Kenny Powers, former baseball phenom, favorite son of Shelby, North Carolina, returns to his hometown after flaming out of the major leagues in humiliating fashion; this is the premise of the first season of Eastbound & Down, a show that tells the story of the complex and fragile racial position of lower-class whites in the American South. Its protagonist, Powers, is a mulleted, swaggering redneck with a proclivity for dramatic monologues, a sort of Dixie Hamlet possessed of the prince’s sense of self-importance but with his ambivalence replaced by absolute certainty of his own greatness. His deeds and utterances drive the show, which may at first seem to be a collection of cheap laughs at the expense of some hicks but is actually rather nuanced – as you’re chuckling at the racist antics of Powers you’re also feeling empathy with him, forcing you to reevaluate the moral judgements you made freely only minutes before. The point is nothing in Eastbound & Down is as simple as it seems, not even whiteness in the heart of the former Confederacy, and that to fully understand it (the whiteness) requires the viewer to be seized by some uncomfortable associations. To understand the Southern racist, you must drive a mile in his pickup truck.

The show does not deceive its viewer as to Kenny’s beliefs. To the contrary, they are nearly the first things you learn about him, and they are unpleasant: prejudices against black people, jewish people, gay people, all forthrightly expressed during interviews in various pro baseball locker rooms. He’s knocked out of baseball, and is shown driving back into Shelby finishing beers and tossing them out his window. Eastbound aired on HBO, and it’s fair to say declaring proudly one’s bigotry and littering the casualties of domestic brews swallowed while operating a motor vehicle are outside the milieu of most people who subscribe to an expensive channel to see complex characters’ nihilistic ruminations on the banality of evil as well as tastefully shot sex scenes. To that audience, Kenny is an oddity to be gawked at, a confirmation of their worst fears: the U.S South is an alien land full of unreachable bigots with whom they have nothing in common.

But there is a trick here. The viewer will quickly come to identify with Kenny Powers. Not because his views are secretly less repulsive than they appear, but because empathy is possible despite them. Soon after he bumps back into town, he goes to a training session for substitute teachers, where the other attendees recognize him and chuckle about his professional downfall. On his first day of work, his boss, Terrence Cutler, the school’s principal, jokes about how the once-mighty Kenny Powers now works beneath him at a middle school; to add insult to injury, Culter is engaged to Kenny’s high school sweetheart, April, for whom Kenny still has romantic feelings. These and other sundry humiliations – having to move in with his brother Dustin, getting made fun of by his students – earn Kenny the sympathy of the viewer. It’s hard not to see a guy in an ill-fitting school polo shirt and a mullet be repeatedly embarrassed and not feel bad for him, and to remember moments where you might have been similarly disrespected; here, empathy blossoms. This identification is fostered by Kenny’s placement as the protagonist of the story, the hero who provides the “primary point of view” (Cohen 257). The camera is deployed so the viewer sees from Kenny’s perspective, and his monologues describe both the action and the feelings it engenders in him; it’s difficult to avoid seeing the story through his eyes.

This of course presents a contradiction. How can well-meaning viewers with an egalitarian racial spirit see themselves in an inveterate racist who has no qualms about sharing his beliefs? Eastbound slyly evades this question by taking aim at whiteness, trying to pull back the curtain on the idea of it as a monolithic identity and reveal its internal tensions and contradictions. One of the show’s main antagonists, Cutler, is a white person of a very different sort than Kenny. His sport is triathlon, and the show delights in showing him in form-fitting bicycle outfits and swimming gettups to reveal his thin-yet-gelatinous physique. His copulation with April involves rickety thrusting and awkward banter. He’s feckless in dealing with students, and communicates awkwardly with his staff. But, despite his weaknesses, he can embarrass Kenny. At a backyard barbeque thrown by him and April, Cutler drunkenly mocks Powers for being a baseball has-been, a failure now condemned to the humiliation of teaching gym at a middle school taking orders from people who once watched him on television. Notably, Cutler speaks sans southern accent. It’s this detail that reveals the point of Cutler’s diatribe. Cutler is strange and sad, yet he has power enough to crush a former World Series champion emotionally and marry his love to boot; in making this possible, the show argues that the most feeble northerner has the power to humiliate a successful embodiment of the rural south. The viewers’ identification with Kenny means they see this verbal attack as an injustice, and absorb the intended message: poor southerners are frequently slighted by a culture that prioritizes northern notions of white identity.

It’s not just the north that attacks Kenny’s rural whiteness. Ashley Schaeffer, Kenny’s other primary foe, owns a BMW dealership, lives in a plantation house passed down from his ancestors, has white hair, wears white suits, and speaks with an exaggerated patrician drawl; he is the very embodiment of the Southern landed gentry. Schaeffer, knowing Kenny is back in Shelby, offers him meager sums – sometimes paid out in coupons to local businesses – to put on, at Ashley Schaeffer BMW, exhibitions of a fastball he can no longer throw. It’s essentially his humiliation displayed and exchanged for cash, and Kenny loathes it so much he decides on a petty form of revenge. He returns at night and drunkenly tosses a cinder block through the window of a dealership BMW and then drives away. This act heightens rather than underscores the embarrassment the viewer feels for Powers. He cannot stand up to his tormentor to his face – he looks like a fool when he tries – so he must return to defile one car in a lot full of them; this act is captured on film and used to blackmail him later. Again, the divisions between the types of white people are stark: the wealthy, upper-class southerner can exploit his redneck counterpart to sell pre-owned vehicles and the latter has no recourse.

This sense of abuse, having been beaten down, wears on a person. Kenny decides to swallow his pride and become a glasses-wearing teacher who takes his responsibilities seriously, polo shirt tucked into zipper-sided sweatpants; he turns down an offer for a pitch-off at Ashley Schaeffer BMW between himself and his nemesis from his pro baseball days, Reg Mackworthy. He also helps his brother out with his contracting business, where the two of them are subject to further belittling, this time from a rich professional house flipper for whom they’re constructing a sunroom. She berates the two at length, a verbal bludgeoning they endure until Dustin, pushed to the brink, declares that they’re done working for the day, and that he and Kenny are headed to the BMW dealership so his pro baseball-playing brother can prove himself again in a pitch-off. It’s a moment of triumph, not only for Dustin and Kenny, but also for the lower-class white trash group to which they belong, a victory the show underscores with dialogue; as they depart, Kenny calls the house-flipper a “city bitch” while she mutters “rednecks” under her breath. In emphasizing the intra-racial conflict present in both the sunroom scene and the subsequent pitch-off, the stakes are raised – the fight is no longer about Kenny trying to prove himself to the people of Shelby, but instead of a southern white redneck identity fighting to stay respected in a world that is hostile to it.

And in this battle the rednecks win. April hears on the radio the announcement of the upcoming pitch-off while lubing up Cutler before a triathlon; she breaks her promise to see him at the finish line to watch Kenny try to return to former glory. Her presence spurs him on, and he delivers a blazing fastball that knocks Mackworthy’s eye out. It’s a victory over Cutler, whose fiance leaves him for Kenny, and over Schaeffer, whose promotion intended to humiliate Kenny ends with an eye on his dealership floor and Powers’s fastball velocity back in the triple digits. Kenny celebrates by smashing BMW windows with hurled baseballs, an act once done at night as proof of his cultural impotence redone in the daylight as proof of triumph. In having Kenny symbolically defeat both the condescending northerner and the wealthy southern plantation owner, the show celebrates the redneck identity of its protagonist and argues against its cultural demonization.

But Eastbound does not savor the pleasure of Kenny’s symbolic victory. It punishes the viewers for their identification with Kenny by reminding them of his racism. In no sense is he a changed man. This is evident in his confrontations with Mackworthy when he feels the need to point out his rival’s blackness as a knock against him. Even more egregious is his chat with a pro executive for Tampa who informs him that, after seeing the return of his fastball, the team is looking to sign him, that they need a “shot of personality”, and asks if the racism and homophobia that once made him famous are beliefs he still holds. Kenny cheerfully informs him that his prejudices are the same, and the pro scout reacts positively – inflammatory comments brings fans to the stadium. The audience, rooting for Kenny’s success, have been duped into supporting a racist who succeeds not despite his bigotry but because of it. In building Powers up to be a hero who represents a group of people, promoting audience identification with him, and then rewarding him for holding the stereotypical prejudices of that group, the show can be seen as a tacit endorsement of those values. Never change, and society will reward you eventually.

This analysis would hold true if Eastbound & Down concluded with a victorious Kenny returning to the major leagues. It does not. He receives a call as he’s about to leave Shelby for Tampa saying the offer has been revoked, that no team in the big leagues wants to sign him. The idea that racism would end up a benefit for him is shown to be a fiction. This reversal changes the meaning of his previous triumphs. When he knocked out Mackworthy’s eye, showed up Schaeffer, and won back April from Cutler, the expectation was for future success – that defeating his foes meant a demonstrably better life ahead for him. Instead, he is humiliated once more. The racism for which he was once rewarded is shown to be an anachronism, the remnant of a system used to suture together an alliance between whites of the upper and lower class; see Kenny facing off against Mackworthy, both of them being exploited by Schaeffer for profit, but opposed nonetheless (Mahoney 133). But that system of white alliance is fraying at the seams. The divisions between whites are sharper than ever, the conflict playing out on lines of identity: north versus south, rich versus poor, city versus country. Eastbound & Down reveals and plays out those conflicts, only to say that they do not matter. While being the most talented or favored white person might have once meant automatic success, it does not now. You, the redneck, can win, see your ideological foes bested, and be left with nothing in the end. Whiteness doesn’t mean as much as it once did. It’s this author’s opinion that this change means a better, fairer society, but realizing it is going to leave Kenny Powers and many others like him crying in the front seat of their cars. It’s a harsh reality, but one we’re going to have to acclimate ourselves to as a culture. The alternatives are too unpleasant to bear.

BoJack Horseman is a sad show. Its characters are unhappy with their lives; its viewers are often dejected upon seeing an episode’s downer conclusion, which is the kind of ending the series prefers. It actively punishes the audience for rooting for its characters. Most critics identify the despairing mood: Ian Crouch of the New Yorker describes the show as “incessantly bleak”¹. But the reasons they give for this despair – the depression of the main character, the cruelty of some of his decisions – do not fully capture why the show is so emotionally powerful. BoJack Horseman succeeds at making the viewer miserable by offering a sincere vision of happiness and rejecting it. Twenty-five minutes watching a depressed anthropomorphic cartoon horse win a game show will convince you that glimpses of utopia can make you sad.

Heavy stuff, particularly for a show with a premise as silly as BoJack Horseman’s. The show’s eponymous protagonist is a large cartoon horse who walks, talks, and feels like a human. He is a former sitcom actor who, having made more money than he knows what to do with, mostly spends his time drinking to abuse while watching episodes of his old TV show. He is severely depressed. The first season chronicles his attempt to return to cultural relevance by writing a best-selling book, an endeavor he undertakes because he believes becoming famous again would make him happy. He is unsuccessful in his attempt at happiness, but does manage to re-enter the public eye; he is cast to star in a biopic about Secretariat, which is where the second season begins. The eighth episode of the second season, titled “Let’s Find Out”, finds BoJack on a trivia game show for celebrities hosted by his cheerful rival, Mr. Peanutbutter. (Mr. Peanutbutter is a yellow lab who also acts like a human; in the world of the show, all animals act like people.) The show is on a network run by BoJack’s girlfriend, an owl named Wanda.

“Let’s Find Out” makes BoJack into an anti-hero, someone who, despite being constantly embarrassed and defeated, is able to show surprising resilience. Anti-heroes are “weak”, “ineffectual”, and “inept”, which certainly describes BoJack during the first segment of the game show². He gives a series of wrong answers to astoundingly difficult and trivial questions (“what is the average rainfall in Bora Bora?”), for which he is mocked mercilessly by Mr. Peanutbutter. He has his alcoholism exposed on national television. When he attempts a witty rejoinder to some of Mr. Peanutbutter’s abuse, he is booed loudly by the studio audience. The ultimate embarrassment comes in the form of a surprise: the show is joined by a second, “big” celebrity, the actor Daniel Radcliffe, relegating BoJack to the status of “little” celebrity. When BoJack tries to greet Radcliffe, whom he’s met before, as equals, he is snubbed – the “big celebrity” has forgotten they’ve ever been introduced. It’s this sense of slight, of injustice, that provokes empathy. The viewer roots for BoJack because of his perseverance in defiance of humiliation.

But BoJack is not depicted as stupid or weak, no matter how many questions he answers incorrectly. Instead, he is presented as a smart victim of an unfair system, which allows the show to shift its critique from its character to the society he exists in. The absurdity is apparent from the game show’s first segment, a “small talk round” during which BoJack is punished for his correct descriptions of his activities the night before, and continues through the trivia questions, as when he incorrectly selects “D, all of the above” for a question whose answer is “A and B, with C also being acceptable”. Daniel Radcliffe, his adversary, gets to answer questions about colors (“blue and yellow combined makes green”) and snatch cash out of the air while BoJack is given a minute to write an essay on European history. His thesis statement is strong and reveals a surprising amount of knowledge about the causes of the French Revolution, but this doesn’t matter: his essay is tossed in the trash and his humiliation continues. His intelligence is irrelevant; there is seemingly no way for him to win. In ensuring its protagonist is a victim of circumstance instead of his own personal failings, the show uses the anti-hero as a way to gain identification from the audience, who can empathize with the experience of unfair treatment despite adequate qualifications.

This identified injustice sets the show up for a utopian solution. Utopian moments in film address inadequacies in society with an idealized remedy, an example of what a better world would look like³. In “Let’s Find Out”, Bojack is informed of Mr. Peanutbutter’s “tell”: whenever the dog gets excited, his ears flop upwards, giving away the correct response to the trivia questions. It allows for a montage of Bojack shouting zany answers while Daniel Radcliffe and Mr. Peanutbutter look on incredulously. The show works here on a utopian level, BoJack’s mistreatment in an absurd system corrected by the cleverness that had been previously stifled. It imagines, briefly, an ideal world where a competition of knowledge is won by the smarter person.

But the show rejects this notion of utopia almost as soon as it appears and replaces it with a different one. During a commercial break, BoJack’s girlfriend Wanda approaches him to ask for a favor: she needs him to throw the game. In coming dangerously close to winning, he has upset the game show’s viewers, who are rooting for Daniel Radcliffe and whom she needs to satisfy as part of her job at the network. This request might seem narrative interrupting the ideal world, a betrayal of the previously-extended utopian vision; that’s because it is. It’s explicitly a return to the unjust former state, where the game is rigged to favor the undeserving. A different form of utopia is offered in its place, one that could be described as dealing with “representations of interpersonal relationships”⁴. This kind of utopian scene imagines what relationships would look like in a freer, better world, unconstrained by patriarchal or capitalist notions of self-interest. Wanda’s asking allows BoJack the opportunity to deepen their relationship by performing a selfless act. The utopian dimensions are clear: the viewer watches the character they identify with ameliorate his isolation by incurring a cost to himself to move close to another person, a decision that addresses real alienation by showing them a better world, one in which someone will sacrifice for you. Before BoJack flubs the final question on purpose, sentimental music plays as BoJack glances at Wanda. His selfless act will presumably be rewarded.

It is not. The show refuses to honor its utopian promise. The question BoJack intentionally blunders away is about Secretariat, the horse he is playing in an upcoming movie. For this mistake he is ridiculed endlessly by Mr. Peanutbutter and laughed at by Daniel Radcliffe and the audience, a humiliation that is too much for BoJack to endure. While he at first protests meekly, asking Mr. Peanutbutter to quickly move on, the continued mockery turns him cruel, leading him attack Mr. Peanutbutter by saying the dog’s wife took a job in a war-torn country just to escape their awful marriage. It’s petty and harsh. Whatever benefit he got from his utopian moment is shown to pale in comparison to the pain of the mockery he had to endure after it.

This can be seen as narrative intruding on utopian moments, a circumstance that, in Dyer’s writing on the subject, did not diminish the importance of the utopian scene itself⁵. To the contrary, such disruptions throw the moment of utopian solution into stark relief: this is how much it stands out when compared to the world we live in today. But “Let’s Find Out” denies the viewer the comfort of this interpretation. At the end of the episode, BoJack is offered an opportunity to redeem himself for his bitterness. If he answers a question correctly, the game show will donate a million dollars to charity; if he gets it wrong, the show will set ablaze the half-million it had already pledged. The question is an easy one: who played the titular role in the Harry Potter films? It’s clear that BoJack knows the answer, but pretends to be confused, mirroring Daniel Radcliffe’s earlier ignorance of his name. The answer he gives, over dramatic music, shocks everyone: “Elijah Wood?”. The sheer cruelty of the decision to burn a half-million dollars for charity to make a point in a petty feud is astounding, and would be depressing enough on its own. But the fact that the decision is clearly made to parallel the previous moment of utopia makes it especially devastating. When BoJack answers a question wrong to make Wanda happy, it is about a movie he is starring in; when BoJack answers a question wrong to spite Daniel Radcliffe, it is about a movie Radcliffe starred in. In both circumstances, the camera cuts, accompanied by music, to Wanda looking expectantly in the tunnel before focusing back on BoJack’s face as he answers. The parallels are the show’s way of equating the two decisions. The fleeting moment of utopia cannot last, and the vulnerability it required exposed BoJack to abuse harsh enough to engender intense spite. The decision to give an incorrect answer can be seen as a dark utopian moment, a fantasy for the viewer where they have the power to take out their justifiable frustrations in the most destructive way possible. This fantasy is never corrected; it is the note on which episode ends. The utopian moment of interpersonal happiness is snatched away and replaced by cruelty.

“Let’s Find Out” complies with the notion that art works by giving its audience an idea of a massively better world, but does not use its utopian vision to the same effect. In most entertainment, the utopia is meant to be savored, shown in contrast to the inadequacies of the society they inhabit. BoJack Horseman provides a glimpse of a freer, more intimate society only to crush it viciously. It complicates  the utopian theory of culture by proving utopian visions can be used to make people sad. Some art argues that better world is only possible in your imagination, and that your fantasies only deepen your inevitable despair upon being crushed by the society you actually inhabit. When a huge pile of cash is dropped into a roaring fire, the audience’s utopian hopes drop with it. The world offers to give money to charity and burns it out of spite.

If you ask your typical claiming-nonracist confederate sympathizer – I’m not talking about revisionist-history reenactors or statue-enthusiasts, who are wrong for their own reasons; I mean bumper-sticker-on-a-pickup-truck guys – why they own Stars and Bars paraphernalia if not to express a hatred of African Americans, you’ll invariably get the same response: an endorsement of a spirit of rebellion*. Most people, particularly the culturally-liberal set overrepresented among those who care about the American film canon, realize that this explanation is either mendacious or foolish: rebellions are only laudable when they fight against something pernicious. So why, then, have those progressives elevated to the level of a classic a film that seeks to celebrate a doomed resistance to the cultural advancement of women and black people? For that’s what One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is, a movie that valorizes the efforts of white men to retard social progress, and does so effectively enough to get even the most liberal of audiences not only cheering throatily for gendered violence but also associating the plight of the modern white man with the suffering of a group that white men were primarily responsible for perpetrating a genocide against.

This deception may seem like a difficult feat, but it’s easily accomplished through the film’s use of narrative structure. Viewers understand from the start they are to root for McMurphy, who is established as the film’s protagonist by his positive portrayal in every scene. It’s certainly not by virtue of his character – he’s been in and out of jail for assault, and has malingered his way into a mental institution to avoid a work farm after a statutory rape conviction. No matter his personal failings, he is favored by the story in his conflict with the authority in the psychiatric hospital, shown as the only patient courageous enough to resist the demands of the domineering hospital staff when he craftily avoids having to swallow mandatory pills and proposes the strict schedule be altered to allow the men to watch the World Series. The hospital authority is shown as dominating, oppressive, particularly through its leader Nurse Ratched, who asks bullying questions during group therapy and manipulates a vote to ensure the patients cannot watch the baseball game despite the enthusiastic support of every aware member of the ward. Her name is a unsubtle bit of dramatic nomenclature: “Ratched” is essentially “ratchet”, a tool used to tighten and to bludgeon. McMurphy’s rebellion is against this repressive authority that seeks to clamp down on the men’s desires and beat back any challenges to its power.

This resistance to domination is seen by many as the point of the film, and is the reason it remains lauded. But a framing of the movie as a mere celebration of rebellion is incomplete – it misses the symbols and cues that indicate the broader cultural forces represented by McMurphy and the hospital authority he is fighting against.

McMurphy’s acts of resistance check all the boxes of stereotypical masculinity. He likes sports – he defies Nurse Ratched by requesting the men be allowed to watch the World Series and jolts the patients out of their stupors by starting a pickup basketball game during recreation time. He’s into fishing, conversing buddy-buddy with a doctor about a photo of the latter’s biggest catch; when it comes time to steal a school bus and break the men off the ward, he takes them out to sea and and teaches them the tricks of angling. On the way, he proves that he also likes sex by picking up a prostitute friend of his named Candy and cavorting with her below the deck of the boat. These desires are under normal ward circumstances denied to him by authority, and not just any authority; McMurphy is a non-crazy person in a mental institution, a confinement that suggests the stereotypical wants of guys have been pathologized, declared medically abnormal and requiring intensive treatment to correct.

The person in charge of constraining his desires is Nurse Ratched, presented as the embodiment of female command over men; she rules over the ward with an iron voice. The film makes her a symbol of a larger conflict through contrast and by action. Ratched and her crony are the only female characters important to the film’s central conflict, and they’re the antagonists. Ratched goes about her domination in a way that evokes a stereotypical difference between women and men – while McMurphy is a man of action, running around getting into hijinks, Ratched maintains her distance, controlling the men through procedure and implicit threats. Medication is distributed from behind a window; orders are given over a loudspeaker. Privileges are revoked and cigarettes rationed. When physical force is required, she retreats behind the glass and calls in a squad of orderlies to bring McMurphy to the shock therapy table; she isn’t there when they give him the volts. Her most cruel act is a verbal threat: she tells the poor, stuttering, Oedipally-afflicted Billy that she will tell his mother that he had sex during the patients’ night of drunken revelry, a prospect so devastating for him he commits suicide. It’s here the gender dynamics are most clear – a stereotypical male action is turned against Billy by the social pressure of two women who control his life. McMurphy’s attempted revenge on Ratched after Billy’s body is found is also gendered – he chokes her, trying to remove the two things that give the nurse her power: her distance and her voice. It’s a man reasserting the primacy of physical violence, a sphere where he has the advantage, to try to make a woman – all controlling, nagging women – shut up forever.

McMurphy is foiled and Ratched saved by Washington, one of the three main orderlies on the ward. These orderlies have a feature in common: they’re all black. With the exception of Chief Bromden, to whom we will return, these are the film’s only characters who are recognizably non-white. Their blackness is made conspicuous not only by contrast to the white patients but also by dialogue. In a fight with McMurphy, Washington holds him down and calls him a “punk-ass motherfucker”; in response to McMurphy indicating he is to be free in sixty-eight days, Washington informs him “that’s in jail, sucka”, implying his hospital stay is indefinite. None of this is particularly subtle and it seems embarrassing to continue to list evidence – the point is, the orderlies talk in a way that is recognizable as Black English. The three African-Americans are not the only orderlies on the ward – others appear to break up fights – so the decision to depict them as the main henchmen on the villainous side is purposeful – it suggests black people collude with the system to oppress the desires of white men.

To understand One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is to understand what its characters represent. It is not enough to view the film as a tale of resistance to authority and celebrate it on that basis; it is a tale of a specific resistance – that of white men to their perceived confinement as a result of social change – to a specific domination  – that of the supposedly ascendant cultural position of women and African-Americans. It makes this conflict real and picks the viewers’ side for them. But what does it present as a solution? That answer is more complex, and is revealed only in the movie’s famous final scenes.

The film makes clear neither side is willing to abandon the fight. After McMurphy’s boat trip, a group of correctional bureaucratic-types are in a meeting debating whether to remove him from the hospital and send him back to the work farm. Nurse Ratched comes down strongly against this proposal, insisting he remain on her ward – she will not back down from fixing a problem. Nor will McMurphy from a fight – during the patients’ all-night party, he steals a key and opens a previously locked window through which he could escape to the outside world, but chooses not to, instead falling asleep on the ground beneath it. By giving both sides a choice to exit that they decline the film makes clear it does not see a scenario where one side opts out of the conflict.

Other potential solutions to the conflict are hinted at, but ultimately rejected. The problem of controlling, oppressive women – the world’s Nurse Ratcheds – can be solved if women became pliable, agreeable, compliant – the prostitutes Candy and Rose, who laugh at everyone’s jokes, say things like “nice place you’ve got here, Mac” when entering the hospital, and have sex with whomever McMurphy tells them to. Aggressive black men working as the muscle of the system can be replaced by those like the night guard, Turkle, who allows McMurphy to smuggle in women and liquor in exchange for some cash and favors. These positively-portrayed characters are only a temporary respite from the fight, however – in the morning, Nurse Ratched and the orderlies return to restore order and administer punishment. The idea of going back to the old paradigm is shown to be a fantasy.

The film’s true solution is not a solution at all. It reveals itself during the movie’s denouement, after the climactic scene where McMurphy tries to choke out Nurse Ratched and in so doing seals his fate.

To understand the significance of the ending of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest you must understand the character of Chief Bromden and his implications for the film’s symbolic conflict. Chief is the only non-white patient on the ward, a towering Native American man who is feigning deafness and dumbness to deal with trauma and avoid interacting with others. His presence can be seen as a way of concealing the movie’s racial argument – the film isn’t depicting a struggle between whites and nonwhites because Chief is on the whites’ side. But it is more significant than that. At one point in this history of this land, Native Americans were unopposed by any group – they were the only ones here. Their desires were bounded only by squabbles with each other. Only after white people arrived did any sort of conflict begin; those fights ended with massive death tolls and, ultimately, the marginalization of Native Americans. By placing Bromden on the side of McMurphy and the ward, the film implies that something similar will happen to the traditional white men of the world – that the arrival of new cultural forces will result in previously untrammeled freedom being constrained almost entirely. This is the film’s conflict taken to a conclusion: if Ratchet and the orderlies win, white men will go the way of the chiefs of the past, a message made bitterly ironic by the fact that white men were primarily responsible for the genocide and segregation of Native Americans in the first place.

And the film does argue that the forces of cultural change will prevail. McMurphy is thwarted in the attempt to kill Nurse Ratchet with his bare hands. He is punished with a lobotomy that leaves him a husk. In lobotomizing McMurphy, the film reveals its belief that to survive in the coming future stereotypical white men will either become institutionalized – the men on the ward – or turned into shells of their former selves. McMurphy is not left in that hollow condition for long, though – Chief Bromden finds his friend unresponsive with telltale scars on his forehead and smothers him with a pillow. The audience understands this to be a mercy killing, and it’s a bittersweet ending, lightened by Chief’s escape after he smashes a window with a massive hydrotherapy cart.

Chief’s escape can be seen as the solution to the conflict the film depicts – the only way to avoid the coming cultural marginalization is to escape into the night. But that’s not a solution at all – McMurphy is dead on a cot, and the other men on the ward are still under the control of Nurse Ratched and the system. Chief’s escape is impossible for any other man to pull off – McMurphy tried his best to budge the cart and could not move it an inch. What he said after his failed attempt reveals the film’s true answer to its conflict: “But I tried, didn’t I?”. Some stories make vivid a real social conflict and are content to not provide a solution; instead, they valorize the efforts of the defeated in a fight long lost**. They’re stories of a war – literal or not – that is over and that has shaped the world in its aftermath. Better to fight back – McMurphy trying and failing to choke Nurse Ratched to stop her power – than to go meekly along with your subjugation; this way you’ll be rewarded mercifully with death rather than see yourself humiliated in defeat. The Confederates after Appomattox, the white men who fought cultural change, will always be heroes to someone, and will be favored in stories glorifying their attempts. At least they tried.

* This idea can be found explored in more detail in Alex Nichols’s essay here

** The idea of stories depicting a real-world conflict and providing a solution is common in studies of literature, but is most often attributed to Jamison’s Political Unconscious