Cool Hand Oedipus?

“’Cool Hand Luke’ is a Greek tragedy.”

My girl friend at the time didn’t make much of a reaction, other than the usual, he-must-be-out-of-his–head look. But the thought has persisted that one in a very basic sense, “Cool Hand Luke,” one of Paul Newman’s greatest movies is as much a tragedy as anything the Greeks wrote, or at least since Oedy R. got a jolt when he found out where he should really be sending his Mother’s Day cards.

Now, the movie does not have a Greek chorus (unless you want to count the inmates at the prison camp. Nor does it have a legend with roots in the Olympian religion, or perhaps in the more primitive aspects such as Bacchus and Pan. But in its overall development, it is very much a tragedy in the classical sense.

The tragedy is the struggle of the prisoner, Luke, against his fate. As with Oedipus and ever other card-carrying Greek hero, he cannot escape it. Rex killed his dad and married his mom, despite every effort to avoid it. Achilles showed too much heel to survive the Trojan War, while Jason defied every mother’s warning about marrying bad girls.

Luke struggles against the environment in much the same way Jack Nicholson’s character does in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Both eventually succumb to the system they are forced to live in, which is inexorable in defending itself.

And Luke’s efforts are particularly senseless. In his fist fight against George C. Scott’s character, he refuses to stay down—the sign of submission—and receives a more and more devastating pounding from his physically superior opponent. He turns a typical slug fest into something so distasteful that no one derives pleasure from it. In a sense, he wins.

However, his struggle for individuality, for respect, for freedom moves relentlessly to his being serious wounded by a gunshot. And the movie ends with a near certainty he will die as his transport takes its time to take him to treatment. In the modern movie world, this would be an open signal for a sequel.

It is this appeal to individualism that attracts us to Luke and to Nicholson’s character, Randle Patrick McMurphy. The difference, of course, is that McMurphy tries to rally the inmates of the mental hospital to band together while Luke makes no effort to make his cause a general one.