​A half century of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

By Blaise Balas

Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is among the most famous stories of the American counterculture. Adapted for the screen by director Milos Forman in 1975, the movie version won five Oscars and cemented itself as an immediate classic. Very much of its time, the film deals with several themes and subjects still relevant to modern culture, albeit in very different — and arguably less tasteful — ways than they might be handled today.

The film begins with Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) entering her ward in a psychiatric hospital, followed by the admission of Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson). In this moment, McMurphy and Nurse Ratched are set up as foils to each other, with Ratched serving as a draconian tool of a draconian and oppressive system, and McMurphy serving as a rabble-rousing rebel of the ward, determined to shed societal bounds and live in a world of free-thinking and revelry.

Ratched, the villain, and McMurphy, the hero…except nothing Nurse Ratched does is unreasonable within her position. And McMurphy seems distinctly less interested in actual free thought and social change than he is in sex, fighting and baseball.

Most examinations of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” position Nurse Ratched as the villain. She is one of the most hated characters in all of American film and literature. She doesn’t hold at all with any of McMurphy’s actions, like changing the schedule of a mental institution on a whim, or breaking the whole ward out of recess to steal a fishing boat (which is illegal even when not in a psych ward). Essentially, Nurse Ratched, one of the most loathed characters of all time, is a woman doing her job.

Throughout the movie, McMurphy is positioned as somewhat of a revolutionary. Modelled after Ken Kesey’s own experience of the sixties, he is a man who will break societal expectations and challenge conformity, setting all of these poor, innocent men free of the confines of society. He takes the other men in his psych ward — all white, with the notable exception of Chief Bromden — and tells them that their enemies are a woman and a Black man, people for whom this is their place of work, whose jobs it is to keep these men (and themselves) safe.

He makes it a point, from the moment of his incarceration for assault and statutory rape, to make life as miserable for the staff, and Nurse Ratched in particular, for as long as he’s there. He says directly to another patient that this is his goal. And that is, I believe, the most important thing to keep in mind while viewing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” That it is a film detailing weeks upon weeks of psychological abuse enacted upon a woman by a man who simply wants to do whatever he feels like, whenever he feels like it, and is mad that he can’t.

He can’t incur five assault charges and just keep walking free. He can’t have sex with a fifteen-year-old girl and expect there to not be consequences. He can’t run a gambling ring with cigarettes in a psych ward. He can’t change the schedule there just because he wants to watch a ball game. McMurphy simply cannot accept the idea of there being consequences for his actions and he takes it out on the person he perceives as the ultimate personification of those consequences by turning an entire ward of mentally unstable men against her for weeks.

Nurse Ratched is positioned as one of the most infamous villains, and her only crime was telling a man no. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is the story of two people being pushed to their breaking points by each other. After McMurphy, with the help of Turkle, the Black security guard, turns the whole ward into a party for a night and leaves the mess for Nurse Ratched in the morning, there is a final, climatic confrontation between the two of them in which they both hit their absolute worst. For Nurse Ratched, it is when she finds Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif) in bed with a woman who has been brought in from outside.

This, for perspective, could get her fired and ruin her entire life. And what she does, at that absolute low, where her ward has been trashed and there are two whole people in it that should not be there, is tell Billy that she could tell his mother. Now this is a targeted jab. She knows that Billy is not stable, that this would be the absolute worst case for him. She hits him where it hurts, on purpose. It is unprofessional and dangerous, and is implied to lead to Billy’s death by suicide not even a minute later. Upon seeing Billy’s body, in a final, desperate bid to retain some sense of order — and also not have the entire ward fall to chaos and violence — she suggests that herself and the men should go back about their day. At this point, McMurphy tackles her to the ground and begins to strangle her. Nurse Ratched tries to keep herself, her staff and the other patients safe and is nearly killed for her troubles.

This climactic moment is very indicative of ideas surrounding gender during the time. The woman is senselessly sensible, clinging to her routine and her control in the worst circumstances. The man is impulse driven and somehow correct. She is the villain for trying to keep order in a dangerous and unpredictable place, and he is the hero for disrupting that order and making life harder for everyone who works there and lives there. The final scene of the film reveals that McMurphy — a grand hero defeated by the system for being too free spirited and impulsive — is to be lobotomized as part of his “treatment” following his attempted murder of a staff member. It is often viewed as a final indictment of villainous societal norms and institutional punishment as personified by Nurse Ratched. But when I saw it, all I could think was that Rosemary Kennedy was lobotomized in 1941 for a whole lot less.

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” screens in the Centennial Film Series at the Fargo Theatre on June 23 at 7 p.m. Tickets are available at the door.