Cool Hand Luke the Film Essay

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How should one interpret the final escape attempt? There are definitely more sides to it. First of all, Luke is trying to escape his prison condition and, in conformity with everything that has been shown so far, battle authority and manifest his disobedience against rules and order. However, it is also an attempt to escape his own human condition, also a similar type of prison to the one he is experimenting in his real existence. Caught between a set of societal rules that need to be respected in order to be able to survive in society and his own fight against authority, corroborated with his desire to lead an existence without such boundaries, Luke attempts escapes from his own human condition, which is probably what increases the drama and tragedy of the movie, because we all know that is not possible except through death. This also anticipates the end of the movie and the final scene.

Luke is also isolated from the other human beings. His final phrase is very significant in this sense: "What we've got here is a failure to communicate." There are so many things incorporated in this phrase. First of all, it is a personal statement. Luke has not succeeded throughout the movie to communicate with the authorities and with the decision makers and they are not able to communicate with him either (the phrase had been mentioned before in the movie by the captain). Second, it is also a statement that has reference to the entire society and is somewhat not specifically temporal as well: the humans have failures to communicate with one another, which makes it all the harder for them to get along and to create the appropriate relationships between each other.

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The drama of the movie goes beyond the individual drama of the main character to be extended to a more collective drama of the entire society.

With that in mind, Luke's death does not really solve that problem and, in fact, shows what society does with those that do not fit in: it eventually eliminates them, either physically or simply by marginalizing them. The movie leaves no potential answer for any of these questions and no open window.

At the same time, however, Luke's revolt and his model seems to remain with his fellow prisoners, as we see in the final scenes of the movie, with Luke's smile remaining in the prisoners' memory, which is perhaps an encouraging perspective that there may be some future solutions to the existing lack of communication. With the final image, one may also understand that Luke was exactly the coagulating instrument that was lacking in the prison community and, potentially, even an instrument of communication with the authorities, despite his disobedient character.

The movie remains a manifesto of disobedience and fighting against authority of any type, but, as the essay has planned to prove, it also includes so many additional aspects that start exactly with this type of disobedience and that point towards the human condition and the individual's existence in society, both in terms of his own individuality and his relationship with the other people. Luke is not adapted and not adaptable, but he is able to bring people together, mainly because they idolatrize him and see in him the perfect model of their fight against the centralized authority......

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