The Laws of God, the Laws of Man
‘‘The Laws of God, The Laws of Man:
Power, Authority, and Influence in Cool Hand Luke’’
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.[1] 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.
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.]
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 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.
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 Lukeboth 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. Housman[22] 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;
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?
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.