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