The Talkies

...After 13 years, Kesey's prophetic parable has been made into what appears to be a cult movie for the 1970s...

...But this transformation of Nurse Ratched's character poses some difficulties...

...Although the new movie, starring Jack Nicholson, is superior in many respects to the novel, it is also less satisfying—a seeming paradox grounded in crucial differences between the two, differences that reveal a great deal about the time that has lapsed between the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest writing of the novel and the making of the movie...

...Instead of Paul Bunyan, Nicholson plays the punk who's wised up, the wiry s.o.b...

...To take an important example: The intervening 13 years have been marked by a remarkable shift in cultural attitudes toward women...

...Unfortunately, though with no discredit to his acting, Nicholson provides no answers in his portrayal of the...

...One need scarcely be reminded of Catcher in the Rye in the 1950s, and if Easy Rider was the quintessential movie of the 1960s, the novel that seemed most directly tied to that decade's collective unconscious was Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...

...He is not merely a liberator, but a saviour and a redeemer...

...The problem with the movie is that it simply isn't obvious—as it is in the book, with its cardboard characters—that Nicholson's McMurphy is any more virtuous or any more sane than anyone else—including Nurse Ratched...

...One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a novel of the '60s—perhaps the novel of that decade...

...In the novel, McMurphy is a six-foot, red-haired, brawling he-man—a sort of hip Paul Bunyan...

...Mc-Murphy describes his fellow inmates in the book as "victims of a matriarchy," and Kesey's Big Nurse is the embodiment of the grotesque parody of womanhood that accords with such a misogynist's view—a parody possible, perhaps, in a decade still emerging from what others had characterized as an era of "Momism," but scarcely credible in our "enlightened" decade...

...As a movie, it fails, in spite of the excellence of its performances and production...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 23...

...The movie does, indeed, bring a refreshing realism and sophistication to what is basically an overblown psychedelic/religious comic book...

...First published in 1962, it prophetically prefigured—and, in so doing, influenced —the rise of the counterculture that was to emerge in the next few years...

...Fletcher's Big Nurse is no longer an ogre, but rather a bland, impersonal,and nearly faceless administrator—a bureaucratic embodiment of the banality, rather than the monstrosity, of evil...

...This might be the price to be paid for trying to make a "realistic" movie out of a novel that can only be regarded as fantasy...

...and it is clear that Kesey intended her to represent the rationalistic and civilizing (therefore, "feminine" and castrating) force which robs men of their individualistic and animalistic (therefore, "masculine" and powerful) nature...

...Although Forman has explicitly stated in interviews that his purpose was the same as Kesey's, that intention is not manifest in the film: the metaphor no longer operates successfully because of the very transformations that were made in the interest of realism and sophistication...

...Appropriately, when One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was produced as a play, Kirk Douglas 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 played the lead...

...who's just a few years past his prime...

...But along with this sophistication, the movie introduces an ambiguity, not found in the novel, concerning artistic purpose...

...It is a credit to the direction of Milos Forman and the superb acting of Louise Fletcher that the change in cultural attitudes has been so skillfully rendered in the movie as a change in sensibility...

...It is rare for a cult movie to be made from a cult novel, and rarer still for one to be made successfully...

...The transformation of the character of McMurphy is the third crucial difference between the novel and the movie...

...But although the cinematic Big Nurse is more of a bureaucratic type than her literary counterpart, the bureaucracy itself has vanished in the movie—there is no Combine, and the paranoids don't have a real Establishment to fear...

...But it is no such thing...

...But Nicholson brings such a sly and studied ambiguity to his characterization of McMurphy that the issues that were clearcut in the novel have become blurred in the film...

...Kesey's prescient novel, set in an insane asylum, explicitly delineated the political and cultural themes that were to become dominant in the '60s: the rebellious anti-authoritarianism, the drug culture, the uneasy alliance between political revolution and psychedelic experience, and—most of all—the "politics of madness," in which insanity (especially schizophrenia) is seen as the only "sane response to a repressive, institutionalized, and technological society...

...In a sense, Nicholson is no less "All American" than Kirk Douglas—it's just that our notion of an "All American" has changed...

...In the novel, it is clear not only what McMurphy is battling against, but also what he is battling for—the manhood of his fellow inmates...

...Indeed, it has been reported that Anne Bancroft, Angela Lansbury, Geraldine Page, Colleen Dewhurst, and Ellen Burstyn all turned down the movie role of the Big Nurse...

...We are so used to sentimentalizing the individual who "bucks the system" that we often shut our eyes to the possibility that the "system" just might have some justification...

...In the novel, the Big Nurse was a "high official" of "The Combine"—Kesey's paranoid conception of an Establishment which manipulates and_ controls people both inside and outside the asylum...

...The differences are not those of the literary versus the cinematic, but those of the '60s versus the '70s...

...This elimination of one of the central themes of the novel was necessary, perhaps, because of the difference between the cynicism of the '70s and the freewheeling and almost naive paranoia of the '60s, but it leads one to wonder what it is that the movie McMurphy is battling against—since it isn't the Matriarchy and it isn't The Combine—and what it is he's battling for...

...The movie version is simply ten years too late—too late to render the novel adequately in the fashion of that decade, and too sophisticated to capture its clearcut, if simpleminded, purpose...

...In the novel, the archenemy of the hero, McMurphy, is Nurse Ratched—who is known as the "Big Nurse...

...But that was a decade ago, and now such a characterization would be as corny as the conception of the Big Nurse in the novel would • be grotesque and unbelievable...

...This is not to suggest that the novel is somehow "better" than the film—in fact, just the reverse is the case, if we limit our consideration to the simplemindedness of much of the novel: The male/female and individual/institution conflicts are depicted in crude fashion, and the hero and the villain, whohave been described by some critics as "archetypes," are really little more than cartoon figures...

...rebel Mc-Murphy...

...Kesey clearly intended the asylum to be a metaphor for society as a whole and regarded McMurphy as a hero triumphant, even in his death, over the machinery of an insane society...

...As a novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest succeeds in spite of—or perhaps because of—its limitations...

...This is most troublesome because those moviegoers who have not the novel—who are not aware of how both McMurphy and Nurse Ratched differ from the characters in the novel, or of how the male/female and individual/institution conflicts have been virtually eliminated—are still likely to see themovie as Forman does, as a paean to the free spirit who triumphs through nonconformity...