Cool Hand Luke, as you may know by now, is my favorite film and I think it presents a shape of story neither Vonnegut nor Eilam mentioned, and that is tragedy. Here is my attempt to show the shape of Cool Hand Luke:

It goes from bad, to inspiring, back to bad and then worse. That’s as deep as I’ll get into the plot as to not spoil the movie too much, but their is a plot synopsis here if you’d like to read it and see how accurate my “shape” is.