Review of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) by Aw C — 17 Jun 2018

In my adolescence, this was unquestionably my favorite and most personally formative film, its themes of nonconformity, antiauthority, struggle and risk striking a deep chord with me. At some point, after reading the novel, I even performed the play as Mac, though I really was just doing my best Nicholson impression (and not a great one at that). While other movies-especially the aesthetically more avant-garde, those that do formally what this cries for textually-have today become new favorites, Forman's brilliant (and only second Hollywood-made) film still makes an impact on me.

Those thematic overtones of the film are still razor sharp, clear as day, yet inevitably challenging to a perpetually stifling status quo. Forman's deft ability to mix the comedic and the tragic, the bureaucratic and the chaotic-an obvious extension of his antiauthoritarian early works of the Czech new wave, though here more refined-finds its perfect setting in a claustrophobic mental asylum. What happens when the inmates take over an already infuriatingly mad system? Who gets to define "crazy"-those who ostensibly *are* or those who are charged with curing the "illness"? In an institution where the doctors have no more claim to knowing than the patients, where the experts are as vegetable-like and dead-to-life as the most failed of cases, the lobotomized, what constitutes a cure whatsoever? Who of these people, the outcasts and the weirdos and the chronics, even need to be cured?

Having now immersed myself in Freud and Lacan in a professional setting, I am now particularly struck by the role reversal between Mac and Ratched. For all her awful efforts, it is Mac who achieves the only breakthroughs in the film-Chief breaking out of his statuesque silence and breaking out of the building, Billy briefly overcoming his stutter, the others learning to stand up for themselves, if only for a moment-while Ratched, in all cases but the Chief's, immediately shuts such breakthroughs down again in order to maintain order. Because for Ratched and her ratchet system, *order* means the functioning of "giving orders." Because "order" here works not to establish a routine that facilitates a cure, but in fact prevents it-in the need to maintain the status quo, I am reminded of that quote attributed to Einstein: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.".