Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest presents an allegorical representation of American society in the 1950’s. It is not without reason that a mental institution was chosen as the setting for this novel. Kesey experienced first-hand how these institutions function when he worked as an orderly in a California mental institution, observing the clearly determined hierarchy of power between the doctors, nurses, and patients. Classed as a counter-culture novel, readers enter in aware of the anti-mainstream nature of this novel. The cited text in this essay proves the anti-establishment bias that is presented through the characters, as per Mailloux’s first of three “moves” (Murfin 338).What I found as the overall emphasis of the movie was very different from the novel. While I usually identify from the perspective of a filmmaker, I see some major flaws in a truly accurate representation of this novel. Simplifying the “psychotic” nature that constitutes Chief Bromden’s internal monologue, the film focuses only on the disruption of order and schedule that Randle P. McMurphy introduces upon his arrival, sending Kesey into a fury. This was done at the behest of the director, Milos Forman, who responded with "I hate that whole 1960s drug free-association thing. That's fine in the book, which is stylized. But in the film the sky is real, the grass is real, the tree is real; the people had better be real too." While that decision still allowed the film to touch upon some of the major themes of the novel, specifically the clashing relationship of McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, I find it lacking, due to the fundamental structure those “drug-free associations” provide to the plot. The ability of the film and the novel to convey key elements ...
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Works Cited
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Murfin, Ross C. ”Reader-Response Criticism and The Awakening.” The Awakening, Kate Chopin. Case Studies In Contemporary Criticism. 2nd Edition. Ed. Nancy A. Walker. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. 291-306.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey presents a situation which is a small scale and exaggerated model of modern society and its suppressive qualities. The story deals with the inmates of a psychiatric ward who are all under the control of Nurse Ratched, ‘Big Nurse’, whose name itself signifies the oppressive nature of her authority. She rules with an iron fist so that the ward can function smoothly in order to achieve the rehabilitation of patients with a variety of mental illnesses. Big Nurse is presented to the reader through the eyes of the Chief, the story’s narrator, and much of her control is represented through the Chief’s hallucinations. One of these most recurring elements is the fog, a metaphorical haze keeping the patients befuddled and controlled “The fog: then time doesn’t mean anything. It’s lost in the fog, like everyone else” (Kesey 69). Another element of her control is the wires, though the Chief only brings this u...
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David Lean takes advantages of this story to carry out a film critic and with it; he wants to reveal how England was at post-war times. It remains a vital decisive point in the history of the British cinema. After postwar period the course of doing films changed automatically, from this time onwards filmmaker focus on recreate the atmosphere in which England and its population were living.
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Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is a book in which he dealt with the issues of racism, sex and authority that is going on in a mental institute. In the novel, the women are depicted as the power figures who are able to significantly manipulate the patients on the ward. There are four ways of Ken Kesey’s using of “woman” as a subject: Superiority of male sexuality over female authority, matriarchal system that seeks to castrate men in the society, mother figures as counterpart of Big Nurse and “Womanish” values defined as civilizing in the novel.
Winokur, Mark and Holsinger, Bruce. “Movies and Film.” Infoplease. Pearson Education, 2000-2013. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.
Due to production costs and financial restrictions, the director and screenplay writer can never fully reproduce an entire literary work into a screen version. With the complications of time restriction in major motion pictures, a full-length novel is compacted into a two-hour film. This commonly leads to the interference in the sequence of events, alternation of plots and themes, and the elimination of important characters or events. But the one true adversary of novel-based films is Hollywood fabrication. Producers, directors, and playwrights add or eliminate events and characters that might or might not pertain to the storyline for the sake of visual appeal, therefore defacing the author’s work.
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