Fiction Friday: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
For me the title of this book has always conjured the image of a young Jack Nicholson in roughneck clothes grinning dangerously within the sterile ward walls of a mental hospital. It was a defining role for him and in many ways serves as a cultural landmark for America as well, signaling the transition of our society from the logical 50′s to the passionate 60′s.
In that sense, the film was a faithful rendering Ken Kesey’s watershed novel of the same name, which takes place not so much in a mental hosptial, but in that manic and medicated space between freedom and security, anarchy and order, organism and institution. These archetypal Modern nemeses are sketched in the characters of Nurse Ratched, the authoritarian dictator of the ward, and McMurphy, the new patient faking mental disorder in order to live a life of leisure among the harmless stooges.
The hospital ward is an extension of Nurse Ratched herself: cold, clean, hardened and impersonal. Everything is orderly, material, and tightly controlled. She wields power through punishment, provides safety by threats, gives comfort by means of control. Into this micro-culture McMurphy enters as the revolutionary, the anarchist, the agent of spirit and creativity which overturns convention. Like all freedom fighters he represents danger for both his rulers as well as himself and his compatriots.
As with the 60′s, the power struggle between McMurphy and Ratched is most powerfully symbolized by sex. Ratched is uncomfortable with her own sexuality – her large breasts strictured by uniformed sterility. McMurphy is sexually unfettered, introducing prostitutes to the residents and working to arrange a sexual encounter for Billy – the tamed and timid child of Modernity’s puritanical authoritarianism. This is the struggle of our era, one just beginning to simmer in the early 60′s when Kesey wrote this novel, and its tragic ending turned out to be remarkably prescient. We view this descent into violence through the narrative eyes of Chief Bromden, the bewildered native-American who stands, perhaps like most of us, off to the side pretending not the hear or speak, while the extremes of society battle for supremacy.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a mythological drama for the malcontented children of Modernity, a dramatic battle between the gods of our age: Eros, the creative Greek god of sexual love and beauty, and logos the neatly-ordered incarnation of Christendom’s version of Jesus. In this sense I don’t think the relevance of Kesey’s novel ended with the flower-children of the 60′s. Eros is still the god of loafers, poets, artists, and lovers and he still strives to liberate the repressed in a logos society dominated largely by cold calculation, dogmatic assertion, and quantifiable production. This struggle continues in various postmodern subcultures like Hip-Hop, Hackers, Freegans, Street Artists, Cybergoths, Polyamory, and hundreds of other North American neo-tribal groups who still can’t conceive of a brand of institutional authority rooted in anything but control, and toward whom the American church still largely projects the Jesus of logos.
Kesey provides no answers – no hopeful way forward. In the novel, this climactic battle wounds both sides irreparably, and as I set it down I couldn’t help but wonder just how prescient Kesey may yet turn out to be.
One of the all time best movies!