see that he is human after all. Luke achieves
leadership on his own and on his own terms. When he needs the compassion and help of others,
he learns that he gets them only in exchange for heroics. The benefits of family, both with his
blood-relatives and with his prison-clan, are for grinning Luke burdens.
When Luke breaks away the last time, he must get rid of his last disciple, Dragline,
because he is tired of carrying others. He must confront that ‘‘Big, Bearded Boss’’ alone. He
has tried to evade petty power and authority. He seeks to learn his place in the larger camp run
by The Boss. He goes alone into the chapel, where he will meet his fate if not his God.67
LUKE
Hey, Old Man! You home tonight (pause)? . . . If You kin spare a minute, it's about time we had
ourselves a little talk. . . . Old Man, I know I'm a pretty evil feller who killed people in the war
and got drunk and chopped up municipal merchandise and like that. I admit I ain't got no call to
ask for much. But even so, You ain't dealt me no cards in a long time. I mean it's beginning to
look like You got it fixed so that I can't never win out. Inside or out, it's just different bosses and
different rules. Where am I supposed to fit in? . . . When does it end? . . . What You got in
mind for me next, Old Man? What do I do now?68 . . . [Luke relents, folds his hands, and drops
to his knees] . . . Yeah. That's what I thought. I guess I'm just a hard case and I gotta find my
way out myself. . . . [Dragline enters the back door as police cars surround the chapel] . . . Is
that your answer, Old Man? You're a hard case too, ain't you?
Believing that his meager supplication to Providence had been spurned, Luke recites the sardonic
catch-phrase of this movie and reels from the force of Boss Godfrey's bullet through his larynx.
Thus, this movie is ambivalent throughout about individualism. It is Luke's strength and
his weakness. The film's viewers must decide on a measure of individualism knowing that true
individuality is very costly. Thus does the adolescent become an adult.
A Defeatist Ending?
Ultimately The Man With No Eyes kills Luke because Luke will not ‘‘get his mind
right.’’ Killing Luke elevates him to heroic status and places him beyond earthly power,
influence, or authority. Luke becomes an power on his own in the retelling of Dragline. ‘‘Cool
Hand Luke, hell, he's a natural-born world-shaker!’’ gushes Dragline at film's end.69 The picture
of Luke and the showgirls, taped back together after Koko had torn it in pique at Luke's
capitulation to the bosses, serves as a relic. The martyr is once again the object of admiration for
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
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Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
the whole camp. It's a costly way to be a leader, but a formula familiar from art and actuality.
This end reveals anew the superficiality of seeing Cool Hand Luke merely as a tale about
meaningless existence. Luke's efforts end in his death, but clearly the film-makers admire Luke
and believe that he has made a difference.
First and least, Luke has liberated himself. Dragline tells inmates how dying Luke smiled
as prison officials drove him away from the shooting. ‘‘They shoulda known then that they were
ne'er gonna beat 'im!’’70
Second, the car drives over the mirrored glasses of Boss Godfrey, now forced to show his
entire face after Dragline has assaulted him for the murder of Luke. Luke has encouraged
Dragline to escape [as Randall McMurphy did in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for Chief
Broom] and to unmask power rather than to legitimize it. Such is a Christ-like act that even the
reverent should appreciate.
Third and most significant, as the prison car takes Luke to the prison for burial, it passes
under a stoplight. With Luke's passing, the green light changes directly to red, with no intermediate yellow. The green is on top and the red on bottom! It may be a small triumph, but
Luke has turned an authority on its head. He never quite settled his score with the parking
meters, but his score with authority backed by power has been settled before Luke slips into
death. Luke has made a difference.71
SUMMARY JUDGMENTS
And, since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
The movie ends with a montage of Luke Jackson and his broad grin, an ending consistent
with a claim that Luke could liberate himself only through death. Luke's soul could flee past
Saturn and past Mercury, where he need not keep the foreign laws of God and man. What else
might the smile have meant throughout the film?
The smile might instead mean that, like God and the Devil, Power and Authority are not
mocked and cannot abide humor that levels them. Humor, sarcasm, irony, and satire often
expose truths. Exposing truths imperils exposed and exposer, however. Exposure compels the
exposed to rely on social resources that work without choice and absent credulity. The exposed
will often strive to limit exposure by eliminating exposers. Luke knew the truth and the truth
may have made him free. It certainly made him dead.
Thus, Luke's smiling front collided with the economy of political communication. Rules
and rulers, authority and power incited Luke's demystification. Initially, Luke's grins and pranks
were not overtly insubordinate to The Captain and the bosses. Once gratuitous power and
sanctimonious authority tyrannized Luke, Luke chose to resist more overtly. His playful
mockery of officials elicited brutish retribution. As The Captain and his underlings tried to make
authority and power into influence, opportunistic communication became more difficult and
honest vengeance took the place of wily persuasion. The makers of Cool Hand Luke have,
following Orwell,72 illustrated how insincerity breaks down communications.
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
16
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
The film leaves the bull-gang and the audience at a crossroads. Convicts have their
inspiration for their confrontations with power and authority. Members of the audience must
choose as well. Some will emulate Luke. They will resist expressive and repressive crimes.
They will recognize crime that comes from on high as well as crime that wells from those below.
Others will cooperate and collaborate for security or advancement. Maybe they will do so less
easily for having experienced Luke's joy-ride.
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
17
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
Notes
1.
For a list of movies about penitentiaries, prisons, and other penal institutions, please consult Richard B.
Armstrong and Mary Willems Armstrong, THE MOVIE LIST BOOK (Cincinnati: Betterway Books, 1994) pp.
301-303. For a survey of the genre, please see Bruce Crowther, CAPTURED ON FILM: THE PRISON MOVIE
(North Pomfret: Trafalgar Square, 1990).
2.
Recent examples abound. Dead Man Walking considers acknowledgement, repentance, and justice.
Murder in the First highlights perseverance and courage. Hope is the resounding moral of The Shawshank
Redemption, while Malcolm X more concerns redemption.
3.
A Jalem Production distributed by Warner Brothers in 1967; directed by Stuart Rosenberg; produced by
Gordon Carroll; written by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson from Donn Pearce, COOL HAND LUKE (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965).
4.
Friedrich Nietzsche, THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.) (Thomas
Common, translator) p. 108 [Chapter 29, ‘‘The Tarantulas’’].
5.
John Maynard Keynes, THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT INTEREST AND MONEY
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936) p. 383.
6.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Sympathy for the Devil on the Rolling Stones' CD BEGGARS
BANQUET (New York: ABKCO Records, 1986).
7.
From Stanley Kauffmann, FIGURES OF LIGHT: FILM CRITICISM AND COMMENT (New York:
Harper and Row, 1971) p. 28:
His escapes are self-willed escapades, not acts of heroism. And he gets himself killed out of stubborn cussedness,
not for any cause or any practical reason. Thus the popular film arrives in the age of anti-idealism and of the acte
gratuit. Camus's Absurdity on the quarter shell.
8.
Pauline Kael, GOING STEADY (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970) pp. 35, 60.
9.
Frank N. Magill (editor), MAGILL'S SURVEY OF CINEMA (Volume One: English Language Films,
First Series) (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Salem Press, 1980) pp. 384-386. On Christ-symbols, please see
‘‘Theological Criticism,’’ in Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Oswalt, Jr. (editors), SCREENING THE SACRED:
RELIGION, MYTH, AND IDEOLOGY IN POPULAR AMERICAN FILM (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press,
1995) p. 15. Compare essays at [‘‘http://falcon.jmu.edu:80/~delucagi/coolhand2.0/jesusessay.html’’ and
‘‘http://falcon.jmu.edu:80/~delucagi/coolhand2.0/jesusinfo.html’’] on the World Wide Web.
10.
I invoke in this sentence three well known works that raise questions similar to those that I find in Cool
Hand Luke. Please see Fyodor Dostoevsky, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (Constance Garnett, translator) (New
York: Walter J. Black, 1942); John Gaventa, POWER AND POWERLESSNESS: QUIESCENCE AND
REBELLION IN AN APPALACHIAN VALLEY (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); and Kenneth
Burke, PERMANENCE AND CHANGE: AN ANATOMY OF PURPOSE (New York: New Republic, 1935). If
Mr. Rosenberg, a director who trained on television, is incapable of critics' respect, perhaps similar investigations by
a novelist, a sociologist, and a literary critic can gild Cool Hand Luke with importance by association.
11.
I render dialogue from the movie by reproducing the words from the screenplay in IDENTITY: PRINT
VERSIONS OF THE FOLLOWING FILMS: ‘‘THAT'S ME,’’ ‘‘THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE
RUNNER,’’ ‘‘COOL HAND LUKE,’’ AND ‘‘UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE’’ (New York: Scholastic Book
Services, 1974) pp. 79-134. This passage appears first on p. 119, col. 2. I have reproduced the key sentence in
boldface.
I henceforth refer to this script as ‘‘Pearce and Pierson.’’ The reader should realize that words in the
release will vary slightly from the screenplay. I alter punctuation in dialogue when I believe that it increases clarity
and I replace characterizations of characters' movements to suit the release.
12.
Pearce and Pierson, pp. 133-134. As I warned in the previous note, I alter descriptions of actions to suit the
released film. The famous phrase was capitalized in the script.
13
David V. J. Bell, POWER, INFLUENCE, AND AUTHORITY : AN ESSAY IN POLITICAL
LINGUISTICS (New York : Oxford University Press, 1975).
14.
Sheldon S. Wolin, POLITICS AND VISION: CONTINUITY AND INNOVATION IN WESTERN POL-
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
18
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
ITICAL THOUGHT (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960) pp. 220-224.
15.
Influence may even coax from an audience convictions of listeners' authority or even power over the
speaker, as in a political campaign. Self-proclaimed public-servants ritualistically flatter voters in campaigns
because voters tolerate power or authority in themselves better than in others.
16.
For example, Randall P. McMurphy [Jack Nicholson] in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest reminds the
guard who is pushing him away from the edge of the pool that they may meet up on the outside.
17.
Philippe Nonet and Philip Selznick, LAW AND SOCIETY IN TRANSITION: TOWARD RESPONSIVE
LAW (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).
18.
Of course, expectations for formal rules require more than mere predictability. Please see Professor Lon L.
Fuller's ‘‘desiderata’’ in THE MORALITY OF LAW (Revised Edition) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969)
pp. 33-91.
19.
Please consider prisoners' introductions to their penal homes in The Shawshank Redemption, An Innocent
Man, and Papillon. Cinematic boot-camps are comparable settings for candid expressions of power and authority.
20.
Please consider the testimony uttered by F. Murray Abraham in AN INNOCENT MAN: ‘‘It's simple in
here. It's an insane place with insane rules, so it ends up bein' logical.’’
21.
Indeed, if inmates return the favor by pointing out self-interest that the guards or wardens may have missed,
mutual influence or exchange may result. I do not consider exchange-relations in this paper. Regarding exchange in
prison, please screen The Shawshank Redemption, The Longest Yard, Victory, or Good Fellas.
22.
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF A. E. HOUSMAN (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965) p. 111.
23.
Of course, the viewer must cede some artistic license here. Unless the parking meter ranged to five or six
hours, how could the time on the meters be running out just as Lucas Jackson is cutting off the heads?
24.
I quote here from the release because this scene was not in the script.
25.
This is a device in, for example, the first movie to feature Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo: First Blood.
26.
A famous ‘‘take’’ on Southern justice is In the Heat of the Night, but James Baldwin effectively shows the
degree to which that film sanitizes relations in the South in THE DEVIL FINDS WORK: AN ESSAY (New York:
Dell, 1976) pp. 61-69. Caricatures are equally safe but more abundant in My Cousin Vinnie. The parody in Cool
Hand Luke may be quite near the mark—Bob Herbert, Brutality Behind Bars, THE NEW YORK TIMES [National
edition] (July 7, 1997) p. A17, cols. 1-2.
27.
Minimizing the venality of an imprisoned protagonist is, of course, a familiar tactic in film-making. Please
compare Murder in the First, The Shawshank Redemption, The Longest Yard, and The Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner.
28.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 90, col. 1.
29.
In the script, Luke identified the first meter slain on screen with a general who awarded him a medal and a
second with Helen, a woman over whom Luke lost his head. Please see Pearce and Pierson, p. 82, col. 1. These
details did not make it into the released film.
30.
Luke resembles the protagonist in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951): a
man-boy who won't back down. Like a teenager, Luke strikes back at restraints that are in his communal if not individual interests. This rebel has a cause but one that he cannot convey to ordinary adults, who may never have perceived mundane concessions as defeats or, if once they did, no longer recall the exuberance of self-exertion against
forces and fences that wall in the brave and the lonely everyday and everywhere. Please refer as well to Lonely Are
the Brave, in which Jerri Bondi [Gena Rowlands] denigrates Jack Burns's [Kirk Douglas] resistance to restraint as
childish.
31.
Indeed, that this film communicated reached an audience seems to be what annoyed Pauline Kael most!
Please see note 35.
32.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 87, col. 2. I have altered the dialogue from the screenplay because the words that
George Kennedy actually says in the release are, in my view, more striking.
33.
Both quotations may be found in Pearson and Pearce, p. 94, col. 2. I substituted ‘‘Bosses’’ for guards
because that is what Newman clearly says in the release.
34.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 94, col. 2.
35.
The script called for more explicit and frequent references to women and sex. The novel is even more
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
19
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
explicit.
36.
Pauline Kael's screed on this point shows how superficial one's glance at the screen must be to consider the
car-washing scene a harmful diversion:
Stuart Rosenberg, the director of WUSA, made his movie reputation with a contemptible success, Cool Hand Luke, a
film that pretended to have something to say and was full of touches designed to make the audience feel
‘‘knowing’’—such as a girl teasing a bunch of convicts by washing her car seductively, playing with the nozzle of a
hose and squeezing fluid out of a sponge. That is, he transferred a commercial hack's sexual innuendo onto a young
girl, just for effect. Rosenberg's ‘‘touches’’ don't grow out of his material—they're stuck on; his movies are full of
signals to us, but the signals don't direct us anywhere. The road gang in Cool Hand Luke went through a lot of waste
motion just to satisfy the director's desire for a rhythmically edited sequence, . . .
Pauline Kael, Deeper Into Movies (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973) p. 181.
First, let me answer Ms. Kael's ad hominem with one coming right back at her: it takes some nerve for the
author of I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Going Steady, and Deeper Into Movies to denounce sexual
innuendo. On a more rational level, please notice that Rosenberg was seeking, according to Kael, just to make the
audience feel knowing and just to create a rhythmic sequence. I pass by conventional use of ‘‘just’’ to denote
‘‘simply’’ or ‘‘solely’’— perhaps Ms. Kael just changed her mind in mid-paragraph or just tacked on another
thought about just why Mr. Rosenberg deserved her vitriol.
Third, I believe that I can justify the sequence by more than its rhythm. I reject as obtuse the claim that
audiences felt that they understood something that the inmates [or whomever Ms. Kael believes to be out of the
know] did not. Rosenberg's rhythm derives from shooting the young woman from inside an old automobile as she
washes it. As she washes the car's roof, she presses her ample bosom against the window through which the camera
shoots, nearly creating a three-dimensional effect. Certainly sexual and perhaps exploitative, the sequence tends to
make college students—males and females alike—squirm and laugh nervously. The sequence may create in many
viewers discomfort. It may even cater to the prurient in some watchers. Absent such effects, Dragline's tormenting
of inmates, inmates' ‘‘cold showers,’’ and a fistfight over ‘‘Lucille’’ would make less sense. As in many yarns, the
provocation must be supreme.
37.
Please notice that the inmates who first assist Luke to his feet and who counsel him to stay down are the
most marginal inmates. Two are new meats who came in the new-meat wagon with Luke. The third is ‘‘Society
Red’’ [played by J. D. Cannon], a bad-check artist who maintains his distance [he imagines it to be superiority] from
the other inmates by, among other practices, reading The New York Times. I cannot decide whether to see Society
Red as a detached, unemotional observer or as an analytic, fearful rationalizer. Either way, I suspect he would do
well in academic politics.
38.
Compare on this point The Longest Yard, in which a guard would not kill a prisoner as the warden ordered.
39.
I allude below to Kris Kristofferson's Me and Bobby McGee: ‘‘Freedom's just another word for nothin' left
to lose.’’
40.
I like this choice of a musical instrument invented by Africans and introduced to the American South by
African-American slaves. In the novel, Donn Pearce seems to me to use the banjo both to illustrate still another of
Luke's excellences and to construct a very working-class hero.
41.
On this point, one might compare Icarus or Jack London, whose credo seems to explain Luke's ‘‘preferencestructure:’’
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be
stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and
permanent planet.
RESPECTFULLY QUOTED (Suzy Platt, editor) (Washington: Library of Congress, 1989) p. 213.
42.
A more recent example of this tactic adorned The Shawshank Redemption, when Andy Defresne [Tim
Robbins] locked himself in an office and played Mozart over the prison's loudspeakers.
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
20
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
43.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 105, col. 2.
44.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 106, col. 2.
45.
In Luke's first moments inside the prison's barracks he had made faces [ever the adolescent?] at trustee
Carr's litany of ways to ‘‘spend a night in the box.’’ Carr then asked if Luke was going to be a hard case. Luke
shook his head in the negative. Perhaps Luke had not intended to be a hard case.
46.
The script shows that this pose is quite intentional: ‘‘We see Luke, lying half naked and unconscious with
his arms spread out hanging over the table. His pose is almost Christlike. He is smiling.’’ Pearce and Pierson, p.
113, col. 2.
47.
In the release, Boss Godfrey appears to shoot a pheasant on the rise—a sporting diversion. The script
called for The Man With No Eyes to shoot a crow.
Please note that The Man With No Eyes later shoots a snapping turtle lazing in a slough. When Boss Paul
orders Luke, once a snapper but now a gofer, to retrieve and to clean the dead reptile, Luke escapes for the third and
final time. In another anticipation of his demise, Luke holds the turtle aloft by a long pole and grins as he shouts,
‘‘Here he is, Boss. Deader'n hell but he won't let go.’’ Pearce and Pierson, p. 131, col. 1.
48.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 92, col. 2.
49.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 114, col. 1.
50.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 114, col. 2.
51.
I have quoted the release. The script called for Luke to shout, ‘‘Come on! Make me know You're up there!
Kill me or love me, one or the other.’’ Pearce and Pierson, p. 115, col. 2.
52.
I have quoted this lyric from the release. The words are not in the script. The film-makers appropriated a
profane hymn for the banjo scene. They might have done worse, to judge from the variety of doggerel listed under
‘‘Sounds’’ at ‘‘http://falcon.jmu.edu:80/~delucagi/coolhand2.0/sounds/plasticjesus.html,’’ the ‘‘Cool Hand Luke
Homepage.’’
53.
Recall from note 44 that Carr the Floorwalker had listed myriad ways to ‘‘spend a night in the box’’ and
then asked Luke if Luke would be a hard case. Luke may not have anticipated that he would be a hard case, but his
nights in the box changed his mind. The box, designed as a sanction to get prisoners' minds right, becomes a spur to
set Luke's mind wrong. This is first among a series of reversals in the latter half of the movie.
54.
Ms. Mercedes C. Garrido suggested that I compare the boxes in which Luke and his mother were placed. I
thank her.
55.
Pearce and Pierson, pp. 116-117.
56.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 117, col. 1.
57.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 119, col. 2.
58.
Perhaps Luke said it to Dragline because Dragline could hear Luke and would act on what we might define
as power-talk: ‘‘If you insist on hitting me, I shall punish you by making you beat me to death.’’ The end of the film
makes it evident why such a message would not deter The Captain or The Man With No Eyes.
59.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 121, col. 1.
60.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 122, col. 2.
61.
I cannot decide whether Luke exacerbates by this ersatz photograph the sexual frustrations that Dragline
had exploited after the car-washing scene.
62.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 126, col. 1.
63.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 124, col. 2.
64.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 129, col. 1.
65.
Playwrights, novelists, and movie-makers have flourished license as freely as poets. Please consider A Tale
of Two Cities, A Man for All Seasons, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Shootist, and Thelma and Louise as
examples of immaculately choreographed martyrdom.
66.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 126, col. 1.
67.
Pearce and Pierson, pp. 132-133.
68.
This query apes Dragline had asking not two minutes before, when Luke cut him loose, ‘‘But what am I
gonna do all by myself?’’ Pearce and Pierson, p. 132, col. 2.
69.
Pearce and Pierson, p. 134, col. 2. I have chosen the sentiment in the released edition because it conveys
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
21
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
Luke's victory more than the original script did. This version may be confirmed in Melinda Corey and George
Ochoa (editors), The Dictionary of Film Quotations (New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1995) p. 82, col. 2.
This sentiment is the only entry other than the famous line about ‘‘failure to communicate.’’
70.
Again, I cite the released version, not the script.
71.
Director Rosenberg reused this formula in his 1980 film, Brubaker. As reformer Henry Brubaker [Robert
Redford] is driven out of the prison, inmates indicate their appreciation for his efforts by applauding him. Dickie
Coombes [Yaphet Kotto], a trustee who has opposed Brubaker's reforms as misguided, says to Brubaker [with no
apparent justification] ‘‘You were right.’’
72.
Politics and the English Language in SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT, AND OTHER ESSAYS (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1950) pp. 84-101.