Synopsis Of 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'

Lilas Alkhen
One Flew Over the Cuckoo 's Nest

Jack Nicholson 's acting persona as the heroic rebel McMurphy, who lives free or die
The film 's credits play under an Oregonian wilderness scene at dawn, as a car 's headlights move across the screen. A black-coated supervisory nurse, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) (known as Big Nurse in the novel) arrives at the locked, security ward of a state mental hospital [on location in Salem, Oregon at the Oregon State Hospital/Asylum], where patient inmates, nurses, and orderlies attend to early morning medications. Pills are dispensed from the Nurses ' Station, a large booth with sliding glass panels.
In the next group therapy meeting, McMurphy begs Nurse Ratched to rearrange the "carefully worked out schedule" of the work detail so that the inmates can watch the opener of the 1963 World Series baseball game (at Yankee Stadium) on television, adding: "a little change never hurt huh? A little variety?" To intimidate his liberating challenge to the leadership of the ward and to cause no disruption to the ward 's precise schedule, she refuses: "Some men on the ward take a long, long time to get used to the schedule. Change it now and they might find it very disturbing."
In the next group therapy meeting, McMurphy begs Nurse Ratched to rearrange the "carefully worked out schedule" of the work detail so that the

This conclusion isn’t particularly dramatic, and it won’t make for good cinema. Cuckoo’s Nest is realistic in some ways, and it was a hugely important movie for the time, because it helped bring attention to some hospitals with unethical practices or unsafe living conditions. Both the book and the movie are insightful views into societal problems such as stereotypes about people who have mental disorders. But the film is largely out of date in terms of depicting hospital staff as manipulative or evil. From what I saw when I worked in a similar institution, mental hospitals are a calm, healing environments—as they