One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1975)

Miloš Forman’s 1976 best picture winner, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is one of the most riveting films I have ever watched. The film is based on Ken Kasey’s 1962 novel of the same name. This memorable title comes from a child’s rhyme, "One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest." The rhyme serves as an epigraph, suggesting the film’s themes of obedience vs. deviance, sexuality, and fundamental human needs. 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest takes place in an Oregon mental institution in 1959. Trouble maker Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) angles to get moved from a prison farm to a mental institution for an evaluation, supposing that it will be a less confining establishment. But the disciplinarian Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) administers over the ward with a big stick, keeping her patients in line through abusive practices including medication, humiliating group therapy sessions, and electroconvulsive treatment. The constant verbal and physical disputes between the uncontrollable McMurphy and the hidebound Ratched affect the wellbeing of all the ward's patients.

Although the film is set in a mental hospital, the film isn’t really about mental illness. The film’s overt discussion of what makes a person legally insane further helps us understand one of the films main themes: obedience vs. deviance. Nurse Ratched's ward is a machine run on conformity, obedience, rules, and fear. She expects nothing but compliance to her schedule by the patients. She keeps them in constant state of obedience through her practices of medicating, humiliating, and electroshocking. The patients live in absolute terror of Nurse Ratched, until McMurphy arrives at the ward. McMurphy upsets all the rules of the ward, instilling ideas in the patients that they are people and don’t deserve to be dehumanized by the institution. The ongoing battle of wills between Ratched and McMurphy ultimately leads to the movie’s final scene, where we truly witness the meaning behind the film’s title. 

Another way that Nurse Rachet controls the men in the ward is through shaming and disgracing them for their sexuality and masculinity. This is yet another major reason for conflict between McMurphy and Ratchet. Ratchet is not only disapproving of the patient's sexual identities but also of their masculinity. Early into the film, she refuses to put on the baseball game for the members of the ward simply because it goes against her ideas that the ward should be a place of celibacy and emasculation. McMurphy is infuriated with Rachet’s mariatrical rule over the ward. McMurphy is inherently sexist in his nature, he calls Ratchet a c*nt and defends statutory r*pe in his first meeting at the institution. McMurphy hates that Ratchet is a woman with control over him, and one night in an unruly mood, he brings in two prostitutes to the ward for himself and the other patients. When a member of the ward, Billy, is caught with one of the prostitutes, Ratched threatens him with the thing that scares him the most, his mother’s disapproval. Rachet publicly shames Billy despite already knowing his past trauma of sexual relations with women. 

One of the most important lessons I have learned in school is that the four fundamental human needs are safety, autonomy, connection to others, and a sense of purpose. While I mostly used this information when studying my school’s curriculum, it applies perfectly to this movie. Throughout the film, we can see the characters denied their basic rights. The patients don’t feel safe because of the way Nurse Rachet runs the ward. The patients have no autonomy, Nurse Rachet decides everything for them. The patients have little to no connection to others outside the ward, they are prisoners. The patients’ only sense of purpose is to abide by Nurse Ratched. Most of the patients are used to having limited rights because of the way the institution treats them, however McMurphy is not. When McMurphy rebels against his and his friends treatment, he attacks Nurse Rachted. McMurphy is then lobotomized, forever paying the price of for questioning the hierarchy inside the ward. 

This movie is excellent and powerful. While on the surface it’s a film about the patients in a mental hospital, underneath it's a film about the endeavors of an autocratic force to diminish the individual. This film reminds you that freedom is precious.

Here is the trailer to the film.