285 - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Psycho-Symbolic Review

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Psycho-Symbolic Review
By Lee Myers and Hugh T. Kerr

JUST because a film wins a few honorable mentions from critics and reviewers doesn't guarantee that it's a good movie. But if it collects the Motion Picture Academy Awards for best picture, best actor, best actress, best director, and best film script-it must deserve some attention.

No doubt some of Ken Kesey's original "Merry Pranksters" may feel that the film betrays their psychedelic protests of the 60's, and Kesey himself is reputed to be unhappy about what later re-writers have done to his song. No matter, the film makes its own way, and the 70's are very different from the 60's, even if the distinction between those who are in and those who are out of a mental institution is still foggy.

Superficial in many ways, the film has a curious capacity to rivet the viewer's attention until the closing scene. Those who have seen the film confess that it casts a continuing and provocative spell. Like a vision, or a bad dream, it impinges on consciousness in an adhesive way.

I

The central conflict in the film revolves around the relationship of Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) to the male patients of her mental hospital ward. Nurse Ratched is a very domineering person with definite expectations and demands for her patients. The implication is that she knows what's best for their growth, and so they must conform to her wishes in order to remain on her ward. Any deviance from her expectations results in punitive reprisals. And she has quite an arsenal available, such as medication, electric shock treatment, and psychosurgery. Her expectations, demands, and "shoulds" become the means of survival.

Of course, Nurse Ratched's means of survival play right into the "felt" needs of the patients. It is safe to assume that the patients grew up in environments that were extreme in their non-facilitating qualities. Their real self was buried very early in their childhood. The

United Artists, 1975; directed by Milos Forman; film script by Laurence Hauben and Bo Goldman; adapted from the novel of the same name by Ken Kesey (1962); with Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher. When Jack Nicholson received his award as best actor, he hinted that there must be as many crazy people in the Academy as in the movie. When Louise Fletcher accepted her award as best actress, she "signed" in the language of the deaf to her parents: "I want to thank you for teaching me to have a dream. You are seeing my dream come true. Thank you."
Two previous articles on Kesey have appeared in THEOLOGY TODAY: "A PsychoTheological Appraisal of the New Left," by James N. Lapsley (Jan. 1969) and "Parables of Costly Grace: Flannery O'Connor and Ken Kesey," by George N. Boyd (July 1972).
Lee Myers is Director of the Kanawha Pastoral Counseling Center, Charleston, West Virginia. Hugh T. Kerr is Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY.

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adult demands of living were simply too much for their false self to handle. They ended up in an environment where control was exercised by someone outside of themselves. They gave up on life. Their false self, the one that was developed in order to survive in the environment of their childhood, was simply not adequate to meet the challenges and opportunities of adult life.

Nurse Ratched is an interesting, if repulsive, person. Straight-laced, starched-white, a no-nonsense woman, she comes across, in the beginning, as low-keyed. Her control is subtle and disguised as real concern for her patients. But as the film moves along, "control" becomes more ominous and blatant.

Two of the major characters on the ward are Billy and the Chief. Billy is a young adult who has a stuttering problem, a deep fear of life, and an infantile mother dependency. Billy's fear forces him to accept the control of Nurse Ratched even when he finally experiences some feelings of liberation and forgets, momentarily, to stutter. But when the nurse threatens to tell his mother about his misbehavior, Billy becomes speechless, and in desperation cuts his throat with a broken glass.

The Chief, a huge American Indian (played majestically by Will Sampson), is equally fearful, particularly of expressing his physical aggressiveness. Like most dependent and passive people, he hides a secret strength. In his case, it is playing "deaf and dumb." A towering, silent monument, the Chief is haunted by memories of his ancient father, suffering the pains of some terminal illness. In a final act of brutal compassion, the Chief suffocated his father, relieving him from further agony. Curiously, at the end of the film, the Chief is the only one to fly over the cuckoo's nest to find release and liberation.

II

There are other interesting people on the ward, some who have voluntarily committed themselves, and some close to being grotesques. Into this "crazy" environment appears the hero, McMurphy (Jack Nicholson). It is not exactly clear why he has come to the hospital, but he is obviously a con artist who knows how to trick the authorities. McMurphy is a man who responds out of his own being. He is a carefree soul who enjoys life to the fullest. His pleasures are simple and basic-fishing, sports, women, poker. When McMurphy arrives on the ward, he is distressed by what he sees. He stares at the other patients in amazement, questioning how grown men can give up their humanity so easily. His first involvement in the ward is to get a poker game going that has a little spirit and excitement in it.

It is not too long before a confrontation between McMurphy's free spirit and Nurse Ratched's control takes place. McMurphy is simply not a man that responds to outside expectations, demands, and "shoulds." He is concerned with having fun and enjoying life. He wants to be him-self. The ensuing scenes are a delight to the eye and ear as

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we see McMurphy bring life to a group of men who have lost their real self. The excitement of a make-believe baseball game on TV, and a basketball game when the patients defeat the hospital attendants, raise the hopes and spirits of what were once hopeless and spiritless automatons.

III

The most hilarious episode is a fishing party, spontaneously organized (if that is the word) by McMurphy who drives off in the hospital bus with his pals and a pick-up girl. McMurphy teaches his fisherman friends how to bait their hooks and steer the boat, hoping he and the pick-up can retire below decks. Alas, the timid helmsman, overcome with his new responsibility, abandons the wheel. The boat goes round and round, a great fish is caught, lines and poles get tangled.

The return to port is triumphant with the grinning fishermen displaying their huge catch. No matter that a police helicopter hovers overhead and the stern-faced custodians line the shore.

IV

The film moves to the climactic scene when McMurphy decides he can't take Nurse Ratched's control. Together with the Chief, he plots to escape from the hospital. As a final gesture of caring concern, he throws a party for the patients. A night attendant is bribed to open a window for two call-girls and a sack of booze. The party is a howling disaster but a most enjoyable experience for the men. Their faces light up, color returns to their cheeks, their eyes sparkle.

McMurphy pairs Billy with one of the willing girls, and a kind of preformal chaos (Wa1purgisnacht) upsets the conventions and overrules the ordered world.

When Nurse Ratched returns to her post the next morning, she finds the ward in a shambles. She soon reasserts her absolute control over everyone. But things get worse. When the nurse threatens to tell his mother about the girl, Billy kills himself. McMurphy, fingered by Billy as the instigator of the party, is treated to the ultimate form of control, psycho-surgery. The Chief is horror-struck at seeing his friend and liberator reduced to a vegetable non-human, and he repeats on McMurphy his agonizing act of compassionate suffocation. Having put his father out of misery, he must now dispatch his only friend. With a superhuman physical effort, the Chief elevates a water fountain, hurls it through the barred window, and escapes from the hospital to freedom at last.

V

For those of us in the helping professions, whether therapists, ministers, teachers, counsellors, the film asks us to question seriously how we surround a non-facilitating environment with our own expectations, demands, and "shoulds." The film asks us to question our

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particular school of thought, whether it be psychoanalysis, transactional analysis, gestalt, or what have you, and see if we are only communicating another set of expectations for our clients. Oftentimes these schools turn into another form of Nurse Ratched's "law." It is easy to see in the human potential movement how self-actualization, expressing feelings (particularly anger), and developing higher consciousness become another "should" which distracted people feel they must meet. Perhaps they feel that way because we in the helping professions communicate that "our way" is "the way."

So what is proclaimed as freedom is really the "law" in disguise (Luther). People come to us for help, looking for an environment in which their real self can be born again. But they often find only another set of "shoulds," expectations, and demands. So often we forget that our theory is nothing more than a road map, not the destination. Thus people flit from one psychological school to another, one human potential movement to another, each time emerging unfulfilled and disappointed. Wanting freedom and the gospel, they find new confinements and the old constraints of the "law."

VI

The film suggests that the greatest thing we in the helping professions have to offer people who seek our help is a sense of authentic humanity. If our own humanity is controlled by the "law," then people asking our help come only into contact with another false "self." But if we are having fun, living our own life, whatever the restraints, motivated by our own inner integrity, then clients, patients, parishioners, and others are free to recapture their own real self and give blossom to the seed that has lain dormant within them.

McMurphy challenges all of us in the helping professions to reexamine our own lives and ask, if in the process of being trained, analyzed, and educated, we may have lost the secret of being human. McMurphy shows that the spirit of adventure, humor, compassion, risk-taking, and the determination to respond to inner instincts are road-signs to what it means really to be human.

Nowhere do we get any hint that McMurphy is sacrificing himself or making some sort of supreme effort to help unfortunates. Yet at the same time, we see within him a deep compassion for his friends. It seems to say: "Hey! There is more to life than what you are experiencing; you are more than you see yourself to be; you can enjoy life and experience yourself and your humanity in a very different way."

McMurphy's word to his fellow patients comes as exciting good news. He has an impulse to make them sense what they can become-even within the narrow restrictions of a mental institution. Compare that to a person (pastor or counsellor) who is trying to help others out of a sense of duty, obligation, or a feeling of superior insight! McMurphy, quite simply, prods all of us in the helping professions to "practice what we preach."

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VII

The film provokes, inescapably, some important biblical themes. It doesn't require much stretching of imagination to see Nurse Ratched (ratchet?) as the paradigm of the "law" that needs to be fulfilled through the gospel of redeeming grace. The "law" says that in order to be good, accepted, and approved, here is what is required. The "law" is the religious form of expectations, "shoulds," and demands. Many of us, including pastors and counsellors as well as clients, patients, and parishioners, are quite content to live this way. We voluntarily commit ourselves to this regimen because it promises order, security, approval, and assurance. But there are others who yearn to escape from this house of bondage into the free world of unexpected possibilities, the sphere of sheer grace, the joy of liberating ecstasy, and the good news of the gospel.

If McMurphy (a catholic Catholic?) is a literary and filmic paradigm of Jesus, then the good news is that the "law" is no longer needed for love, life, acceptance, and integrity. Jesus brings the message that people no longer need to live up to demands, "shoulds," and expectations in order to be accepted. One's humanity does not have to be earned, controlled, or conformed to another's expectations. The New Testament tells of Jesus' vigorous opposition to the "law," as conventionally interpreted, and his happy acceptance of people as they are. The only real absolute is God, and so we humans are free to be ourselves as we hope for something better.

VIII

It is tempting, and perhaps illusory, to see Christ-figures and evangelical symbols here, there, and everywhere in modern secular culture. But several theologians today are discussing with great seriousness the notion of "theology as narrative and story," though most of them probably couldn't tell a yarn if they had to. And it may also be true, if disturbing, that the gospel gets communicated today in more valid, imaginative, and hidden ways through art forms, including film, than by way of sermons, historical-critical exegesis, and theological lectures.

Whether Ken Kesey ever had any such thing in mind when he wrote the book, on which the play and the film are based, is immaterial. If the good news of redemption, new life, and liberation from the "law" are proclaimed, there-we can be sure-broods the spirit of the Christ.

The bizarre setting and the gutter dialogue of the film will be offensive to many. But a mental hospital, with its ambivalence between appearance and reality, normal and crazy, professionals and patients, inside and outside, restraint and freedom, is an accurate, if disturbing, facsimile of much of contemporary existence.

There is little danger that the original gospel story can be supplanted

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or perverted by a film of this sort. But there are numerous parallels in the secular copy that remind us of the master-original. To mention only the obvious: a rough dozen disciples, a big rock of a man, a miraculous catch of fish, an intoxicating last supper, the dumb speak, the deaf hear, the lame and halt walk and dance, the dead come to life, and the one who brings these blessings is betrayed by a friend and cruelly immolated as a trouble-maker and disturber of the peace.

Far-fetched? Improbable? Absurd? Derivative? Imitative? Dependent? Well, those descriptions define rather well what a cuckoo's nest might be. But of course we know, don't we?, that the cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds and mimics their songs. No wonder that the cuckoo is a synonym for a crazy person! The object of life is not to look for a warm nest in which to settle down, since it doesn't exist anyway, but to fly over the cuckoo's nest.