Thursday, October 7, 2010

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and Into a Pile of Work: A Defense of Nurse Ratched

Hi everyone.

So this is seriously starting to get a little ridiculous.

This month is going to be a little nutty, so I’m not sure how much I can truly commit to this, but: I’m going to try to write more than one post a month this semester.  Because if I can’t do better than one post a month, that just seems dumb.

That blog housekeeping aside...  Let’s talk second year.

It’s been an eventful first month or so!  I’ve fully transitioned to working with a new fellowship advisor this year, and that’s going well.  So far my fellowship has been focused on entering and double-entering a ton of data and managing a baker’s dozen of flaky undergraduate and graduate volunteer research assistants (most of whom are “desperate for research experience”, but not so much that they ever show up to do any work).  More interestingly, I’m attending a conference in the northwest for said fellowship this week, and while I’m more excited about visiting family and friends while there than I am about standing next to some posters for a few hours in itchy professional clothes, it should be a good experience in and of itself.  At the very least, it means I get to add research presentation experience to my CV.

More awesome than that: I have a client.  It’s awesome.  But that’s all I’ll say about that.

Also: After plowing through MEDLINE and PsycInfo (for the very happily ignorant: databases that amass every social sciences, etc. article in the entire universe) on a randomized controlled trial (RCT) finding extravaganza and feeling very self-satisfied and productive, I’ve slammed into yet another wall with my thesis.  I’m now at the end of the first phase of my data collection process, wherein I now have to look up individual articles *by hand* to see if they’re RCTs.  It’s really boring and tedious, but I need to get off my ass and just do it.  Luckily I had another monthly meeting with my mentor this week for another dose of fear-of-God.  Hopefully I’ll push past this temporary obstruction to my progress and move on to more interesting data collection tasks.

Now: to movie talk!

Last week, I had the pleasure of re-watching “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975).  I was in high school the last time I saw it, and I thoroughly re-enjoyed it.  However, given that I’m at a very different stage in my life and professional development now, I was struck by a theme in the film I hadn’t noticed before.

R. P. McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson, of course) is a new transfer to an adult male inpatient psychiatric ward after being imprisoned, essentially, for a variety of illegal antisocial behaviors (but specifically, this time, for statutory rape).  Nurse Ratched, played by Louise Fletcher, is the primary authority figure of the ward in which he is placed.  While initially he attempts to ingratiate himself to her, McMurphy eventually turns against Ratched after realizing that his retention in the hospital is not subject to the same limitations as his incarceration.  In other words, if he is successfully deemed insane after his evaluation at the hospital, he isn’t getting out when his original prison sentence is up—he’s getting out when he’s deemed sane again, which means he may *never* get out.  Suddenly what McMurphy thought was essentially a vacation is in fact something much more sinister, and he’s pissed.  As a result, things on the ward take a dramatic and ugly turn.

Ratched is a notorious bogeywoman in film history.  She rules her ward with an iron fist, mercilessly emasculating (figuratively) and electro-shocking (literally) her patients with near-impunity.  McMurphy is cast as a the rebellious antihero, raging against the castrating tyranny of Nurse Ratched with all the strength and cunning he has.  Indeed, during the film’s climax, McMurphy nearly strangles her to death... to put her in her place, I suppose?

So the first time I saw this movie, I remember being totally on McMurphy’s side.  As you’re supposed to be.  He’s a resilient and stridently free spirit, damning the Man no matter what the consequences, refusing to be tamed.  Except in this case, he’s damning the Woman, and I think that’s not a trivial detail.  And here we are at the thing I didn’t notice in high school, but which struck me clear as day last week.

I get that “Cuckoo’s Nest” needs to be taken in context.  The seventies were in many ways a high water mark in psychiatric institutions having the power to rob patients of their rights.  Mental health professionals took a profoundly paternalistic view of their role in their clients' lives during that time.  Moreover, with the war in Viet Nam coming to a close the year the film was released, after extremely vocal civilian protests, it’s hard to overlook the parallel of McMurphy’s resistance to the authority figures of the hospital.  In addition to being a beautifully told and compelling story, this film is very much the product of its time.

However, it’s a product of that time in another way I now find troubling. Second-wave feminism was very much a part of the public discourse in the mid-1970s.  The gender dynamics in this movie seem to be a clear reflection of '70's societal conflict over women asserting their power.  McMurphy is supposed to be the hero in this film, but instead he now seems to be to be the embodiment of a frightening, violent backlash to feminine agency.  So assured is he of his own entitlement to masculine dominance that he nearly wrings the life out of Ratched in an attempt to reassert himself and correct the gendered power imbalance.

...Of course it’s not quite that simple.  McMurphy attacks Ratched because he believes she drove the fragile Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif) to suicide by threatening to tell his mother he slept with McMurphy’s lady friend/a prostitute.  And in McMurphy’s defense, she does needle Billy’s immense fear of his mother pretty aggressively.  But in *Ratched’s* defense, no one made McMurphy turn the hospital into bedlam (ha, psychiatric hospital humor) by dragging in whores and booze before his botched escape attempt.  It doesn’t appear to dawn on him that he’s a bull in a very-fragile-mentally-ill-people-filled china shop, treating the men of the ward as if they only need a fishing trip and some rum to make them all better, until it’s far too late—and he copes with that murky awareness by nearly murdering Ratched instead of turning on himself.  I would argue that it wouldn’t have been possible for Ratched to push Billy over the edge if McMurphy hadn’t forced him to that edge in the first place.

We’re supposed to be repelled by Ratched’s lack of emotionality and the extent of her control over the men in her ward.  The film clearly seeks to deride her for being dispassionate (translation: frigid) and measured (translation: calculating, also frigid), when in fact, within reason, these are hallmarks of a seasoned and effective mental health professional.  Acting as if you’re in complete control when you’re acutely aware that you’re not ranks surprisingly high in the list of skills you need to survive as a mental health practitioner in any setting, let alone in a hospital, where you are direly outnumbered by possibly dangerous patients.  I can attest to that from experience.  Ratched’s steely composure is therefore, given her context, a virtue.

There’s a scene in the movie that sealed this Ratched reinterpretation for me.  After hijacking a hospital bus filled with other patients and taking them fishing on a doctor’s boat, McMurphy’s status at the facility is assessed by a panel of (male) doctors.  Ultimately, the doctors defer to Ratched in deciding where to place the deviant and possibly dangerous patient.  Surrounded by men who want to return McMurphy to prison or transfer him to another ward, she instead advocates for retaining him in her ward.  She argues against shuttling him to some other facility, taking a stand against passing the McMurphy buck down the line to yet another hospital that will probably only do the same—a typical pattern with difficult-to-treat patients to this day.  Instead, she states she wants to keep him in her ward because she thinks she can get through to him.

We’re probably supposed to see that as a sinister ploy to keep McMurphy in her clutches, presumably for the purposes of breaking his beautiful, free spirit.  And to be fair, that *is* essentially what happens.  Thing is, the dude’s a psychopath, in the formal DSM-IV Antisocial Personality Disorder sense of the word.  In his intake with the head psychiatrist at the hospital and in subsequent discussions of what to do with him, we learn that McMurphy has a long history of law-breaking and incarceration.  He’s had sex with a minor on at least one occasion.  He’s violent and manipulative.  He’s charming and charismatic (classic hallmarks of a psychopath), which makes him appealing even to me, but he is *not* a hero.  Ratched, on the other hand, is a resolute and skillful professional woman, doing a difficult job and doing it quite well.

...And she’s supposed to be the villain.

A big part of me still loves McMurphy and mourns what becomes of him.  But more than that, I’m struck by the tragedy of the villification of this brave and strong professional woman.

Even with that taken into account, I give the film a 5.  I mean come on.  It's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for christsakes.

And with that... time to go.

<3

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