The Thing about Cool Hand Luke

I read Cool Hand Luke several times a year (depending on the year) and watch the movie that many times or more.  Every time I do one or the other I see a new thing about it that makes me get the thing even more.  Writers more gifted than I espouse enormous elaborate theories about the movie and the book – the symbolism of this or that scene or passage, the biblical references and underlying themes, the real meaning of Boss Godfrey’s name, the significance of the song Luke sings when his mother dies, etc. etc. ad nauseam.  They go so far as to paint young Lucas as a Christ figure citing his crucifixion-like pose after he eats the (50) eggs and further that his devouring of said eggs is emblematic of his having devoured the sins of the (50) prisoners in the camp.  And still farther by comparing Dragline to Judas Iscariot at the end.  That’s fantastic – possibly ridiculous.  I won’t even go as far to say that those subtle and not so subtle cues and innuendos aren’t there or that this interpretation isn’t exactly what Rosenberg or even Pearce intended with the story.  What I will say is that the thing about Cool Hand Luke is much less complicated.

 

I admit that there are aspects of Luke’s personality and performance that indicate that he is searching for, begging for even an explanation of his own existence but is that really that odd, does that have to be tied to a biblical or even a cultural phenomenon?  Think about it in the context in which it was written and later filmed – that’s maybe what the ‘60s were in a nutshell.  It was a time of revolutionary thought, right?  So it’s easy to understand how Luke could be put upon a pedestal as a hero, a lone wolf fighting against the oppression of societal norms.  And that is in fact part of what makes him cool, but what’s more striking and is in my opinion the framework around which the story is constructed is the manner in which he was; his mocking affability when he was first arrested, his quiet defiance when they put him in the box after his Arletta passed – "Callin' it your job don't make it right, boss.".  Why he was arrested in the first place is even cool – for cutting the heads off of parking meters because there’s not much else to do in Eaton.

Without the movie and without Paul Newman’s defining portrayal of the character I don’t think it would have such cultural significance.  I love The Color of Money and HUD and his kick-ass spaghetti sauce and pizza and salsa or whatever but, Paul Newman is and will forever be only one thing – Cool Hand Luke.   That’s what made Luke cool: that’s what made Newman cool.  Understanding that symbiotic relationship between character and actor is imperative to understanding Cool Hand Luke.  The book is the book and it’s amazing but the cinematic face that Newman gave to the faceless printed Luke is indescribable really.  When I read the book now, it’s his face I see – Paul and Luke are inseparable.   

I can’t get behind the majority of the phenomenal pile that has been attributed to the movie, but I will allow this small piece of symbolism and it translates to everyday life.  There is hardly a day that passes in my professional and even my personal life where this statement doesn’t ring true.  Make of that what you will but if you’re honest you know it too:  “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. I don't like it any more than you do.” In that regard, Luke does probably represent the disaffected youth of that time.  Tow the line.  Be a team player.  Be an anonymous cog in the wheel of the machine, because they tell you to or because that’s how we do things here.  Isn’t that what we are all taught both implicitly and explicitly our whole lives?  Luke upsets the balance in the camp by going against the current, by being different, by attempting to be an individual even though he doesn’t know how to be.  What’s his reward for not falling in line lockstep behind the other zombies?  He is disposed of. He is killed – devoured by the system. 

If there is any hidden meaning in the story, the movie more so than the book, it’s the opposite of what most people think it is, myself included.  Luke isn’t the hero we all want him to be.  Luke isn’t celebrated for fighting the system; he is cast out of it.  The message that so many have tried to find in the story may be just the opposite of what I’ve always thought that it was.  The movie doesn’t celebrate individualism; it’s a lesson in why you shouldn’t be an individual.  It’s a cautionary tale.  That’s disappointing, isn’t it?  Maybe that’s why so many have tried to assign a higher meaning to the film.  Is Cool Hand Luke really little more than right-wing conservative propaganda?  If you advertise enough fear and sell enough fantasy about the perils of upsetting the heard, eventually we will all buy in.  Most of us already have and shudder at the thought of not disappearing silently into the homogenized mass of humanity that pop culture insists that we are. 

The last couple of paragraphs illuminate the dangers of thinking too much about a simple thing.  I almost singlehandedly talked myself out of my own adoration of the character, the book and the film.  My whole thesis morphed into whatever it is now by going down that path and I’m not sure I’ve written what I sat down to write about in the first place.  Here’s the thing, you can find a unicorn in a cloud formation or the face of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich if you look hard enough, but I think you are missing the point if you do.  The cloud formation is the beautiful thing.  The grilled cheese sandwich is the beautiful thing.  Why not appreciate just that? 

Cool Hand Luke may indeed represent all of the ideas I scoff at that others have ascribed to him.  And if that’s what he is to you, that’s fine; everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  You probably don’t even have an opinion on the matter and there’s no reason why you should.  For what it’s worth, to me, Luke is just cool and that in of itself is the beautiful thing.  That fact for me doesn’t need to be spun around or filtered through any theology or ideology to understand it – it stands on its own; has its own merit.  Life is complicated enough, isn’t it?  Why make difficult that which is simple and pure by creating and assigning undue significance to a fictional character of all things, a story, just to give it a supposed deeper meaning.   

The thing about Cool Hand Luke that makes it genius is that Luke is simply cool. 

End of list.