Revising Cuckoo’s – McMurphy’s weapons in the battle with Big Nurse

So what are McMurphy’s weapons in his battle with Nurse Ratched? Increasing in importance they are:

 

1. Physical force – this culminates in smashing the glass and his physical attack on Ratched (but remember this had little effect on the Combine).
2. He rips Ratched’s uniform and reveals her breasts, those “mistakes” in “manufacturing” thereby showing that she is vulnerable like everyone else.
3. His independence of mind – even after his disappearance his “presence still tromping up and down the halls and laughing out loud in the meetings and singing in the latrines”.

 

As a result, Ratched loses her patients one by one. McMurphy has the final victory – as Bromden says, “She couldn’t rule with her old power anymore.”

Revising Cuckoo’s Nest – McMurphy

OK, I think we all know that this is going to be a hard year in terms of time (and the lack of it!). So, we need to be revising and I want to start with ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ by Ken Kesey.

Let’s look at McMurphy. His arrival is a direct challenge to the power of the Combine. Even his initials give promise of something dynamic – R.P.M – revolution per minute – revs. He introduces the patients to revolt – gambling, drinking, independence, laughter – which means conflict with Big Nurse.

In this battle with the system (Combine) – a battle to the death – McMurphy has three different roles:

1. persecutor
2. victim
3. rescuer

1. He has a head-on confrontation with the institution – he bets with patients, gets the better of Nurse Ratched – he seems to have a number of victories BUT discovers he is committed and others are voluntary. This rattles him but he returns to battle by putting a fist through the window of the Nurses Station, he follows this with the battle over the baseball game, the fishing trip and fights the aide. He does this irrespective of the inevitable punishment.
2. McMurphy is a victim – his defeat is inevitable as it is an uneven battle between him and the nurse. Ratched has three final weapons – EST, her control over when he is released and the lobotomy. Note the symbol of his victimisation – the cross shaped table and crown of thorns in ‘the shock shop’.
3. As the rescuer McMurphy has a mission to rescue patients from the mind numbing effects of hospital routine. A symbol of this can be seen in Bromden’s response to the fog. McMurphy’s main defense against the Combine is laughter – it has a huge impact on the ward. Laughter is both a gesture of defiance and a symbol of freedom and mental independence.

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest – The Film

Now that we have seen the film version of ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ you might be interested in this discussion from the Filmsite. It looks at the background to the film:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) is one of the greatest American films of all time – a $4.4 million dollar effort directed by Czech Milos Forman. Its allegorical theme is set in the world of an authentic mental hospital (Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon), a place of rebellion exhibited by a energetic, flamboyant, wise-guy anti-hero against the Establishment, institutional authority and status-quo attitudes (personified by the patients’ supervisory nurse). [Forman himself noted that the asylum was a metaphor for the Soviet Union (embodied as Nurse Ratched) and the desire to escape.] Expressing his basic human rights and impulses, the protagonist protests against heavy-handed rules about watching the World Series, and illegally stages both a fishing trip and a drinking party in the ward – leading to his own paralyzing lobotomy.

Jack Nicholson’s acting persona as the heroic rebel McMurphy, who lives free or dies (through an act of mercy killing), had earlier been set with his performances in Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). The mid-70s baby-boomers’ counter-culture was ripe for a film dramatizing rebellion and insubordination against oppressive bureaucracy and an insistence upon rights, self-expression, and freedom.

The role of the sexually-repressed, domineering Nurse Ratched was turned down by five actresses – Anne Bancroft, Colleen Dewhurst, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, and Angela Lansbury – until Louise Fletcher accepted casting (in her debut film) only a week before filming began. And actor James Caan was also originally offered the lead role of McMurphy, and Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman were considered as well. The entire film was shot in sequence, except for the fishing scene (shot last).

It surprised everyone by becoming enormously profitable – the seventh-highest-grossing film ever (at its time), bringing in almost $300 million worldwide. The independently-produced film also swept the Oscars: it was the first film to take all the major awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress) since Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934). It was nominated for nine Academy Awards in total: Best Actor (Jack Nicholson with his first win after losing the previous year for Chinatown (1974)), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler), Best Director, Best Editing, Best Picture, Best Score (Jack Nitzsche) and Best Supporting Actor (Brad Dourif). “Cuckoo’s Nest” beat out tough competition for Best Picture by Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and Altman’s Nashville (1975).

The film’s unauthorized screenplay (by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman) was restructured and adapted from author Ken Kesey’s 1962 popular, best-selling novel of the same name so that it would appeal to contemporary audiences. [Kesey wrote the first version of the film’s screenplay.] The film’s title was derived from a familiar, tongue-twisting Mother’s Goose children’s folk song (or nursery rhyme) called Vintery, Mintery, Cutery, Corn. The ones that fly east and west are diametrically opposed to each other and represent the two combatants in the film. The one that flies over the cuckoo’s nest [the mental hospital filled with “cuckoo” patients] is the giant, ‘deaf-mute’ Chief:

Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,

Apple seed and apple thorn;

Wire, briar, limber lock,

Three geese in a flock.

One flew east,

And one flew west,

And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

Read the rest here.

It also outlines the story:

The film’s credits play under an Oregonian wilderness scene at dawn, as a car’s headlights move across the screen. A black-coated supervisory nurse, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) (known as Big Nurse in the novel) arrives at the locked, security ward of a state mental hospital [on location in Salem, Oregon at the Oregon State Hospital/Asylum], where patient inmates, nurses, and orderlies attend to early morning medications. Pills are dispensed from the Nurses’ Station, a large booth with sliding glass panels.

An energetic, swaggering, wisecracking, non-conformist, rebellious patient/prisoner Randle Patrick (R. P.) “Mac” McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), 38 years old, is escorted into the ward where he meets some of the bizarre, memorable patients/inmates (most of whom are voluntarily committed):

a silent, dignified, huge and towering Indian giant “Chief” Bromden, aka “Broom” (Creek Indian Will Sampson in his film debut) – a “deaf and dumb Indian” “as big as a god-damn tree trunk” – with a father blinded after many years of alcoholism

a pathetic, incessantly stuttering, paranoid boychild, thirty-year old Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif in his film debut) – shy, virginal, impressionable, and deathly afraid of his mother

an ineffectual, rationalizing intellectual Dale Harding (William Redfield) – relatively sane but unable to get over his wife’s betrayal and adultery when she “seeks attention elsewhere”

an insecure neurotic Charlie Cheswick (Sydney Lassick) lacking self-confidence

a short, smiling Martini (Danny De Vito in one of his earliest roles) with an immature personality

a cynical, trouble-making sadist Taber (Christopher Lloyd in his film debut).

Read more here. It is well worth the effort.

About One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) combines the personal and professional experiences of Ken Kesey and reflects the culture in which it was written, yet it stands strong on its own merits. Kesey developed the novel while a graduate student in Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program. The novel was partly inspired by Kesey’s part-time job as an orderly in the Palo Alto Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital. Kesey also had begun participating in experiments involving LSD and other substances for Stanford’s Psychology Department. Speaking to patients under the influence of LSD, Kesey began to perceive that society had turned functional people insane instead of allowing them to find their way back to functioning in society. Kesey’s use of LSD also prompted him to have hallucinations while working as an orderly. Kesey often imagined seeing a large Indian mopping the floors of the hospital, prompting him to later add the character of Chief Bromden as the novel’s narrator.

Kesey published One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to great critical and commercial success. Upon publication, the novel had a tremendous effect on baby boomers just beginning to awaken to stirrings of rebellion, for it mirrored and stirred up their new challenges to authority. Kesey also found himself financially relieved by the success of the novel, which allowed him to move his family to a large estate in La Honda, California, which became the site of his wildest days as a bohemian, partying with the likes of the Hells Angels, Allen Ginsberg, and San Francisco’s hippest cultural figures.

Read more at Gradesaver.