Our philosophy club is having movie nights and one of them will be Cool Hand Luke:
“You keep coming back with nothing.”
“Yeah, sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.”
Luke is in prison for getting drunk and destroying municipal property (cutting the heads off parking meters). He was in the Korean War and seemed to distinguish himself in combat but then lost his rank and exited a private.
Luke is an attractive figure because compared to his peers he is wrestling with the problem of meaning. Whereas others are content to keep the rules, or find a comfortable setting for themselves, Luke wonders what the larger purpose is. He says that there is only a lot of guys laying down a lot of rules and regulation. What is the purpose?
Society and popular religion have not provided answers for Luke. Or, the answers are arbitrary. Either a kind of skepticism saying that we can’t know so we should adopt pragmatism (what works to get through life comfortably) or religious fideism telling us to believe without knowledge. He asks for evidence that God exists. He seems to think he has none:
We see this when Luke’s mother visits him. In the background Harry Dean Stanton is singing the hymn “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.” In this clip the dialogue with his mother is cut but we get the whole song. His mother is dying and this is their last interaction. She doesn’t have any answers for him but there is a kind of hopelessness and acceptance that it all came to nothing. The religious answers are a kind of rule following in this life with the promise of blessings after death. Christ is said to comfort us in our trials but there are no answers about why there are trials and suffering in the first place. What is the purpose?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckulh3cSPuU
After Luke learns that his mother has died he sings “Plastic Jesus.” This exposes the emptiness of popular religion and its devotion to objects that promise a blessed afterlife. This form of religion tells us that if we have devotion to the right kind of idol we don’t need to worry about suffering and we will not be punished in hell. There is no knowledge or meaning given in this religion. It is arbitrary and cannot explain itself in contrast to the many alternatives found throughout the world. Is there any meaning to it all?
Luke is put in the box after his mother dies because the guards reason that he might try to escape to go to her funeral. After her funeral is over Luke is let out. He then escapes. After he is caught the captain tells him that if he obeys things will go well with him but if he disobeys he will suffer. This is the arbitrariness of human rules that Luke has encountered and for which he wants some higher purpose. As we watch them hammer in the nails to his shackles we are reminded of the nails hammered into Christ and we begin to wonder if Luke is a kind of Messianic figure. Is this all just a matter of miscommunication?
Throughout, suffering is what serves to get Luke to stop and think. Others harden themselves to suffering or accept it as part of life. Luke does not. This is true of the suffering he saw at war. And it is true of the suffering he encounters throughout life. The captain tells him that he will not get used to the sound made by the chains. It is a reminder of his own failure to make sense of suffering.
As Luke attempts his final escape he ends up in an empty church. He goes inside and asks if anyone is home. Silence. It is at this point that we see Luke is not a hero or a Messianic figure. He is more than an anti-hero, he is an anti-Messiah. The silence of the church and its failure to give answers past fideism has motivated Luke to find meaning. In this he is more authentic and human than his peers. But now he charges God with silence and offers excuses for his own failure to know. Luke claims to have been seeking and wanting to know. He blames God and says “you made me who I am.”
Luke is an anti-Messiah figure in that he does not recognize the reality of his own sin and need for redemption through atonement. It is true that society and religion have not provided meaning. However, Luke has had access to clear general revelation this entire time. It is his rationality that has not allowed him to settle for less than meaning and it is his rationality that can see what is clear about God and the good. His failure to see what is clear to reason is the root sin of not seeking, not understanding, and not doing what is right. He does not repent of this or acknowledge it as sin while expecting others to see that their arbitrary rules are meaningless.
He performs a mock confession on his knees but doesn’t get the answer he wants. What kind of answer does he want? What is more clear than general revelation? Does he want an audible voice from the rafters of the church? Or a voice in his head? Even such as these would be no more than the appeals to authority he is questioning. What he needs to be able to do is use reason to make inferences about God and human meaning. This will solve skepticism and avoid fideism with its appeals to authority.
When the police and guards arrive Luke laughs and says “this is your answer?” But there is a senses in which Luke has had similar answers throughout. He has no one to blame but himself. Although he begins as an attractive figure because of his search for meaning he loses this as he devolves into his own irrationality and denial of what is clear.