I can’t say exactly how it came up, but it had to do with works of art that express some worldview I hold dear, and the only answer I have for that is the 1967 prison drama, Cool Hand Luke.

It was on TV all of the time in my teenage and college years. And not just on TV on Tuesday afternoons when I had nothing to do, it was always on at 3 or 4am, when I’d be fresh off of a gig, unable to sleep yet, and in a quiet house all by myself.

The movie, starring the inimitable Paul Newman, is about games and rules and prisons, literally and metaphorically.

Without ever beating you over the head with it, we watch the game of military service become the game of public protest via disobedience. We watch the game of prison sentence serving and chain gang service. The games of escape. The games of capture. The games of punishment and penalty and the threat of isolation, forcing our main character to consider who he is in his own mind, and those around him to consider what he represents in theirs.

If you play the games by the rules others have set out for you, you can’t be surprised if you’re frustrated. That’s what watching it a hundred times from various starting points imprinted on me.

All these themes settled in. I had an interpretation in my mind for years. Then, during the pandemic, I ended up watching it a bunch more times, in normal waking hours, way before 3am, and start to finish. I cried just about every time. It hit harder at 40 than 18.

Life is a series of prisons, and you don’t physically escape them, so much as you mentally survive playing in and around them.

You have to see them as interconnected. You have to understand they’re as much a construct in your head as they are around you.

Without spoiling anything, there’s a scene at the end of the movie where a group of prisoners are gathered around each other and telling the story of Cool Hand Luke. The myth that lives on. Which is what stories can do.

A great story can keep you out of prison, sure, but more than anything it can help you make sense of the prisons we are always navigating across our lifetimes.

I never imitated it, but as an almost-always-smiler, it was always a thing I laughed to myself about across all of those years. The way he kept smiling. Especially in the one at the end of the movie before it cuts out.

If you’ve never seen it, that’s my pitch.

Oh, and - keep smiling.