One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) Cast: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, and Will Sampson Director: Milos Forman Synopsis: The movie is based on the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest written by Ken Kesey. Jack Nicholson stars as a prisoner, Randle McMurphy (Mac), sent to a mental institution for further evaluation of behavior during incarceration. Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) takes on the challenge of treating Mac even though he does not exhibit signs of a mental illness. Through the experience of residing in a psychiatric institution, Mac forms a strong bond that is life-changing with another patient, Chief (Will Sampson). Review: Mac is a prisoner serving time for statutory rape involving a fifteen year old girl. He is …show more content…
transferred to a mental institution because he is considered lazy and does not participate in his duties required for work. It is suggested by the institution’s psychiatrist that he is faking a mental illness just to get out of serving laborious time on a prison farm. Mac quickly becomes friends with other patients in the facility, playing poker and making random bets. A zealous group of eight men stick tightly together, and become extremely mischievous with Mac as their mastermind. He enacts the World Series for all to enjoy on his ward when he is denied the privilege of watching it. Nurse Ratched is the ward’s head nurse and she often “plays a crooked game,” as McMurphy informed to a group of doctors. She asked that a majority vote be placed in order to watch the game, and it occurred, yet she still did not allow anyone to watch television. Chief is a deaf and mute Native American patient that McMurphy has taught to play basketball. They have a bond that does not require common communication skills, which may be the catalyst of such a connection. Mac instructs Chief to lift him atop the wired fence, allowing McMurphy to escape. Instead of escaping, however, he steals the bus with six of his buddies on it. They pick up a girl, Candy, and head out to borrow a fishing boat to go deep sea fishing. They caught two large fish and police and doctors were awaiting their return at the dock. This fiasco was an attempt to prove he was “crazy” because they were about to release him back to the prison farm. Nurse Ratched persuaded the facility’s big-wigs to treat McMurphy instead of passing the buck to another ward. Mac thinks he is golden until one of the orderlies informs him that he is not released in 68 days, the time his prison sentence is up. He is required to stay as long as they deem necessary to treat him. In the next therapy session, the group gets out of control because Nurse Ratched will not allow a patient (Cheswick) to have his cigarettes due to gambling them away to Mac. Cheswick, Chief, and Mac all become physical with the staff and are sent to ECT. While waiting to receive treatment, McMurphy offers gum to Chief. Chief receives the piece of gum and verbally thanks Mac. This takes Mac by surprise and he commends Chief for faking. This only strengthens their friendship; Mac tries to convince Chief of escaping with him. Chief explains why he is unable to leave right away with McMurphy. So, McMurphy plans an escape without Chief.
He bribes an orderly with alcohol and invites Candy and another girl-friend to help him leave. They begin to give alcohol to all the patients in his ward! Everyone gets drunk and passes out, allowing Nurse Ratched to walk in on the mess the next morning. She tells Billy, Mac’s young stammering friend, that she is close friends with his mother and will notify her of his behavior (having sex with Candy’s friend). She sends him to the psychiatrist’s office and begins to crack down on the ward’s patients. During the clean-up attempt, a nurse finds Billy has committed suicide and begins to scream. Mac realizes what has happened and almost chokes the life out of Nurse Ratched, blaming her for Billy’s death. McMurphy is gone from the ward for some time and his friends speculate over poker about his whereabouts. Later that night, Chief is lying awake and sees Mac returning to the ward. He goes to talk to him and realizes that he has had a lobotomy. Heartbroken, he takes the responsibility of suffocating McMurphy with a pillow, saying the he would not allow him to live that way. Chief lifts the large marble sink from the tub room and smashes it through the window, seeing through Mac’s initial escape plan. The movie ends with Chief walking out the facility through the broken
window. Analysis: I enjoyed this movie very much. Jack Nicholson is a favorite actor of mine, making my viewing experience more enjoyable. While the psychiatrists believed McMurphy did not have any mental illnesses, I believe he had Conduct Disorder or Antisocial Personality Disorder. He was aggressive, destructive, dishonest, rebellious, impulsive, promiscuous, and charming. I have always heard the term “Nurse Ratched” yet never understood where it came from until watching this movie. At times it seemed as though she was a good nurse; an example being that she would refocus therapy groups when patients were getting off topic. At other times throughout the movie, I could understand where the negative connotation derived from in use of her name. She could be overly stern and suppressive. Not only did I enjoy the movie for leisurely reasons, but I also enjoyed comparing my current knowledge to nursing care within the movie. The ECT technique is very different now, and that was fun to review over in my mind. I do not believe that while Chief, Cheswick, and McMurphy were awaiting ECT that they should have been restrained at the wrists, and felt that it was an old technique that is addressed very differently in now. I also enjoyed identifying various characteristics within each patient, potentially identifying different psychiatric disorders.
...and they have no choice, but to follow it or else they can be put into the “Combine” as Bromden sees it. Near the end of the novel “she turned and walked into the Nurses’ Station and closed the door behind her”. When the nurse “walked” away, it shows how she no longer cares and Bromden will then start having a sense of feeling that he should do something because she just let Billy kill himself. The moment when Nurse Ratched “close[s] the door” is a sign for Bromden to gather his courage and help everyone to get out of this ward.
In the film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, directed by Milos Forman, the character of Randle McMurphy is portrayed as being a reckless and carefree man who eventually becomes a symbol of strength and determination in the mental hospital that the film takes place in. This film shows how an individual that can start off with an insignificant and unimportant purpose, but then becomes improved by the environment that they are placed in that they establish ambitions and aspirations that radically impact both themselves and others around them.
This essay will be exploring the text One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest by Ken Kesey and the film Dead poet’s society written by Tom Schulman. The essay will show how the authors use over exaggerated wildcard characters such as McMurphy and Keating. The use of different settings such as an insane asylum and an all-boys institution. And Lastly the use of fore shading to show how the authors can use different texts to present similar ideas in different ways.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest takes place in a mental institution in the Pacific Northwest. The narrator of the novel is Chief Bromden, also known as Chief Broom, a catatonic half-Indian man whom everybody thinks is deaf and dumb. He often suffers from hallucinations in which he feels that the room is filled with fog. The institution is dominated by Nurse Ratched (Big Nurse), a cold, precise woman with calculated gestures and a calm, mechanical manner. When the story begins, a new patient, Randall Patrick McMurphy, arrives at the ward. He is a self-professed 'gambling fool' who has just come from a work farm at Pendleton. He introduces himself to the other men on the ward, including Dale Harding, the president of the patient's council, and Billy Bibbit, a thirty-year old man who stutters and appears very young. Nurse Ratched immediately pegs McMurphy as a manipulator.
He tells of a man by the name of R. P. McMurphy, who was a con man, and was convicted of statutory rape. He told
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a film directed by Czech Milos Forman in 1975. Using potent elements of fiction--characters, conflict, and symbolism--Forman illustrates the counterculture of the 1960’s. This film depicts American society as an insane asylum that demands conformity from its citizens. The film begins with a conniving convict being assigned to the asylum. R. P. McMurphy is sent to the asylum to be evaluated by the doctors and to determine whether or not he is mentally ill. He is unaware that he will be supervised by an emasculating woman named Nurse Mildred Ratched who watches the patients’ every motion from her nurse’s station.
In Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the reader has the experience to understand what it was like to live in an insane asylum during the 1960’s. Kesey shows the reader the world within the asylum of Portland Oregon and all the relationships and social standings that happen within it. The three major characters’ groups, Nurse Ratched, the Black Boys, and McMurphy show how their level of power effects how they are treated in the asylum. Nurse Ratched is the head of the ward and controls everything that goes on in it, as she has the highest authority in the ward and sabotages the patients with her daily rules and rituals. These rituals include her servants, the Black Boys, doing anything she tells them to do with the patients.
Unable to see McMurphy imprisoned in a body that will go on living (under Nurse Ratched’s control) even though his spirit is gone, Chief smothers him to death that night. Then he escapes the hospital and leaves for Canada and a new life. We begin to see the different situations in which the patients struggle to overcome. Whether insane or not, the hospital is undeniably in control of the fates of its
When norms of society are unfair and seem set in stone, rebellion is bound to occur, ultimately bringing about change in the community. Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest demonstrates the conflict of individuals who have to survive in an environment where they are pressured to cooperate. The hospital's atmosphere suppresses the patients' individuality through authority figures that mold the patients into their visions of perfection. The ward staff's ability to overpower the patients' free will is not questioned until a man named Randal McMurphy is committed to the mental institute. He rebels against what he perceives as a rigid, dehumanizing, and uncompassionate environment. His exposure of the flaws in the hospital's perfunctory rituals permits the other patients to form opinions and consequently their personalities surface. The patient's new behavior clashes with the medical personnel's main goal-to turn them into 'perfect' robots, creating havoc on the ward.
As all movies are created based on a book, there always seems to be changes and conflicting ideas. However, they still have the same main idea to the story line. The novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey and the movie directed by Miloš Forman deal with the main idea of society's control of natural impulses. The author/director want to prove that this control can be overcome. Although the movie and the book are very different from each other, they still have their similarities.
However, despite McMurphy’s lobotomy, it was impossible for Nurse Ratched to return the ward to its previous order; “it was difficult with McMurphy’s presence still tromping up and down the halls and laughing out loud in the meeting and singing in the latrines. She couldn’t rule with her old power anymore” (269). McMurphy had served his purpose by helping the patients gain confidence and break free from Nurse Ratched’s evil power. He helped Chief grow big again and overcome his silence and Billy Bibbit gained confidence.
“Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge,” verbalizes Andrea Dworkin. Gender-roles have been ingrained in the every-day life of people all around the world since the beginnings of civilization. Both One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Hamlet portray typical female stereotypes in different time periods. Due to the representation of women in literature like Hamlet by William Shakespeare and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kessey, and pop-culture, evidence of classic gender-based stereotypes in a consistently patriarchal world are still blatantly obvious in today’s societies.
Everybody wants to be accepted, yet society is not so forgiving. It bends you and changes you until you are like everyone else. Society depends on conformity and it forces it upon people. In Emerson's Self Reliance, he says "Society is a joint stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater." People are willing to sacrifice their own hopes and freedoms just to get the bread to survive. Although the society that we are living in is different than the one the Emerson's essay, the idea of fitting in still exists today. Although society and our minds make us think a certain way, we should always trust our better judgment instead of just conforming to society.
Fred Wright, Lauren's instructor for EN 132 (Life, Language, Literature), comments, "English 132 is an introduction to English studies, in which students learn about various areas in the discipline from linguistics to the study of popular culture. For the literature and literary criticism section of the course, students read a canonical work of literature and what scholars have said about the work over the years. This year, students read One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey, a classic of American literature which dates from the 1960s counterculture. Popularized in a film version starring Jack Nicholson, which the class also watched in order to discuss film studies and adaptation, the novel became notable for its sympathetic portrayal of the mentally ill. For an essay about the novel, students were asked to choose a critical approach (such as feminist, formalist, psychological, and so forth) and interpret the novel using that approach, while also considering how their interpretation fit into the ongoing scholarly dialogue about the work. Lauren chose the challenge of applying a Marxist approach to One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Not only did she learn about critical approaches and how to apply one to a text, she wrote an excellent essay, which will help other readers understand the text better. In fact, if John Clark Pratt or another editor ever want to update the 1996 Viking Critical Library edition of the novel, then he or she might want to include Lauren's essay in the next edition!"
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest written by Ken Kesey in 1962. This novel is based on the experience Ken Kesey had during his time working in a mental institution as an orderly. Ken Kesey’s novel is a powerful critique of early 1960’s American society. The three main techniques that Kesey uses to create the Tragic form. In this novel Kesey has used the three main technique to create an inevitable conflict and outcomes that is similar to tragedy. The three main literary techniques that Ken Kesey uses are narrative structure, foreshadowing and symbolism. In this essay I will explore how Kesey uses these three techniques to form the Tragic form and shows how McMurphy gets lobotomized in the end but still wins the war against the Big Nurse.