One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest - A Dangerous Soul
Thoughts On: One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1975)
A prisoner faking insanity spirals with rebellion into the dark system of a mental institute.
There is no better film about clinical madness than One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. The intensity of its drama captures you instantly and drags you deep into a twisting narrative of growing villainy. This holds the Jack Nicholson performance. There's The Shining, there's The Departed, Chinatown and much more; but, to me, Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy is the definition of his on-screen presence. Milos Foreman is a legitimate director; Amadeus and The Fireman's Ball are serious films. One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest is his masterpiece.
The bizarreness of the power struggle between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched in this film is what makes it so impactful. There are so many moments of brevity and lunacy that you remember the film for. But I always forget what looms at the end. The key moment in which we can tell the film has a dark twist comes when McMurphy, committed to an insane hospital as a violent and perverted criminal, realises his fate is in the hands of the hospital he escaped to. Once committed, he cannot get out until the doctors clear him; he assumed he could just wait out the last 70 days of his prison sentence there to get out of work. Upon realising this, McMurphy goes into a rage asking his troupe of fellow loons why they didn't warn him about the power of Nurse Ratched - who he has been betting on being able to wind up. It is here that he is told that most of his friends that he is locked up with, those which he has nominated himself the band leader of, are voluntarily on the ward. It's here where you begin to see that McMurphy is actually insane; for one, these are the people he chooses to lead.
When I was young, watching this film I felt Nurse Ratched was evil and McMurphy sane. My opinion has flipped having watched it recently. One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest starts with everyone saying good morning to each other. This is a key motif that repeats throughout the film. Good morning is how each work day starts and everyone begins to play their role in the ordered clockwork that Nurse Ratched oversees. This clinical system starts out as feeling somewhat peaceful, but the order devolves over time, exposed by the chaos that is McMurphy as a life consuming vacuum. But, as McMurphy learns in the key turning point of the film; the more he resists, the deeper he will be pulled into the clinical system: he is not in control of his release beyond compliance. The clinical ward is not evil, or perhaps the nurses themselves are not, but the system overseeing it certainly is. McMurphy is insane because he fails to adapt to the pressure of conformity demanded by it; at first it is the extremity of his rebellion that shows you how crazy he is, but as the narrative unfolds a more deeper and true insanity is revealed as he clings to a persona while his soul shrinks. Truly, we see the soul of a man evaporate over the course of this film, which is what signifies this to me as Nicholson's best. Nurse Ratched is the order that manages the insanity of this film wildly. I believe everyone in this film is insane; the main doctor who runs the lobotomy schemes, the nurses who manage the craziness, and the patients all stirring in this milieu of extreme bizarreness. The ward overseen by Ratched is an insane place; it is not evil. It, in my view, exposes the insanity within McMurphy, only for him to find out about other wards and the evil of the real clinical system. It is stuck in this place on the edge of death that McMurphy and Ratched play a game of control.
As said, I thought previously that McMurphy was sane, but believe him now to be insane. I thought Ratched was evil, but she too is just insane. Her system of order is one, which is what we are shown in the group therapy sessions, that pulls out the chaos in otherwise withdrawn and secluded individuals. She does so with the belief that the chaos within people is dangerous, but that she is helping people through careful exposure; these are her words, and I felt them to be genuine. Ratched's system is not really proven to be wrong, it crosses the line into insanity; this is the truth of the final climax of the film where McMurphy's friend commits suicide. Whilst McMurphy shows the resilience of each character we meet and he befriends, he disregards their fragile position in life that they hold themselves in, which is sadly real. From the perspective of a man who requires utter freedom as not to be recognised and break out as insane, Ratched's system is an oppressive one. But if one pays attention, it is clearly one that controls and yet also exposes chaos; McMurphy was smart enough to see its game, but lacked the self control to play it, which is why he dies. Alas, it is Ratched's system that sends him to that death having been consumed in a more general insanity met in an attempt for control.
Consider the fact that each therapy lesson starts out as a calm, dead situation, but bursts into an argument or disturbing eruption; and it is in these climactic moments that McMurphy even starts trying to calm it down, abandoning his own chaotic intentions. This is Ratched's job: to control and then stir up trouble on the ward before calming it down again. With McMurphy in the system, people end up dying as he can direct chaos, but disregards where he can be taken - which at once asserts his personal psychopathy and therefore the fact that, though this is a film about freedom, it also warns of the death in unrelenting chaos. Order is simple, chaos a complication. While life needs its spark, one should not set their world alight as McMurphy does. Mirroring this, we see Ratched opt to drown her patients. Simplicity is the destruction complication; fire can best reveal the quelling power of water. The demonstration of this through performance and script is pristine in this film. The final claim of order after McMurphy steers his ship into the rocks is where extreme chaos meets extreme order. The party on the ward drives Ratched insane, and with mere words, she drives a man to suicide in an attempt to claim control. But, one cannot overlook the psychopathic narcissism of a man who takes it upon himself to stir up and lead a ward of mental patients and hold a party the night he escapes. It is here where we see both characters cross the line from insanity to death.
Inasmuch as this is a film about the archetypal desire for freedom condemning soul taking practices like lobotomies, it is ultimately a play demonstrating the collision of two insane individuals fuelled to control and transform the chaos in the world around them. It hauntingly presents a question of our own and general sanity; while there is the greater question of the contents of insanity, this is generally bypassed to bring us toward a darker interrogative. How dangerous is our soul; could it be as dangerous as McMurphy's or Ratched's? The lucidity of sanity varies for each individual; we would rarely claim complete clarity in this regard. However, as we depart from sane states toward the grips of chaos, the contents of our being is exposed and the danger we pose comes to surface. The realm of chaos is not a peaceful one; One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest works to express this notion and posits a question of how dangerous individuals are beyond societal and even personal control. Its dramatic punctum and counterpoint suggests that anyone attempting to control and direct sanity to an extreme is liable to lose it themselves.
