CHAPTER SEVEN
Mark O’Hara
A trickster in a cinematic work often starts out in a position of imprisonment or other restraint.1 The protagonist of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Randle Patrick McMurphy, struggles and arguably prevails against the institution that wishes to discipline him. His resistance to people in power reflects the nature of the trickster as a character type that can change audience members’ attitudes toward characters who are portrayed as mentally ill.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was one of the most renowned cultural artifacts of the 1970s. The movie assumes a stance that is against psychiatry and institutionalization. It also paints a positive picture of the rebellious antics and tactics of Randle Patrick McMurphy who, in his role as trickster, is determined not only to challenge authority but to cause the “patients” around him to take stands for their own dignity and liberation. Of course, in the film, McMurphy tweaks his role as patient/prisoner with a modern mix of bawdy humor, reckless violence, and relentless defiance of control. Randle Patrick McMurphy is a crusader for his fellow patients, one who never stops in his attempts to “stick it to the Man.”
Michel Foucault was a 20th-century French educator, philosopher, and historian; his genealogical ideas about the human sciences are very useful in an analysis of Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,2 based on Ken Kesey’s novel. Randle Patrick McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, achieves archetypal status through his rendition of a likable rascal out to overthrow medical and legal tyrants wherever he meets them. Having “played” the prison system and convinced his warders that he (and they) might be better off if “R. P.” were transferred into the clinical system, McMurphy meets Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher in the film) and the supposedly deviant collection of patients over whom she holds sway. Here are visible a series of Foucauldian themes, mainly covering the development and commingling of the sciences of sociology, psychology, and psychiatry with the older institution of penalty. Foucault posits that
psychiatric or psychological experts, magistrates concerned with the implementation of sentences, educationalists, members of the prison service, all fragment the legal power to punish;…one is handing over to them mechanisms of legal punishment to be used at their discretion: subsidiary judges they may be, but they are judges all the same.3
How does McMurphy fit the profile of an ideal “offender”? First, he is subjected to procedures that are intended more as supervision than punishment—but end up as both. For instance, he is prohibited from certain areas; he is watched closely and monitored to a degree corresponding to his increasing rebellion; he is obliged to take medication. In short, McMurphy faces a clinical “gaze” whose purpose is to record and transform his state of mind and change his criminal behaviors—and to continue the surveillance and modification after he has been changed.4
The Foucauldian concept of the soul, propounded in Discipline and Punish, assists in describing the effects of the apparatuses of power upon the bodies of the characters in this study. The concept of a soul related to materiality and not spirituality serves as a support beam in Foucault’s structural analysis of technologies of control. Insubstantial in itself, this soul nevertheless reflects the ways in which the body is invested by power relations, as well as how it is surrounded by a juridico-medical enterprise that continues to collect knowledge for the purpose of distributing and utilizing power.5 “The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body”6:
[I]t is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished—and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized…7
All of the makers of meaning within the collaborative genre of film provide multiple relationships and plot points that exemplify power relations.
With R. P. McMurphy it is relevant to reference Foucault’s idea of the soul: his character incurs the most forceful apparatuses of discipline of any characters in the film. It could be argued, however, that McMurphy’s role as advocate and activist grants a certain agency for resistance. Hughes writes that activism against ableist policies and procedures should not be reduced to the intentions of individual persons with disabilities, but it should also not be reduced to the bodiless technologies of discourse.8 Despite his perseverance in subversive behaviors—such as arranging an actual fishing trip for his fellow “inmates,” or bribing attendants in order to set up a sexual tryst for young Billy Bibbit, McMurphy is eventually caught in the network of power running through this state hospital. In Kesey’s novel the motif of surveillance is more noticeable: Chief Bromden’s paranoid tone is apparent in the first line, “They’re out there,”9 as he pushes his broom slowly about the antiseptic halls. Kesey’s invention of Bromden as the first-person narrator enables the reader to overhear the workings of power at its source, as the Chief, who feigns an inability to speak, hear, and react “normally,” is allowed to sweep even during the meetings of the board of directors. The metaphor of fog suggests that events or agendas around the facility are hidden, perhaps unethical or even illegal; the fog also characterizes the deadened states of consciousness that drugs impose upon the patients. In the film, not many doctors appear; “Big Nurse” Ratched is their surrogate. She represents the medical establishment in her decisions about the patients: whether or not they are dangerous; whether they should be treated or forced into submission; even the psychiatric judgment of what part of free will was involved with their “offenses.”10 So much of Randle Patrick McMurphy’s “treatment” exemplifies Foucault’s propositions about how criminology, sociology, and the other “human sciences” combine to legitimize the sentences and procedures in operation in modern clinical and justice systems. A crucial effect arises from this combination: the penal system has assumed so many extrajudicial elements and such a large body of knowledge that the judge is no longer seen purely as the person who punishes; criminal justice perpetually invokes systems other than itself.11 McMurphy is out to “play” whichever system that purports to control him, however.
Foucault’s theory of the binary materializes clearly in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Running throughout the film are several oppositional relationships, from color symbolism—in which McMurphy initially appears in dark clothing and wool cap while Nurse Ratched is dressed in white—to the general milieu of the institution—in which power-laden actions like unwarranted lobotomization are cast in striking relief against the small bodies of the patients, who are virtually powerless. In Power/Knowledge Foucault speaks against the tendency toward reductionism, asking why it is that humans tend so quickly to resort to the weak logic of contradiction.12 In viewing a situation, Foucault believes, “one must try to think struggle and its forms, objectives, means and processes in terms of a logic free of the sterilizing constraints of the dialectic.”13 Foucault traces the marginalization that occurs with binary thinking:
Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution…how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way).14
R. P. McMurphy is identified early as a troublemaker, an offender, a person who does not obey sovereign power or disciplinary tactics. Nurse Ratched certainly notes his noncompliance and punishes him with various procedures, including electroshock; McMurphy defies his branding and survives all attempts to break his will, however, until Ratched stumbles upon a gap in McMurphy’s armor: he defends those weaker than himself.
Three-quarters into the 20th century—1975—is an imperative date in a genealogical review of films featuring characters diagnosed with mental illness. The years of the 1960s and 1970s saw the contestation of psychiatric authority, and a reduction in the number of mental institutions, along with the democratization of procedures in many institutions that remained open.15 The popularity of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest suggests strong cultural biases in favor of depictions of distrust of those in power.16 In fact, the years between the release of Ken Kesey’s novel (1962) and the release of the film span roughly the rise and decline of American involvement in the war in Vietnam/Southeast Asia, a time of growing disillusionment and protest in American culture. Paralleling the intergenerational anger of the Vietnam era, the film blames parents for the psychoses of their children, and shows authority figures imposing arbitrary and oppressive rules upon the patients/inmates. Furthermore, the Oregon mental institution of Cuckoo’s Nest functions as a stand-in for a repressive state.17 The power structures wielded by the hospital—with the stern, neatly-coiffed Big Nurse as their agent—represent a coldly calculating agenda that ignores civil rights and annihilates individuality.18 This film clearly does not assume the conservative establishment view that institutionalizing persons with psychological disabilities is the best course: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest could be positioned at the top of the list of films supporting ideas promoted by the antipsychiatry movement. The film brims with binary oppositions between humans and the practices of control exemplified by state institutions.19 Rutten et al. clarify the protagonist’s reaction to power: “McMurphy’s resistance becomes significant when he disturbs the public order and the dominant discourse, which prescribes that people with ‘mental health problems’ need to be isolated from society in psychiatric state hospitals.”20 Both the novel and the film present positive depictions of antiauthoritarian ideology, sentiments that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and that also fit the thinking of the antipsychiatry movement.21 Both texts reinforce the discourse of the imposition of disability status upon humans who are impaired—the major discourse informed by the social models of disability. In fact, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest suggests that the institution of psychiatry and the protocols it has engendered are responsible for creating “mental health problems.”22
Randle Patrick McMurphy can be characterized as a liberator because he treats his fellow patients as mature humans who deserve to make their own decisions—an idea that reinforces a theme in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that individuals should exercise their free will instead of obeying the dictates of hierarchical powers.23 Whether he is leading a protest over television rights in the ward by cheering for a fantasized baseball game, or organizing a fishing trip during which he introduces his fellow patients as doctors (repeating the old trope about “who’s running the asylum?”), McMurphy strives continually to liberate and empower the men surrounding him. Further, McMurphy can be seen as a Christ figure, working for the good of common people until he is betrayed—by Billy Bibbit, who soon kills himself, Judas Iscariot-like; “Mac” is then symbolically crucified through lobotomization, and “rises” briefly before Bromden smothers him, whispering “You’re coming with me.”24 Bassil-Morozow categorizes McMurphy as a “human type” of trickster, who tends to lack abilities to transcend the human frame and sustains bodily harm: his body suffers because he “has crossed the line into the dangerous territory and disrupted the established order of things” within the oppressive psychiatric hospital.25 The physical restraints on McMurphy’s body—including the facility itself, assaults from orderlies, and through ECT and lobotomization—exemplify the Foucauldian idea of biopower. However, I would argue that McMurphy’s influence continues after death: Bromden uses his friend’s idea of tearing up the heavy control panel in the tub room and, with water spraying everywhere, Bromden throws the appliance through the mesh window and runs away, the camera staying on him as he recedes. It is significant that Bromden does not leave McMurphy alive, as McMurphy would have served as a continuous warning of oppressive institutional control. Instead, Chief carries Mac’s message of self-liberation with him, and the other patients back in the hospital shout happily as the big man escapes.
McMurphy can also be romanticized as a rebel who challenges “Big Nurse” Ratched’s authority; when McMurphy states that the patients are no more troubled than the average person “on the street,” he is pointing out the tendency to otherize and stigmatize, or to draw a line between “us and them.”26 All aspects of the patients’ lives are regimented, and their treatments can hardly be called rehabilitative; patients are in fact punished if they step out of their “sick roles” to exhibit more normative behaviors.27 The character Billy Bibbit, for instance, played by Brad Dourif as an insecure and stuttering quasi-adolescent, regains poise and confidence after R. P. McMurphy sets Billy up for his first sexual experience. Appalled by Billy’s rebellion, her authoritarian rule threatened, Nurse Ratched shames Billy into guilt-ridden compliance and suicide. Through invoking Billy’s mother and her incipient dissatisfaction with his behaviors, Ratched locates Billy’s deviance within the domain of the family and uses the mother’s influence to control the son. Billy fails to reject dependence on his mother, a condition for claiming his manhood. Foucault describes the shift away from the public status of family affairs that was a hallmark of the classical age—when societies locked away citizens for debauchery or prodigality but did not categorize these “offenses” as marks of insanity: “In the nineteenth century, conflicts between individuals and their families became a private affair, and took on the allure of a psychological problem….To attack the family was to flirt with the world of unreason.”28
By mentioning Billy Bibbit’s mother, Nurse Ratched nullifies the traditionally supportive role of the family in the care of a troubled member, and manipulates Billy into such mortifying guilt that he names his friend McMurphy as the culprit behind the promiscuity on the ward. This head nurse’s behavior suggests an element of hypocrisy in the representation of those who care for the mentally ill characters in film: dominant American ideologies view nursing as a respectable profession, yet films tend to portray mental health nurses as uncaring and even aberrant.29 After destroying Billy’s self-worth, Ratched continues to devalue her own authority when she retaliates against the other patients on the ward, and particularly when she orders the lobotomy that is meant to neutralize McMurphy’s disruptive influence. Foucault describes the home as the natural location where the family helps to fight illness, the place that existed before the hospital (which before the 18th century was really no more than a poorhouse, or even a warehouse to imprison any type of person society found offensive), the family and home as the place to receive loving care and let the illness dissipate through its natural course.30 Having fallen asleep and missed his planned escape, McMurphy witnesses Billy’s fate, and attempts to murder Ratched. Now that the disciplinary regime has trapped McMurphy, his demise is imminent. Although the “Big Nurse” can seem caring, even liberal, in her promotion of group therapy, her patronizing manner cannot hide her steely belief in the psychiatric hospital as a place of surveillance and control.31 Ratched’s group therapy sessions are more of “a Gestapo-like questioning” than helpful dialogues.32 In short, she is skilled at casting aspersions and airs of unreason upon the less powerful humans surrounding her.
It is fitting that R. P. McMurphy has tricked the prison officials who had him in custody but transferred him to the psychiatric hospital, as these actions further support his role as a trickster. At once social critic and clown, McMurphy breaks countless hospital rules in order to subvert management styles that he deems oppressive, to promote independence and self-esteem in his fellow patients, and finally, simply to amuse himself. Similarly, the conventional trickster is a primal figure, both creator and destroyer, who breaks social taboos, often entertains both others and him/herself, and undergoes punishments that remind onlookers/listeners of the consequences of breaking societal rules.33 Hyde characterizes the confidence man as a typically American hero/trickster, a wanderer in a land of opportunity, an opportunist who can say anything he wants at any time34—an apt description for “R. P.” Because of his antics and oppositional attitude toward the Establishment, McMurphy can also be compared to comical cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny, whose mischief keeps viewers enthralled;35 McMurphy might also strike viewers of the film as a compilation of characteristics of Kesey’s circle of friends from The Merry Pranksters. Jack Nicholson preserves much of McMurphy’s bravado in the film, showing the scintillating self-confidence of a scar-marked gambler, roguish Korean War vet, hard-fighting (and fornicating) logger, and, in one of Kesey’s monologues, quasi-cowboy slang-speaker, cocky and eager to establish himself on the ward:
Then you tell Bull Goose Loony Harding that R. P. McMurphy is waiting to see him and that this hospital ain’t big enough for the two of us. I’m accustomed to being top man….Tell this Harding that he either meets me man to man or he’s a yaller skunk and better be outta town by sunset.36
R. P. McMurphy’s demeanor is complicated: good natured but volatile, loyal yet rebellious—all hallmarks of the trickster. Cinematic tricksters also sometimes serve as therapists, bringing patients to the point of crisis and finally reflection: McMurphy carelessly exposes repressed psychic material, an action that ultimately allows those with whom he shares the ward to connect with each other.37 The irony lies in an ages-old character type being marked by the modern, medicalized construction of mental illness. In earlier times McMurphy might have been accepted as an eccentric and diverse presence, but in the United States of the 20th century, he and his behaviors are marked as defective and categorized for separation from mainstream life.
Several aspects of Milos Forman’s film diverge from the novel’s representations of mental illness. Gone is Ken Kesey’s famous invention of the Native American, “Chief” Bromden, as the first person narrator, along with Bromden’s storytelling devices that suggest symptoms of schizophrenia. Slapstick comedy, violence, and distorted depictions of reality are altered or missing from the movie.38 For instance, Nurse Ratched’s face does not contort surrealistically, and there is no mention of fog machines or the “Combine,” Bromden’s metaphors for hidden hegemonic controls, disciplinary technologies, and destructive agendas. Camera shots, angles, and editing perspectives are also divorced from Bromden, showing third-person omniscience and a traditional, straightforward storyline.39 Kesey’s early postmodern prose style—present tense, first person psychedelic, as it were—is also elided. Milos Forman’s statement, “I like to reveal the inside through the surface,”40 suggests the director’s penchant for indirect characterization and subtle social satire; the viewer/spectator, however, must remember that the film and book are largely different texts. R. D. Laing posits that the mind is located within a person and therefore is not accessible to the other (a psychoanalyst, for example);41 perhaps the decision not to use unusual effects to simulate psychoses is the director’s way of endeavoring to copy his version of reality as closely as possible—without exploiting the medium of film to infer what a character is experiencing. A vastly condensed dramatization that locates institutional inequities mostly within one spiteful nurse, the film fails to expose the injustices leading to the categorization and internment of “the mentally ill”—unless the themes of injustice can be developed solely through the symbols of sterile hospital corridors, locked doors, and electroshock therapy. Foucault cites major institutions such as psychiatric and penal facilities as having limited importance when they are viewed for their economic significance; however, these institutions are crucial to the continued functioning of the “wheels of power.”42 Forman’s film was both a popular and critical “hit,” but regardless of its artistry and literalness, Kesey’s opus also installs images of increasing dominance of disciplinary regimes and unseen wielders of power.
One must wonder what changes would be made if One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest were to be rewritten and reshot. If a filmmaker attempted to follow Ken Kesey’s vision more closely, the product would surely display more surrealistic effects in attempting to suggest states of aberrant perception; it might retain the narrative wanderings of Chief Bromden, and it would probably feature countless permutations of hallucinations experienced by the characters—brought about both through psychoses and through mind-expanding drugs. Kesey speculated on being both the screenwriter and director of his own work: “I could do it weird. I could do it so that people, when they left there, they couldn’t find the exit.”43 Still, the much-lauded 1975 film retains its iconic status more than 40 years after its making, one of the most famous movies to attack psychiatry and its gazes and glances, as well as to promote patient rights and dignity.
Notes
1. Helena Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster in Contemporary Film (New York: Routledge, 2012), 24.
2. Jack Nicholson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, DVD, dir. Milos Forman (1975; Los Angeles: United Artists, 2010).
3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 21.
4. Ibid., 18.
5. Ibid., 24.
6. Ibid., 30.
7. Ibid., 29.
8. Bill Hughes (2012), “What can a Foucauldian Analysis Contribute to Disability Theory?” in Foucault and the Government of Disability, Shelly Tremain, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 80–81.
9. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 3.
10. Foucault, Discipline, 22.
11. Ibid.
12. Michel Foucault, Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 143.
13. Ibid., 143–144.
14. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 199.
15. Helen Spandler, “Spaces of Psychiatric Contention: A Case Study of a Therapeutic Community,” Health & Place 15 (2009): 672.
16. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 10.
17. Claude J. Smith, “Finding a Warm Place for Someone We Know: The Cultural Appeal of Recent Mental Patient and Asylum Films,” Journal of Popular Film & Television 27, no. 1 (1999): 43.
18. Elaine B. Safer, “‘It’s the Truth Even If It Didn’t Happen’: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Literature Film Quarterly 5, no. 2 (1977): 132.
19. Kris Rutten, Griet Roets, Ronald Soetaert, and Rudi Roose, “The Rhetoric of Disability: A Dramatistic-Narrative Analysis of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Critical Arts: A Southwest Journal of Cultural & Media Studies 26, no. 5 (2012): 638.
20. Ibid., 639.
21. Ibid., 641.
22. Ibid.
23. William L. Blizek, “Religion and Spirituality in the Movies,” International Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Society 2, no. 3 (2013): 110.
24. Ibid.
25. Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster, 33–34.
26. Rutten et al., “The Rhetoric of Disability,” 639.
27. D. Quinn, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Teaching Sociology 171, (1989): 122.
28. Michel Foucault, History of Madness (New York: Routledge, 2006), 91.
29. Keri de Carlo, “Ogres and Angels in the Madhouse: Mental Health Nursing Identities in Film,” International Journal of Mental Health Nursing 16, no. 5 (2007): 346.
30. Foucault, Clinic, 17.
31. deCarlo, “Ogres,” 344.
32. Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster, 132.
33. Esther Clinton, Jane Garry, and Hasan El-Shamy, “The Trickster, Various Motifs,” Archetypes & Motifs in Folklore and Literature: A Handbook (2005): 472–480. EBSCOhost (accessed June 4, 2014).
34. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Macmillan, 1997), 11.
35. Paul Nastu, “Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Explicator 56, (1997): 48–50.
36. Kesey, Cuckoo’s Nest, 19.
37. Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster, 56.
38. Nastu, “Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” 48.
39. Marsha McCreadie, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Some Reasons for One Happy Adaptation,” Literature Film Quarterly 5, no. 2 (1977): 28.
40. Milos Forman, quoted in McCreadie, “Some Reasons,” 128.
41. Ronald David Laing, Self and Others, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 3.
42. Foucault, Power / Knowledge, 116.
43. Kesey, quoted in Safer, “It’s the Truth,” 132.