Cool Hand Luke, released in 1967, is a very cool film, one you can appreciate well enough alone as the tragic rendering of valour’s inevitable encounter with fate. But in my opinion it profits being seen as something of a response to the earlier classic, Rebel without a Cause (1955), a response that carries on the torch of the earlier film’s philosophical flame of youth in rebellion, but somehow makes it burn brighter with an anti-establishment fervour that is uniquely the latter decade’s own.

I’ll sketch a brief comparison, then get to Cool Hand Luke itself, then come back to finish my point.

Cool Hand Luke begins memorably with Lucas ‘Luke’ Jackson (Paul Newman) being arrested for drunkenly committing the seemingly meaningless crime of severing the tops of parking meters. The parking meter can symbolise nothing but the order of the establishment, but the self-aware irony of Luke’s crime isn’t that he’s cutting off the head of the establishment snake; it’s just the opposite: a trivial, meaningless crime that only ensures he is more strictly controlled by the establishment against which he nominally rebels. He’s sent to prison.

Rebel without a Cause also begins with its blue-eyed protagonist James ‘Jim’ Stark being arrested drunk, and his offence, too, a meaningless act of rebellion: public intoxication. In Jim’s case, the philosophy is writ in large: a youth restless with a sense of rebellion against something he can’t name the cause of  (perhaps not quite yet the kind of later establishment that sent troops to Vietnam, but at the very least the controlling power of a cultural consevativism).

The ensuing plots of both films are of course very different, but both follow a Byronic hero of a protagonist as he rebels against what he doesn’t quite know is what. Each displays Byronic heroism in a surly cynicism that is somehow balanced with redemptive virtue, some stoic valour in carrying out this battle.

Lord Byron devoted himself to a battle that was not at all causeless but seemingly not a cause his own: the oddity of a British poet committing his wealth and health to the Greek War of Independence, dying for that cause, not from a gunshot but a fever contracted during the siege of Missolonghi.

In keeping with the Byronic spirit, both films end in the necessary fate of death (in Cool Hand Luke it is Luke himself, while in Rebel without a Cause Jim dies a proxy death in the shooting of his aptly named friend Plato).

A note to make, before moving on to the film in its main, is that Jim and Luke were by no means the lone rebels of this causeless cause. The anti-establishment anti-hero was often a lone soldier in each their own film, but there was a battalion of such soldiers mounting their own homefront trenches in the wake of World War Two, two of the most distinguished of which were played by Marlon Brando—as Stanley in  ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1951) and as Johnny in ‘The Wild One’ (1953).

Point of the side-note being: Jim and Luke are no pair of rebels, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They’re part of broader rebellion.

Since I’ve named Stanley, Johnny, Butch, and Sundance, I will try to make my was back to Cool Hand Luke’s distinction by way of a consideration of the difference between Jim and Luke’s naming. First, neither settles with the conservativism of their full Christian names: James and Luke. Each are disciples of course and therefore, nominally, ought to be true acolytes of the Christian cause. But so too were the disciples, in their own time, leaders of a rebellion. I could go on with the biblical, but I’ve already overstepped the mark.

The disinction of names more important to my view of Cool Hand Luke, is the later film’s distinction from its philosophical forebear in evolving from stark to cool. Stark still literally means strong (it’s a word of Germanic origin and stark in modern German still literally means strong) and also denotes hues of sharp or severe. So James ‘Jim’ Stark seemes aptly named for his own rebellion.

But what about Luke? Following his arrest and conviction, Luke arrives at prison known simply as Luke, but the pivotal scene in the film is when Luke becomes known as Cool Hand Luke.

I’ll get back to that scene (and then finally get back to the comparison with the name Jim Stark), but first I ought to summarise the lead-up.

Luke arrives in prison as a nobody and is told to stay in his place, first by the bible-wielding camp warden, and second by Clarence ‘Dragline’ Sidell. So there’s the established order manifest in the political authority of imprisonment itself, and then under that there’s another hierarchical political order established amongst the prisoners themselves.

Luke comes to rebel against both. He is repeatedly punished for breaking prison rules with the customary punishment of ‘a night in the box’, a cramped box that disallows any bodily comfort. He rebels against the prisoners’ politics, resulting in a boxing match between he and the head of the prisoner hierarchy, Dragline. This boxing match is where he first earns his fellows’ respect: the much larger Dragline repeatedly knocks him to the ground but Luke, bloodied and barely conscious, refuses to stay down. There’s no good cause in continuing to get back up—he’s exhorted just to stay down—and yet he fights his causeless rebellion and keeps getting up.

When the respect he’s earned is given a name, it’s during a poker game, where he bluffs and bluffs until Dragline assures his opponent he ought to bail out, because surely Luke must have a good hand. He’s got nothing, though. He wins the pot, noting casually that sometimes ‘nothing is a real cool hand’. And so Dragline, picking up on that statement, takes Luke’s Christian name and christens him anew as ‘Cool Hand Luke’.

My point begins with the recognition that the ‘nothing’ that is Luke’s poker hand is a reincarnation of the nothing that is Jim Stark’s causeless cause. But while Jim’s rebellion in 1955 was stark, strong, Luke’s rebellion in 1967 is cool.

Side note: Cool Hand Luke is notably set in the 50s, so Luke’s cool rebellion is somehow anachronistic. But it’s fighting the same fight Jim Stark fought, because the establishment is always conserved.

Back to stark and cool, though, you might say there’s something in Luke’s name that reflects a more hip rebellion, the kind of hippie anti-war movement that rallied against America’s contemporaneous colonial agenda (in 1965, two years before the release of the film, 200,000 US troops were dispatched to Vietnam).

Set in the 50s, the Vietnam War isn’t really going on as Luke sits in prison, but at the time of the film’s release, plenty of conscientous objectors were. One is reminded of those words of Thoreau: In an unjust society the only place for a just man is in prison.

Is Luke a just man? Is justice a cause a rebel might need? If so, what is justice?

It’s not just a vapid timeless rhetoricism. The question was the talk of the time: John Rawls’ philosophical leviathan, A Theory of Justice, gave an answer right at the time when the question was most asked. The libertarians shot him down. And Luke’s somewhere in the middle, as was Middle America.

Back to stark and cool. So there’s something about the rebellion now evolving into being cool, but there’s also something of a devolvement, a dimunition from a rebellion that once was stark to something maybe fake because fashionable.

But Luke’s rebellion is an evolution, too, and somehow a starker one, because he’s committed to defeating the established order of the prisoners’ politics, too.

This is why Cool Hand Luke is a response to Rebel Without a Cause, rather than a tired re-run.

Remember, the prison is a work camp, and each day the men form a chain gang. It’s never explained in the film, but it’s easy to see how Dragline gets his name: until cool Luke arrives, Dragline has been dutifully dragging the line tied to the load the chain gang is supposed to bear. He’s the tough guy amongst the prisoners, but he is in fact a model prisoner, submitting to the authority of the prison system in every way.

Luke rebels against the Dragline’s hierarchy, as already stated, by fighting his causeless cause in refusing to lay down in his boxing match, before winning with his ‘nothing’ hand.

But his true rebellion against the established order of prison politics is by dismantling its hierarchy. He does this in the most peculiar way by encouraging the chain gang to work harder. He leads a paradoxical rebellion in which the punishment of labour is inverted into a labour of honour.

And the rebellion succeeds: the chain gang works so hard and so fast, there’s no more work to do and they lay about in the sun.

So, Luke’s rebellion consists in dismantling the prisoners’ hierarchy, compelling them to work equally to a common victory; and, so doing, strikes a paradoxical blow to the established order of their imprisonment because, with no more work to do, they achieve a victory in working fewer hours than they are told to.

The question remains, though, whether this is a victory at all, and in what name is it won? They still do the same amount of work they’ve been told to do, and they’re still locked up in prison. Luke plays a cool hand in making this rebellion, and he wins, but his hand is really ‘nothing’.

The film wouldn’t be what it is, nor would it have ever been made, if the story ended with empty victory. I won’t give out all the details of the plot, but this quasi-rebellion carried out in the abstraction that is the symbolism contained in the real and figural confines of prison does not remain severed from the real world, from real rebellion, from fate.

The reality of the outside world penetrates the unreality of the prison’s symbolic architecture when Luke is visited by his dying mother. There’s true pathos in this scene. Because Luke is a true Byronic hero—though he’s full of cynicism, he is also capable of true and great affection.

Luke learns later of his mother’s death, and what ensues is, for me, the most moving scene of the film: It’s nighttime, it’s raining outside, and all the prisoners watch from afar as Luke, sitting alone on his bunk, mournfully playing the banjo, singing an abridged version of the folk song ‘Plastic Jesus’ with true solemnity.

The concept of a ‘plastic Jesus’ is obviously a reiteration of the theme of a causeless rebellion, the iteration here being an artificial (plastic) creed. But it’s so much more than that.

The recurring motif in each stanza of the song is that, so long as the singer (the song was composed in 1957 by Ed Rush and George Cromarty) has a plastic Jesus affixed to the dashboard of his car, he’ll remain safe and, if he dies, he’ll be sure not to go to hell.

So there’s the obvious irony that staying alive and staying out of hell aren’t authentic prospects because it’s an inauthentic plastic version of Jesus that is being relied upon. But more than being a further figural iteration of the idea of an empty creed or causeless cause, the song is also explicitly anti-establishment. Though Luke omits these words in his abridgment, the fully lyrics include the stanza:

And if I weave around at night

Policeman think I’m very tight

They never find my bottle

Though they ask

Cos plastic Jesus shelters me

For his head comes off you see

He’s hollow and I use him as a flask

Not so surly and cynical, but rather comedic, it’s nonetheless the return of the drunk, causeless rebel, another Luke, another Jim Stark. Not only is the drunk rebel breaking the law, relying on an empty (not only is Jesus made of plastic, he’s also ‘hollow’) creed to save him from death, it is the creed itself that ensures his destruction (Jesus is the flask of alcohol that will most likely make him swerve from the road and die).

In the full version of the song, the dashboard ‘plastic Jesus’ evolves into ‘magnetic Mary’ before eventually becoming the most ironic ‘ceramic Satan’.

The plastic Jesus evolves, too, in Luke’s version to a dashboard Madonna or Virgin Mary and he sings:

Get yourself a sweet Madonna

Dressed in rhinestone

Sittin on a pedestal of abalone shells,

Going ninety aint scary

Cos I got the Virgin Mary

Assuring me that I won’t go to hell.

Tears well in his eyes, and he pauses for some few long seconds. All is silent. And then he repeats this final stanza, a tear falling from his eye. But, most significantly, the tempo of his performance quickens, he strums harder, he sings louder…

It is as though he has been driving, and his now driving faster, at ninety miles per hour, drunk, assuring someone—himself—that he won’t go to hell because he’s got this plastic thing on his dashboard that is full of the liquor that will, ironically, be the very thing to kill him.

To return a little, then, Luke’s dying mother visiting prison is significant, reminding the audience and Luke alike that these victories he’s won in his symbolic prison world are no real rebellion: there is a real world out there, a dominant, material establishment, and even above that the absolute authority of death.

And so this cause of the causeless rebel and the nothing hand of Luke’s rebellion—they’re elevated to an existential rebellion, a fight to find some cause worth fighting for, worth dying for, knowing that death awaits.

The visit of Luke’s mother is not just the prognosis of her near death but so too the premonition of Luke’s own death.

The true Byronic hero, spurred by true affection, now aims for true rebellion. He makes a true escape from prison.

He is, by now, the hero amongst all of the prisoners, and they are ecstatic with his achievment because, now united, his escape is somehow, too, their own.  

He is caught, however. After not so long.

He is returned to the men, dismayed.

He stands on a hill and all is silent, but for a metallic chink as the iron pins are driven into his leg irons. This scene is all captured from a low angle and viewing Luke on this hill as the pins are driven home, it is impossible not to think of the nails being driven through the flesh of Jesus as he is crucified on the hill of Golgotha. Luke, of course, though, is a plastic Jesus. And he’s no saviour to his disciples, his fellow prisoners, because now he’s back in chains, too.

The clinking takes on more than a biblical significance, though, when Luke has been fully chained and the warden speaks: ‘You gonna get used to wearin them chains after a while Luke, but you’ll never stop listenin to them clinkin. Cos they gonna remind you of what I been sayin, for your own good’. Luke, the quick-witted rebel replies with irony: ‘I wish you’d stop bein so good to me captain’.

The captain erupts, beating Luke to the ground, before regathering himself and pronouncing a sentence now entered into cinema lore:

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

The obvious implication is that Luke is failing to listen to the establishment’s commands. This is ironic, given that he has just been assured that he’ll never be able to ‘stop listenin to them clinkin’.

As everyone knows, communication works two ways. And given it’s clear that Luke has been listening, and will continue having to listen to that clinking of establishment chain that imprisons him, might the film (mirroring Luke’s ironic) not be some attempt to communicate something back to the establishment?

As Jesus, Luke of course must die for the cause. And he does. He escapes another time. He is shot.

But is it a cause? Given the cause is plastic, hollow, and full of the very liquor he’s going to die from and not for, the response might suggest it is an empty cause. The cause is fated to die, and to die a self-destructive death.

But in all of that causeless cause might not a true paradoxical cause emerge?

I don’t want to elevate Luke to matryrdom, but is this film more than celluloid (plastic), but a story that might move us to fight a cause?

Don’t go taking to the streets. It’s not that simple. Cool Hand Luke is commonly regarded as a film that fights the establishment film, and Luke the rebel with that cause. It’s supposed to be a sign of the times.

But Luke still has to find a cause within himself, an existential cause, something less self-destructive, if he is ever to be the true hero of that other rebellion.

James Dean, whose middle name was Byron, died in a car crash while speeding, the year Rebel without a Cause. Was a plastic Luke sitting on the dashboard of his car?