Word: cuckoo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...years ago, a slogan was current that went "Support mental health or I'll kill you." One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a residue of that mid-sixties sentiment. Like the button it makes a sick kind of sense, though its message is, finally, silly and, in a simplistic way, evil. Only under flower-child aegis (Kesey's book was celebrated by Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg and other gurus) could a 1975 audience be fed such sexist, crypto-fascist garbage. In the end, it's nothing more than pop psychology on the level of a counter-cultural Reader...
...Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is part of an emerging American state of mind, as well as a hang-over of the burnt-out sixties. Taken as a metaphor, it suggests a revolution in the asylum in which the doctors and nurses are overthrown and the inmates reign over all. As a political metaphor it attempts to identify the lot of the oppressed with the lot of the incapable. Even Animal Farm deals with the same theme in a much more complex way. McMurphy's ethic of fuck and fight is hardly a more desirable...
...crypto-fascist. Both are words meant to surprise and offend, particularly since they have been so over-used by the very people who might be expected to agree with the premises of this film. In the first place, the whole tenor and action of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is sexist. McMurphy sees his treatment in the asylum as emasculating and his favorite response to the greyhaired doctors is to startle them with crude '50s locker-room talk. The feminine principle represented by the nurses is that of order--but order conceived of pettiness, primness, and bitchiness...
...movie version of Cuckoo 's Nest is faithful to the external events of the novel−no complaints there. The tro ble is that it betrays no awareness that the events are subject to multiple interpretations. Jack Nicholson plays Mc Murphy as an unambiguously charming figure, a victim of high spirits, perhaps, but without a dark side or even any gray shadings. He is a fine fellow to spend a couple of hours with, but he has no depth or resonance, and his fate leaves us curiously untouched. Similarly, the zany behavior of his fellows is amusing...
...fault for this lies in a script that would rather ingratiate than abrade, in direction that is content to realize, in documentary fashion, the ugly surfaces of asylum life. One Flew over the Cuckoo 's Nest is an earnest attempt to make a serious film. But in the end the movie backs away from both the human reality and the cloudy but potent symbolism that Ken Kesey found in the asylum...