In this episode, we use the film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a launching point to discuss ideas around psychiatry, psychiatric wards, and the conflict between the individual and the establishment.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was originally a novel, written by Ken Kesey and published in 1962. (Ken Kesey, worked the graveyard shift as an orderly at a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California. He spoke to the patients and witnessed the workings of the institution. He also voluntarily took psychoactive drugs, including mescaline and LSD, as part of Project MK Ultra. In addition to his work with MK Ultra, Kesey took LSD recreationally.)
The novel was adapted into film in 1975, directed by Miloš Forman, and went on to win five Academy Awards.
The narrative focusses on the antics of the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson in the film), who fakes insanity to serve his sentence for battery and gambling in a psychiatric hospital rather than at a prison work farm. The head administrative nurse, Nurse Ratched, rules the ward with absolute authority, assisted by her three day-shift orderlies and her assistant doctors and nurses.
In this episode we discuss the character of McMurphy, as an example of an “individual” who stands out from the crowd like Tyler Durden in Fight Club (who we discussed in Episode 8 — Monsters & Masculinity). McMurphy cannot be allowed to run loose in society, and so he is trapped and forced into the punishment system. One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest is about “the combine”, the machine, that forces us to fall into line. With the arbitrary rules, the opiate drugs to dull our senses, with the shame that turns us into our own police.
Towards the end of the book, one of the patients comments how they forced McMurphy to stand up for them, as they are too cowardly to stand up for themselves. McMurphy pushes the boundaries of the system in their behalf, smashing up against a machine that he cannot defeat, a machine that wants to grind everyone down into the dirt.
But despite this seemingly hopeless situation, this film (and novel) can still serve as a call to action. It can be a call to be an individual in the face of the oppressive machine. To be the one who stands, not the masses who push. Either way we are destined to be ground into dust by the machine, but to be an individual is surely a more glorious way to live and honourable way to die.
References
Links
Music for the show by Si Mulumby
A Glimpse of Eternity by Alejandro Tuama