The horndog rebellion of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest The film mistakes lust for liberation

On the back of my paperback copy of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is an excited blurb from Time’s original 1962 review of the novel. It praised Kesey for writing a “roar of protest against middlebrow society’s Rules and the Rulers who enforce them”. Contemporary readers of the review were no doubt assumed to accept the justice of such a roar, but when I read that blurb, I have a totally different response. I feel a strange yearning to live in the middlebrow society it invokes, when the Romantic schema of freedom and unfreedom were so easy to grasp, so straightforward and pleasing to play with in art and politics, and when actual highbrow culture — abstract art, serious jazz, ambitious novels — sat so close to that middlebrow mainstream. Ken Kesey and Time magazine didn’t know how good they had it.

Milos Forman’s movie adaptation of Kesey’s novel was released 50 years ago, and a few months later, at the 48th Academy Awards, it came away with the “Big Five” awards — Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best (Adapted) Screenplay. The movie was a smash hit with both the public and the critics, and so it’s fair to view it as a mid-Seventies movie-industry event. But in its themes and messages, it is very much an artefact of the early Sixties when it’s set, and when Kesey’s novel was published. These early-Sixties origins are key to the movie’s continuing appeal. They’re also the reason a viewer of Cuckoo’s Nest in 2025 might find it vain and simplistic and a little silly.

The film, which hews closely to Kesey’s novel, portrays the fate of Randall P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), a low-level criminal who’s been transferred from a prison work-farm, where he was constantly fighting with prison staff and his fellow inmates, to an unnamed insane asylum. Soon after arriving, he meets the woman who’ll be his antagonist in the film, a stone-faced named Mildred Ratched, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). McMurphy is assigned to a ward in the asylum in which some patients are totally catatonic and others are normal and functional enough to engage in peaceful card games and board games, and to sit for halting group therapy sessions led by Nurse Ratched. McMurphy immediately identifies Nurse Ratched as someone to oppose, an unjust ruler of the ward’s society, which is much more repressive and repressed than McMurphy thinks it should be. So he sets out both to undermine Nurse Ratched’s authority and to infuse his fellow mental patients with his own rebellious spirit, so that they’ll start to fight their own oppression by the overbearing nurse. Significantly, standing off to the side as this action plays out, usually with the handle of a broom in his grip, is a huge “deaf and dumb Indian” everyone calls “Chief”.

I first saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when I was 13 or 14, and I loved it. My son saw it earlier this year, when he was 14, and he loved it. I suspect that the movie strikes such a chord with teenage boys because, like Kesey’s novel, it celebrates a very boyish sort of righteous mischief. What R.P. McMurphy does is he Resists Authority.

The movie isn’t exactly subtle about this theme, but the novel hits it so hard on the nose it bleeds from both nostrils. In the novel McMurphy’s initial processing into the asylum features a recital of his “file” by Nurse Ratched. “Thirty-five years old,” his file says. “Never married. Distinguished Service Cross in Korea for leading an escape from a Communist prison camp. A dishonorable discharge, afterward, for insubordination.” In other words, when it comes to Resisting Authority, R.P. McMurphy is The Best. Not even Chinese Communists can tell him what to do.

But McMurphy’s heroic defiance has a special fuel, his exemplary sex drive. He’s The Best at rebellion because he’s top-percentile as a horndog. This sexual-political formula is much less profound as social critique than either Ken Kesey or the people who made his novel into a movie believed it to be, which I’ll touch on below. But it does give Jack Nicholson the licence and the tools to build McMurphy into an indelible comic character. McMurphy got himself sent to the insane asylum on purpose, because he thought it would be an easier time than the work-camp where he’d been serving a sentence for committing the heroic horndog’s signature felony, statutory rape (“She told me she was 18”). With his lively forehead and those tenting eyebrows, the wide flash of his leering smile, the ambiguous menace in his delivery, Nicholson is beautifully equipped to act like someone who’s acting crazy while also, at a more literal register, Resisting Authority.

His performance is undeniably hammy, but this hamminess is neither distracting nor off-putting. He’s having fun on screen. We’re having fun in the audience. But it’s not just Nicholson who makes Cuckoo’s Nest such a winning film. There’s an intoxicating vitality in pretty much every scene. By this I don’t just mean it’s filled with lively movement, or that it’s briskly edited, but also that its characters are captured with unusual vividness and physical immediacy. One Oscar it didn’t win, but probably deserved, was for Cinematography. (The actual winner, Kubrick’s panoramic Barry Lyndon, was a much more conventional pick for this award.) A testament to the greatness of the film’s photography is how persistently its characters’ faces — smiling, sweaty, bug-eyed, stubbled — live in your visual memory after you’ve seen it.

Of course, the depiction of this ward also highlights one of the film’s more glaring weaknesses: its conveniently wistful treatment of mental illness. This ward of the asylum — McMurphy, his buddies, Nurse Ratched — is presented as a metaphor for society and its repressions. But the ward can do the sentimental and signifying work of metaphor only because the patients in it resemble a gang of likeable misfits more than real mental patients. Martini (Danny Devito) is in the nuthouse, it seems, because he squints too much. Cheswick (Sydney Lassick) has a funny voice and can get a little emotional at times. Taber (Christopher Lloyd) is kind of a live wire but seemingly harmless and totally compos mentis. Harding (William Redfield) suffers from some sort of bookish ennui. McMurphy is supposed to at least be acting crazy, but his few moments of overt craziness play as jokes that everyone’s in on. The whole “mental patient” thing is kind of a ruse, in other words. McMurphy’s fellow patients are just compromised enough to be vulnerable to Nurse Ratched’s repressive rule, but otherwise fairly normal and healthy, so that we like them and root for them as we probably wouldn’t root for people afflicted with borderline personality disorder.

If McMurphy is obviously the central character, the Chief is the audience’s proxy inside the asylum, (and also the novel’s narrator.) But the most thematically central character, at the deepest psychic level the movie is trying to plumb, is stuttering Billy Bibbitt (Brad Dourif). The movie is a portrait of authority, and the operative source of this authority is maternal. Society’s ur-boss is a Mother, and the Mother exercises her authority with an icy, smiling violence aimed right where it hurts, and the movie’s central victim of maternal violence is poor Billy, whose psychic deformities were done to him by his iconic mother, who then delivered him to the asylum ostensibly to be cured of those deformities but actually to be terrorised by a second mother: Nurse Ratched.

In one scene, Billy shows a McMurphyish flash of defiance towards the overbearing nurse-mother, and she unstrings him with a simple reminder that she and his mother are “old friends”. This moment is meant to contain not just drama but diagnostic insight about the real source of Billy’s sickness. In his flush of defiance Billy loses his stutter, but then Nurse Ratched mentions his mother and the stutter comes back with (as it were) a vengeance.

What makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest such a heavy symptom of its time is not just this blunt recourse to the then faddish psychological stories and archetypal figures. It’s the specific conflict these characters find themselves fighting. As I said, McMurphy’s exemplary mischief, his irrepressible challenge to the Rules and Rulers, flows from in his brimming libido. The authoritarian mother, Nurse Ratched, thus represents sexual restraint or repression, and her villainy consists in this almost entirely. The antagonism between boyish sexual exuberance and maternal sexual control drives everything in the film. Billy’s unstuttering faceoff with Nurse Ratched, when he briefly lives up to McMurphy’s defiant example, comes after he finally gets laid. By contrast, the ward’s most pliant and least admirable figure is bookish Harding, who not only accepts but understands and justifies the cold motherly rule of Nurse Ratched. Harding’s defining trait is that he’s a dickless cuckold, miserably (and inexplicably) married to an attractive woman who disdains and probably cheats on him. He’s Nurse Ratched’s favourite because he came to her already castrated.

The movie more or less pummels you with these tidy psychosexual politics from 1962, so I’m not claiming bonus points for decoding them, though I do wish it was all as simple as Cuckoo’s Nest suggests. A sexually oppressive mother — or, Society figured as this maternal oppressor of sexual desire — is a satisfying opponent to have in your Romantic struggle for spiritual freedom. If you understand the antagonism in these terms, the bad people being the ones who would keep you from consummating your horniness, then your spiritual protagonist is your own libidinal striving, which — let’s be honest — would have been your protagonist anyway. No wonder making a “revolution” on behalf of this striving was such a winning idea among Western youth soon after Ken Kesey’s novel was published. And no wonder teenage boys like Milos Forman’s movie so much.

Once you question the seriousness of its themes, its critical picture of the world, Cuckoo’s Nest starts to look like a very different sort of film from the one that so impressed critics and Oscar voters in 1975. Back then, admiring viewers might have taken the film to be an heir to the great Freud-inspired works of Buñuel and Bergman, or films of political liberation like The Battle of Algiers. But watching it again, I started to think that its true place in the history of movies lay in a much less exalted film tradition. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — critical darling, winner of the Big Five at the Academy Awards, frequent entry on lists of the greatest films of all time — seems like the founding model for certain spirited comedies of the decade that followed, in which gangs of misfits rebel against the repressive rules of stodgy institutions. Animal House (1978), for example, is also set in the early Sixties. It also features a gang of misfits, who oppose Dean Wormer, who is functionally identical to Cuckoo’s Nest’s Nurse Ratched as head oppressor at stodgy Faber College. Animal House also views a man’s rebelliousness as at least partly a function of his carnality, and, like Cuckoo’s Nest, it links willing conformity with institutional rules to certain failures of manly sexual readiness.

Also in this new Cuckoo’s Nest tradition I’m proposing is Stripes (1981), in which Bill Murray’s John Winger — who rarely wears underwear — musters his own gang of misfits to show the hidebound US Army that there’s a sexier way to be an American soldier. One should probably throw into this likeable lineage Caddyshack (1980), in which the repressive, unsexy ways of the suburban country club are finally exposed, and made sexier, by a gang of misfits.

This is not a bad tradition to be the founder of. Those are funny movies. And one advantage of putting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the head of this tradition is that it helps us see the silliness of the ideas the movie expresses.

But using this new category to highlight the silliness of those ideas in their intellectual substance also presents us with darker ironies that attach to those ideas in their practical effects. Along with channeling and packaging the shallow and morally convenient theories about desire and repression that would animate the sexual revolution, Kesey’s novel was a key inspiration for a policy shift that almost rivals the sexual revolution in its importance for everyday experience in America, especially for those of us who live in large cities: the shrinking and shuttering of state mental hospitals across America, leading to the mass release of seriously mentally ill people from custodial care, known as deinstitutionalisation.

The reading public was both moved and misled by Kesey’s sentimental portrait of his asylum ward, filled as it is with likeable fellows who are not insane but merely oppressed, and by his lurid and inaccurate portrayal of hospital treatments such as electro-convulsive therapy, which he made seem more painful and violent than it actually was, and which he presented as a method of political control. One the other hand, the movie’s famous lobotomy scene reflected a real systemic abuse that, like much else in the asylum system, was a worthy target for aggressive reform — as opposed to the dismantling of that system that actually happened.

Kesey’s novel came out in 1962. In 1963 John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, which set the process of deinstitutionalisation on its way. You can’t exactly say the popular book caused the unwise law, but you can’t detach them either. The popularity of Kesey’s novel added real momentum to the ideological forces that would convince Congress and the President to revolutionise the treatment of the seriously mentally ill, to make it so that, instead of being treated inside flawed and overwhelmed but tragically necessary institutions, many of them would not be treated at all.

You might wonder how such a disastrous law came to be made. I don’t have a full explanation, but I figure its badness is probably connected in some way to the fact that its main literary inspiration was also the literary inspiration for such cinematic masterpieces as Animal House, Stripes, Caddyshack, and, if were being exhaustive, the several Revenge of the Nerds movies.

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