Essay on "Grief and Loss as it Pertains to Film"

Essay 5 pages (1721 words) Sources: 2

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Grief and Loss in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is a 1962 book by novelist Ken Kesey. It is also an iconoclastic 1975 movie directed by Milos Forman; winning all five major Academy Awards for that year: Best Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), best Director and Screenplay. The novel is set at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon and is also listed in the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films (One Flew Over the Cucoo's Nest, 1990).

In brief, the protagonist Randle Patrick McMurphy (Nicholson) is a recidivist criminal who is transferred to a mental hospital for evaluation; a ploy he is using to avoid hard labor and serve his sentence in a more congenial atmosphere. From the start we can see he has a strong will, is anti-authoritarian, violent at times, but no real mental illness. In the hospital, McMurphy's ward is run by a calm but stolid tyrant, Nurse Mildred Ratched (Fletcher) who controls her ward using a combination of humiliation in group therapy, punishment disguised as unpleasant medical treatments and a daily routine that is tedious. McMurphy quickly notices that most of the inmates are more afraid of Ratched than of getting well and reentering society. Therein follows McMurphy's raison d'etre, loosening Ratched's control over the ward. He does this through continual pushing: gambling for cigarettes, protesting for TV time for the World Series and even an unauthorized escape.

McMurphy finally realizes that Ratched has the power to have him involuntarily committed longer than his sentence, and the power struggle continues. McMurphy becomes the "change agent" for a number of the other patients but, sensing a loss of control, Ratched has him lobotomized to stop his "irrational" behavior. This type of McMurphy really isn't McMurphy, so one of the other inmates, Chief, smothers him and carries out McMurphy's escape plan by hurling a console through the window and running off -- freedom at last (Ibid).

While there are several archetypal themes in the film, a starting point for analysis comes from the title, derived from an American children's folk rhyme:

Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,

Apple seed and apple thorn,

Wire, briar, limber lock

Three geese in a flock

One flew East

One flew West

And one flew over the cuckoo's nest

(One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 2010).

Besides the obvious wordplay, it is easy to see the initial theme of loss in the small number of geese, each going their separate ways; which is antithetical for the species, which normally flock together. This could imply dysfunction, loss, or even anti-social behavior or a reaction to authority -- all which are themes in the film and book.

Symbolically, the characters each represent something larger than themselves; sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly, and sometimes with such complexity that one is almost taken aback at the setting -- which is likely precisely Keysey's point. As characters, we see the interaction of both patients and staff:

Character

Major Traits

Representations

Nurse Ratched (staff)

Calm authoritarianism, unbending will, innately "knows" she is right, and will not tolerate dissent or willful behavior that does not fit her paradigm

Ultimately, Ratched represents the loss of the soul and humanity in a person; instead replacing it with rules, regulations, and procedures that are cookie-cutter outlines of what a person "should be" and how society itself "should be" ordered.

Dr. Spivey (staff)

Titular head doctor at the institution, he is benevolent and committed to the practice of psychiatry; truly believing that the institution can cure those suffering from mental illness.

In contrast to Ratched's loss of humanity, Spivey has loss his will to stand up to illogical and authoritarian will (Ratched); instead preferring the rather isolated ivory tower nature of clinical observation and medicine. The quintessential "ostrich burying its head" in order to protect itself from the external world that may be quite ugly at times.

McMurphy (patient)

Faking mental illness, he soon finds that if one looks hard enough, one can find illness in anyone. Rebellious, anti-authoritarian, brutally honest, yet with a clear sense of right and wrong and the ability to see through the paraphernalia of the external world to find out what one's soul really is.

McMurphy's loses so many things: his freedom, his choice, his ability to engage in common human banter, and finally, his soul.

Chief (patient)

Silent until McMurphy discovers it is all an external dissatisfaction with the world.

Almost the Greek Chorus of the film; but with non-verbal communication. Chief loses his friend, but then gains freedom.

Billy Bibbit (patient)

Shy, virginal, impressionable and fearful of female authority.

Billy loses his virginity thanks to McMurphy, but not his fear; yet in standing up to Ratched, even a little; he gains a modicum of humanity.

Dale Harding, Charlie Cheswick, Martini and Taber (patients)

Each has a unique "disorder" that keeps them trapped behind Ratced's castle: neurosis, immature personality, cynicism bordering on sadism, etc.

Each character has "lost" something that caused them to be institutionalized; betrayed in a way that their sane mind cannot cope with reality; they too "lose" McMurphy as a friend and mentor, but gain more confidence and elan simply by interacting with him.

If one looks at the film through the template of the Kubler-Ross model of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, one can find some interesting parallels with the behavior of both McMurphy and Ratched (Kubler-Ross, 2005). For McMurphy, his initial idea of becoming institutionalized to avoid hard labor is short-term; it is the denial stage in which he looks around the institution and it dawns on him, he is still behind bars, but "this cannot be happening to him." While this is short-term, what McMurphy quickly realizes is that the institution has its own culture and set of rules, some quite illogical in his view. Thus his denial turns into anger -- this is not fair, who is to blame; there are feelings of rage and bucking the system, and Nurse Ratched becomes the locus of McMurphy's loss of authority. When McMurphy realizes than anger is likely not the best way to win with Ratched or the hospital, he tries bargaining; well, let's vote; or, what would the patient's want; even working in bargaining to his sessions with Dr. Spivey. Sometimes the bargaining has a small psychological effect, or at least it appears to; McMurphy does see change within the patient community and yet continues to press the envelope, becoming depressed when he learns that he can, at the will of Ratched and the hospital, remain incarcerated for life. In this sense, McMurphy becomes both disconnected with himself and the world around him and reaches out to find at least a small semblance of stationary survival. Finally, although quite artificially induced, the acceptance stage of coming to terms with the situation is placed upon McMurphy through a lobotomy and finally death. Without his soul, he is not McMurphy, and death, while loss, and also brings about his final actualization and freedom from oppression.

Ratched, on the other hand, has already lost her humanity, and she seems stuck in between stages 2 and 3; quiet anger "Who is to blame" and bargaining "Now Group, if you do this, we can do that." Her world is so myopic, though, that she sees everything through a veil of security and the medical paradigm of fixing something broken. This may be emphasized with the idea of the film's depiction of electroshock therapy; Ratched and others seem to use it in a barbaric way, to control the patients. However, in Ratched's view, she genuinely believes that it is the responsibility of her staff to exert control in order to do what is best for those who cannot. Through the film, though, a number of patients actually die showing that, even with the best intentions, this paradigm is so oppressive that it stamps out any semblance of dissent or individuality -- most especially the McMurphy types who are unwilling to acquiesce to the demands of those who "know better" (Perring, 2003).

Culturally, each character seems to be representational of a particular segment in society that deals with the process of loss in a divergent way; we have the solidly middle class Ratched, the esoteric "egg-head" physicians, the anti-social but sane McMurphy, and then the group of patients with varying degrees of neurosis, psychosis, and socialization issues. In a sense, each is already grieving the loss of something; for one, his wife; for another, his adulthood; for another, his freedom; and for another, his control. Most move, on a regular basis, through the grief stages in an almost manic way -- from denial and willful ignorance to anger, then acceptance in Group Therapy sessions, all with consequence of loss -- loss of soul, personality, will, individuality, uniqueness, opinion, and even, in some cases, physical loss. Clearly, this loss affects them all in different ways, summing up the movie with the idea that our perceptions are our basis of… READ MORE

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