Cool Hand Luke

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

That quote was ranked as #11 on the American Film Institute’s list of the most famous movie quotes of the first 100 years of filmmaking. (This is three spots behind “May the Force be with you” and two spots ahead of “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”.)

It comes from the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke and is spoken to Paul Newman by the warden of the prison in which he is incarcerated. Later in the film, Newman himself mocks the line back to his warden.

As Barb and I watched this movie last week it soon became clear that though that line was exchanged between two characters in the film, the real object of the line is God.

Newman’s ‘Luke’ is a man imprisoned for two years for a drunken act of vandalism. His imprisonment however is a symbol of the senseless and capricious life he has been forced to live under the oversight of a supposedly benevolent deity. Luke has been dealt a whole lot of nothing, and with that hand, he tries to win. But he can’t. So he battles through life with increasing bitterness.

Toward the end of the film, Luke enters a church and shouts to God for some explanation, some intervention, some communication. But the heavens are silent; they fail to communicate. There is no one to respond, and so he turns to face his fate utterly alone.

The movie raises hard questions. Good films do. If there is a God, why does life seem so senseless? This movie does not hesitate to give an answer: life is senseless because there is no God. Even the cross is senseless in a senseless world, and it does not escape being mocked in this film.

But the problem, of course, is not a failure to communicate. It is a failure to listen. The answer to Luke’s question is not easy, but it is there. God speaks; we are too stubborn to listen.

Ironically, it was the next morning that I read the following in John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Calvin, one clearly acquainted with suffering, would counsel Cool Hand Luke to cool it.

“…When dense clouds darken the sky, and a violent tempest arises, because a gloomy mist is cast over our eyes, thunder strikes our ears and all our senses are benumbed with fright, everything seems to us to be confused and mixed up; but all the while a constant quiet and serenity ever remain in heaven. So must we infer that, while the disturbances in the world deprive us of judgment, God out of the pure light of his justice and wisdom tempers and directs these very movements in the best-conceived order to a right end. And surely on this point it is sheer folly that many dare with greater license to call God’s works to account, and to examine his secret plans, and to pass as rash a sentence on matters unknown as they would on the deeds of mortal men. For what is more absurd than to use this moderation toward our equals, that we prefer to suspend judgment rather than be charged with rashness; yet haughtily revile the hidden judgments of God, which we ought to hold in reverence?” (I.17.1)