One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest: Film Analysis

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From time to time, we have all experienced the need to want our voices heard; whether it is in a conversation or for a movement of some kind. The era of the sixties and seventies brought forth the urges to rise up and take a stand against the state of the world one was living in. Tim Dirks, a reviewer for Filmsite affirms, "The mid-70's baby-boomers counter-culture was ripe for a film dramatizing rebellion and insubordination against oppressive bureaucracy and an insistence upon rights, self-expression, and freedom" (par.2). Thanks to Director Milos Forman's 1975 film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the people got the representation they needed. Through the film's adaption from Ken Kesey's novel, immaculate acting that unmasked central themes,…show more content…
It brought life to the story and its accompanying characters, making it more viable to connect with. Michael Healey, in his journal for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, brings up that director, Milos Forman "eliminates the hallucinatory narration by Chief Bromden...and discards the book's 1950s-era view of conformity for a sadder, borderline-defeatist tone" (par.2). Forman was able to do exactly that because he had witnessed firsthand institutional tyranny after growing up in Czechoslovakia during World War II (Haskell pg.270). This in turn softened the aura for each of the inmates and brought rise to the message of overcoming repression. The audience could now see these fictionally insane men as disturbed but concerned husbands, depressed brothers, or friends in need of guidance, instead of just two-dimensional lunatic patients. A close up of McMurphy's smile drop, and a head-on angle of his shoulders slouch in a crushed manor from behind the nurse's station glass window when Nurse Ratched turns down his request to lower the music playing over the speakers, or when he refuses to take his medication and the nurse offers he could take it another way if not orally, are those defeated moments that leave that sinking feeling in our stomachs that could only be possible through our identification and connection with the characters. We are let down just as much as McMurphy is, and…show more content…
In 1975, she was a relatively unknown actress who plays a big part on the audience's identification with McMurphy--as if to say, "who does this woman think she is trying to stifle Jack Nicholson?" (Healey par.7). She was a very unordinary villain in the way that she generally believed that the actions she was taking with the patients were truly for the greater good. James Berardinelli states in his review of the movie that, "self-righteousness, not sadism, is her flaw" (par.8). She goes by the book for each and every patient no matter their distinct case and sees no harm in her ways--only the possibility of progression. When Scanlon questions why the dorms are locked during the day, she refutes it with the fact that if she left them open, certain inmates would just sleep all day--unaware to the fact that certain patients could use a few hours to themselves. She constantly drives into inmates Billy Bibbit, actor Brad Dourif, and Harding, played by William Redfield, about the problems with their love lives and marriages; thinking it will help them to get it out no matter how uncomfortable, resistant, or upset they become. Even when Cheswick vouches for watching the World Series because he believes it could be a therapeutic experience to see and share a game with everyone, she refuses to change the schedule for a few hours because she assumes the other
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