The classic American movie, Cool Hand Luke, highlighted the acting skills of both Paul Newman and George Kennedy, who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as “Dragline.”  It also gave us a handful of memorable scenes, from Harry Dean Stanton’s “Tramp” singing “Just A Closer Walk with Thee,” to several meme-ready quotes, particularly by fan favorite Strother Martin’s “Captain.”  Martin owns the 11th position on the American Film Institute’s “AFI’s 100 Years 100 Movie Quotes” (2005) ranking for his “failure to communicate” line.  In another scene, Martin’s “You gonna get your mind right,” delivered to Newman’s Luke as he is returned to the chain gang barracks after an escape attempt, is a great example of the battle between the individual and the state waged between Luke and his captors.  Beyond its entertainment and emotional impact, what makes it an important film to understand what it is to be culturally American? The vision of the founders in the construction of the U.S. Constitution, where the assumption of man’s natural rights anticipated these tensions, is central to the themes of Cool Hand Luke.  What can we find in the movie that can teach us lessons that relate to our 21st century experience as individuals endowed with natural rights always in tension with (and sometimes in conflict against) the state?

The deeper meanings of the film are made possible by Paul Newman’s portrayal of Lucas Jackson, the American archetypal anti-hero: the non-conformist living his life by a set of inner principles that cause him to struggle with the often arbitrary and erratic nature of society’s boundaries. Luke is a free spirit, a contradiction in study- in the early scenes, the audience learns that he is a decorated veteran of World War II, including Silver and Bronze Stars for bravery, with several Purple Hearts.  As he meets Martin’s “Captain,” when asked why he cut the heads off parking meters in a drunken stupor, he stated that he was just “settling old scores.” Tellingly, there is no court-room scene depicting the justice system’s balanced scales at work, just an arrest and a hot and dusty ride in the back of a prison van to his new home in the backwoods of Florida.  His 2-year sentence at hard labor feeds the state convict labor system for a crime of vandalism that, had he burned down a police precinct in Minneapolis in 2020, likely would not have warranted a written citation (assuming he was exercising his right of protest for an approved “social justice” cause instead of a personal justice reckoning). 

Considering his prison sentence in the context of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted), Luke represents a new test to the general order of the work camp.  The film silently witnesses the segregated nature of the southern prison system of the 1950s, with the male inmate population excluding any members of the BIPOC community, at least by the shallow standard of skin color.  The intake process introduces Luke and his fellow “new meat” to the dual control system, where they learn that the crude power of the state, already excessive in its application, had one mechanism left to control the prisoner’s compliance.  Any infraction against Captain’s rules would result in a brutal form of isolation:  Back-sass a guard, “spend a night in the box.”  Play “grabass” or fight, “spend a night in the box.”  Misplace your issued spoon, “spend a night in the box.”  For Luke and the other men (which included Stanton’s “Tramp” and Ralph Waite as “Alibi”), Captain’s rules were simple, as explained by Carr, a prisoner-trustee who controlled the barracks building night shift as the “Floor-walker.” It becomes clear that the small group of guards depend upon the networks of “rules” among the men to control the prisoners.

Dragline, the barracks Alpha male, marks out Luke as an early hard case, a threat to the order of the gang. Dragline exercises the other form of control the state depends upon - “We got rules here.”  As Alibi gets the first “night in the box” for the new prisoners, Dragline explains that “he ain’t in the box because of the joke played on him.  He back-sassed a free man.  They got their rules.  We ain’t got nothin’ to do with that. Would probably have happened to him sooner or later anyway, a complainer like him.  He gotta learn the rules same as everybody else.”  Luke’s response, a bold challenge to Dragline, sets them on a collision path which will generate an early defining scene between them as they face off in the yard to establish their pecking order.  “Yeah, them poor old bosses need all the help they can get.”  Luke understood that Captain and the small pool of guards, the only representatives of the punishing power of the state, relied on the threat of isolation and rejection by the inmates as the most immediate threat he faced in finding his place for the next two years on the chain gang.

Although Luke exemplifies the loner, his human need for connection, even in the involuntary associations forced upon him as a prisoner, are in some ways similar to his earlier experience as a soldier, and crucial to his identity.  His defiant approach wins the admiration of Dragline and his fellow prisoners, but by pushing the limits of the rules and leading the men in clear challenges to authority and order, his threat to the state was recognized by the guards, Captain, and ominously, the voiceless representative of the ultimate coercive power, Death, the “Road Boss,” or the “Man With No Eyes,” who even Dragline fears in the same manner as he fears a terrible God.   Luke personifies the rugged individual American, but the law, exercised by tyrannical officials and reinforced by networks of compliant individuals bent by the power of the state into a daily game of Faustian deals, must win. 

The right of free and peaceable assembly, the significant but often misunderstood natural right of humans to associate in communities or networks protected, or more correctly affirmed, in the Constitution’s First Amendment (Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances) may not easily be applied to the incarcerated.  However, even in the barracks and work environment which narrowed the private space of each prisoner, the role of the associations each man found in their daily lives was a “natural” right, provided they adapted to the communal “rules” or behaviors which kept the guards and Captain outside the fence where the prisoners made their own networks to protect themselves from the state, and sometimes even from each other.  

As we have experienced over the course of the last 20 months or so during this declared pandemic, heavy-handed challenges to the natural human right to speech and association are not reserved for the criminally inclined.  Justified under the guise of a protective health regime in response to a novel Coronavirus unleashed from beyond the shores of America, we have all been placed into a proverbial work camp barracks.   Instead of the “night in the box” or an extra set of leg irons for escape attempts, our technocratic “road bosses” determine when, where, and how we can work to support our families, worship our gods, and commune with our families and friends. Like the glare and silent “no” one of the guards gives Luke when he asks to move around the truck bed in his one and only prison visit with his dying mother, where he might reach in and touch her hand one last time, the 21st century state, under the emergency powers energized by governors and state health departments, isolated thousands of Americans from loved ones who died cut off from their families, even while in the care of medical professionals.  For Luke, the cruelty of the moment, amplified later by the final letter received confirming her death, became too much for the strongest man in the camp. His natural need to live in a “just” world, unavailable inside the camp, drives him into a self-destructive battle with Captain, and ultimately, “The man with no eyes.” 

Similar in theory to the prison work camp, the “rules” of human associative behavior have been altered across America by federal and state officials, wielding administrative powers often not clearly delegated through legislative text, but assumed in practice as constitutionally sound.  Many of these edicts, proclaimed in response to both real and erroneous information on the contagion, its lethality, and serving the competing interests of corporations, interest groups, and political parties, are clearly the result of bureaucratic ineptitude and heartless application.  That cruel combination of institutional stupidity and inhumanity is exemplified by Captain’s response to the news of the death of Luke’s mother.  While Luke’s fellow inmates silently move to give him space in the barracks out of respect for his grief (the Plastic Jesus scene), he is called out of formation by Captain and segregated from his only support group, his fellow prisoners, into an extended solitary confinement “in the box.”  The explanation for the “preventive” punishment is that, when a man loses his mother, he gets “rabbit in his blood,” likely to attempt an escape to get to the funeral.  Up until that point, Luke had found a way to fit into the chain gang, exercising his unique personality inside the structure, even as he pushed the boundaries of “the rules.”  The time “in the box” did not break him, but it activated his deep need for freedom from injustice and set his mind to escape at all costs, unwilling to submit to the state’s cruel and unusual punishment.  As an American, Luke’s reliance upon the natural rights affirmed in the Bill of Rights informed his basic understanding of his human dignity, even as a convicted prisoner. 

Although Cool Hand Luke deals with a violation of state law, it is important to note that, in the correct interpretation, the amendments constituting the Bill of Rights are understood as statements of the individual natural rights which both the federal and state governments must hold sacred.  Read in the context of the time, the First through Eighth Amendments are clearly individual in their meaning, not conditional upon the whims of future generations who wish to interpret these rights in varied contexts.  The Bill of Rights declares these rights are both natural and eternal.  The final two amendments, the Ninth and Tenth, further distance the federal government from individuals by clarifying that any rights not specifically mentioned in the first 8 amendments are reserved to the individual and their state government.  Understanding the need for societal order, where individuals who violate codified law and threaten the life, liberty, or property of others are subjected to just prosecution and punishment, the authors of the constitution were clear in their reservations about granting a federal government ANY power over the lives of U.S. citizens.  Theoretically, these protections still insulate the individual from the awesome power of the federal government, yet the expanded bureaucratic state, its own special interest in the political landscape of America, hacks and hews against the trunk of the tree of liberty. 

Additionally, contrary to some interpretations, these limits on federal power were made in the understanding that state governments were also precluded from violating these principles of individual natural rights.  In the event a state government, using its own coercive power, violated the assumed primacy of these rights, the first remedy was available at the state level of democratic control.  State courts populated by learned scholars might intercede to nullify the specific injustice, or the ballot would restore the balance of an unjust application of law, well before the need for federal court or legislative action.  Unfortunately for Luke and the rest of America, these “checks and balances” are time-consuming, expensive, and ultimately often past the point of effective relief in the “run out the clock” strategies of elected officials.  By the time a state or federal court deigns to rule in recognition of the constitutional primacy of American law, it equates to treating the symptom long after the disease has killed the patient.

Like Cool Hand Luke, Americans need to ignore the threat of the “night in the box,” quit fearing the “Man With No Eyes,” and get on to living their free lives, conscience of protecting those at risk, yet preserving their natural rights to speak and associate. While this is daunting in the face of the bureaucratic maze of acronyms determined to justify their emergency powers in the futile hope of reducing life’s risks, regardless of the full transaction costs of shutdowns and lockdowns and further exacerbated by the ineffective game of “Fauci Says” that has crushed the economic and associative lives of Americans, it can be accomplished.   

If you want to check out my Cool Hand Luke inspired playlist, open up Spotify and search for The Americanologist, where you can hear some of Lalo Schifrin’s original score for the movie, Jamey Johnson’s cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Four Walls of Raiford, as well as some Johnny & Waylon, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Johnny Paycheck, Charlie Crockett, Jason Boland and the Stragglers, and Johnny Lee Moore.  Give it a listen and a like if you do!