Obedience In Cool Hand Jukeus

Cool Hand Luke: the act of conforming outside of society to create a persona of an outlaw. Starring academy award winning Paul Newman, Cool Hand Luke starts off by setting the tone for the entire movie. Luke Jackson, was arrested for destroying municipal property while under the influence of alcohol. This lead him to be sentenced two years in a road prison, in a chain gang. Many argue that his sentence was worse then his minor offence. Luke is a character you would describe as a non-conformist, anti-hero, who always preferred to be left alone and persistently resisted authority and regulations, you might even call him a rebellion. Luke is a man who refuses to conform to life in a rural prison, that being said, Luke quickly gains respect and …show more content…
To be obedient to authority means to “take directive orders from an authority figure, obedience is practiced to avoid punishment or other unpleasant outcomes due to ignorance of the order”. Usually obedience is done out of fear or respect. Obedience to authority was shown when Luke was made to dig the hole and fill it back up again. When he hadn’t done it fast enough the captain would hit him continuously. Luke begged and pleaded for them to stop abusing him and that he would do whatever they told him and that he will never disobey them ever again. When Luke returned to his bunk house and confessed to them that he has got his mind right, the men began to abandon and turn away from him, calling him a phony. Luke then began to cry out at their betrayal “Where are ya? Where are ya now?”. This was one of Luke’s only sign of obedience, when he was in pain from the abuse and needed a way out. Luke’s fellow inmates most definitely obeyed authority more than Luke ever did. The inmates never attempted to escape, the inmates always did what they were told to do, they learned from watching Luke get in trouble. Consider the Milgram experiment in relation to Cool Hand Luke and the inmates. The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology experiments where you would measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure. The authority figure would instruct them to perform acts that they didn’t want to do due to their conscience. The subjects would read questions to people they thought were the test subjects but were actually actors, and if the actors answered wrong, the test subjects would apply an electrical shock on the actors, or so they thought. This experiment is measuring what extent a person would go to cause pain to another person, assuming they were ordered to do so by someone they thought was an authority figure. In Cool Hand Luke, the inmates were ordered