Motion Picture Evaluation - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest [Final]

            The movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, studies the US mental health system. In the 1975 film, our main character Randel Patrick McMurphy, a “normal” convict from regular society enters the mental institution expecting less work and comfort. He is confronted by a system designed to keep patients subordinate to medical authority. Here the patients are shuffled about in a formalized daily routine to live their lives isolated from the rest of society. The movie situation reflects the real life problems of institutionalizing mentally ill Americans. A movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill emerged during the later period of the 20^th century. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a film that depicts this deinstitutionalization effort via a negative portrayal of mental health wards.

            McMurphy’s fight against the system demonstrates the challenge to medical authority during the decline of medicine’s Golden Age. As an outsider, he can see how the system has emasculated its patients right from the beginning. Nurse Ratched simply tells the patients that it is medication time over the intercom and they quickly form a line in front of the nurse’s booth. Two suspicious looking white cups are then given to each patient to consume. One of McMurphy’s first acts of rebellion is to ask what the medication is for. Nurse Pilbow’s response is the standard medical authority answer, “It’s just medicine. It’s good for you.” To which McMurphy replies, “I don’t like taking something if I don’t know what it is.” This conversation is a perfect reflection of the decline of medical authority. Whereas doctors could simply prescribe and ask patients to take medication in the past, the new patients refuse to take medication unless it is explain to them. McMurphy challenges the system again during one of Nurse Ratched’s group therapy sessions. Nurse Ratched sees the group discussions as therapeutic and a way to improve patients. Instead sticking to the formula of telling each other’s life stories, McMurphy openly asks to watch the World Series. This rejection of medical procedure for more basic pleasures and satisfactions illustrates another issue of medical compliance, patient satisfaction.

            The mental health system’s failure to actually cure its patients reveals the true purpose of institutionalization to make compliant patients. The film shows the how the mental health ward does not cure patients. Rather the patients are kept confined in the institute to become a part of the system. Despite the rosy talk of rehabilitation and treatments, a high barbed wired fence surrounds the facility. The fence is clearly designed to keep patients in. Even more telling is that McMurphy, the one breaking the rules, provides a far more successful therapeutic treatment than one provided by the facility. Chief Bromden, often ignored as a mute, starts to take part in basketball games. The sensitive Charlie Cheswick blatantly challenges Nurse Ratched’s authority during a group therapy session. Billy Bibbit loses his stutter and gains confidence. How does the system respond to this miraculous improvement in their patients? The authorities come down hard on them. Bromden and Cheswick both get hydroelectric shock therapy. Bibbit is reduced back to his stuttering self because of Nurse Ratched’s threat of disclosing his activities to his mother. The final nail in the coffin is when the McMurphy is reduced to a dullard through a surgical operation. Unable to cope with the challenge to their authority, the institution decided to change a healthy adult male into a mentally deficient individual. The new McMurphy is exactly what the system wants, a quiet and passive person. McMurphy has literally become “a god damn marvel of modern science.”

            The film reflects an issue that continues to plague Americans. Early on mental health institutions were created as a specialty facility for psychiatric disorders. They were seen as a step up from the local care provided the community, which often was a case of no treatment at all. However, the facilities quickly became more like prisons where the insane were restrained. A movement towards more moral treatment did not solve the issue of understaffing and overcrowding. These problems persisted until a new movement of deinstitutionalization emerged. Here is where our film comes in to argue against the institutionalization of mentally deficient and ill individuals. While the movement was ultimately successful, it led to a new dilemma. The problem was that those released from the mental health wards were provided absolutely no treatment or way of coping after their release. Thus, these new citizens of society were stuck as the new underclass because they were unemployable and often homeless, especially those without family support.