Social Psychological Themes In The Film 'Cool Hand Luke'

Cool Hand Luke directed by the reputable Stuart Rosenberg and nominated for four Oscars is a tragic tale of an ordinary individual rising up the courage to oppose the establishment, thus becoming a hero. Cool Hand Luke weaves a rich tapestry of the prison life on both sides of the establishment and the injustices of the system. In short Cool Hand Luke is a movie that focuses on the struggles of a single courageous man and his quest for freedom.

     The heros flee to the rebel base to warn them and a last ditch attempt

For over centuries, the only form of punishment and discouragement for humans is through the prison system. Because of this, these humans or inmates, are sentenced to spend a significant part of their life in a confined, small room. With that being said, the prison life can leave a remarkable toll on the inmates life in many different categories. The first and arguably most important comes in the form of mental health. Living in prison with have a great impact on the psychological part of your life. For example, The prison life is a very much different way of life than what us “normal” humans are accustomed to living in our society. Once that inmate takes their first step inside their new society, their whole mindset on how to live and communicate changes. The inmate’s psychological beliefs about what is right and wrong are in questioned as well as everything else they learned in the outside world. In a way, prison is a never ending mind game you are playing against yourself with no chance of wining. Other than the mental aspect of prison, family plays a very important role in an inmate’s sentence. Family can be the “make it or break it” deal for a lot of inmates. It is often said that “when a person gets sentenced to prison, the whole family serves the sentence.” Well, for many inmates that is the exact case. While that prisoner serves their time behind bars, their family is on the outside waiting in anticipation for their loved ones to be released. In a way, the families

Prisons hide prisoners from society. “If an inmate population is shut in, the free community is shut out, and the vision of men held in custody is, in part, prevented from arising to prick the conscience of those who abide by the social rules” (Sykes, 1958, 8). The prison is an instrument of the state. However, the prison reacts and acts based on other groups in the free community. Some believe imprisonment

for being associated with the rebels. It seems that during this point the prisoners start to react for

The Shawshank Redemption movie is about a man named Andy Dufresne who was falsely accused of murder and was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of his wife and her lover. Being in jail, Andy faced many problems of being abused, but he also gained a strong friendship with a man named Red. Many of the things that the prisoners had to face showed a sociological perspective on how life was in jail and how it affected the prisoners. In Shawshank prison, the functionalism theory, the conflict perspective, and the control theory shows the life and adjustments a prisoner has to make in order to survive going into a new world.

Prisoners like Brooks were trained to like routine for so long, that they became used to the way they were treated. Andy became subject to extortion when the administrator used him to do their tax returns ; “By April of 1951, Andy was doing the tax returns for half the screws at Shawshank , and by 1952, he was doing almost all of them” (51) This quotation shows that lack of empathy , and morals used by the administration at Shawshank. Shawshank as a prison was highly corrupt and the prisoners suffered from mental abuse by use of extortion and punishment.

In one of these chapters, Bayard Rustin detailed the twenty-two days he experienced on a chain-gang, where he was sentence to by the courts in result of one of his various arrests during the civil rights era. Immediately, he illustrated in great detail the abominable conditions of the camp. The building being festered with roaches in every room and, in the living quarter, approximately a hundred men were closely stacked together in double-decker beds like sardines. The odor, Rustin had gone on further to describe, was absolutely rancid and he went on to later explain that it was largely due to the fact that "each week [the inmates] were only given one suit of underclothing, one pair of socks, a shirt, and a pair of socks. Even though [they] worked in the mud and rain, this was

A man by the name of Andy Dufresne was convicted of murdering his wife and her lover and was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in Shawshank prison. He was an obvious black sheep among the prisoners, but as time went on he grew relationships with the crooks and realized the injustice in the justice system. In the creation of friendship between Red and Andy, hope was spread throughout the prison. While many themes are present in the film The Shawshank Redemption, hope, friendship, and injustice are also relevant in the world today.

The story starts out with Hitch, Law, and Rascal working under Charlie Waide on a cattle drive through Texas. The first conflict in the novel arises when ownership of a cow is in question between Rascal and a fellow cowboy. This small infraction ultimately sets the precedent of the story as the ownership of cattle becomes a problem that builds up to the main conflict. As the story progresses forward, Law is caught violating the cowboys’ set of unwritten laws as he tries to cheat other cattle owners out of cattle, an offense he would repeatedly make throughout the novel that leads to his death and would add fuel to the main conflict over cattle ownership.

After reading the book I have gained a new understanding of what inmates think about in prison. Working in an institution, I have a certain cynical attitude at times with inmates and their requests.

As the many families camp together, proximity combined with necessity breaks down barriers of relation, and miniature societies form with there own unwritten rules and expectations. It is in one of these "Hoovervilles" that the Joads have a wicked confrontation with a vigilant police officer. A woman is shot, Tom and Floyd Knowles nearly become fugitives, and Jim Casey is arrested and thus removed from both the family and society. This sacrificing of self for the good of the group strengthens the bonds between the migrants in the Hooverville, and Casey's experience with fellow inmates in prison gives him an important realization about the power of organized protest. Incidentally, these terrible losses at the Hooverville drive the Joads in fear to what will turn out to be a far better place, and the knowledge that there are others in the same situation who will help lends unifying strength to the family and other migrants.

In conclusion, William Faulkner’s stories deal with a plethora of human problems, while at the same time they focus on social conflicts and misunderstanding. In, “That Evening Sun” this can all be clearly seen, as he focuses on one of the most urgent problems of that

Survival is the key struggle in The Shawshank Redemption. This film takes place in the corrupt Shawshank State Penitentiary where mental and physical abuses inflicted upon prisoners are the hard realities of the system. For the prisoners of Shawshank, life is often bleak and violent. However, the will to survive is what keeps the characters motivated to retain their humanity and challenge the institutionalization of Shawshank. In particular, the film’s main protagonists, Andy Dufresne and Ellis “Red” Redding, exemplify the struggle for survival in the face of a corrupt, frightening, and oppressive prison system. In order to survive the harsh realities of the world, people adapt with personal traits like courage and resourcefulness in addition to forming community with other people.

writes towards the middle of his essay about seeing the prison being brought up to the hanging site and