Word: mentalism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...beginning to infiltrate bookstores here, too. Her romances follow the best tradition of the comedy of manners, with not too much substance, and plenty of wit. Like Jane Austen, she has enough of an eye for the slightly ridiculous to keep you laughing, but she never requires the mental gymnastics of serious literature. No one is ever murdered, no one hurt--you simply ramble along in a world of idiosyncrasies and foibles, where the only danger is the loss of good ton, and where the worst that happens is that someone is sent off to manage the Jamica estates...
...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...
Basically, the film takes an absurdly simplistic caricature of traditional theories of mental illness--that anyone deviating from the bland norm should be locked up and lobotomized--and reverses it, adding no subtleties in the process. The result is a prescription that "order" is wrong and that "sub-normal twits and gibbering hunks of animality" should inherit the earth. Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) arrives at a relatively quiet ward in a mental institution, where three-quarters of the patients are "voluntaries," and he proceeds to wreak havoc. The only crazy thing about him, he claims, is that all he wants...
...mother. His case is the one cure that McMurphy attempts with "alternate psychology." He brings a whore into the ward and pushes Billy into a room with her for the night. In the morning, Billy's stutter is gone. The incident is typical of the instant cure approach to mental health that Forman is purveying. A good game of B-ball and a "good fuck" is all it takes...
...MADNESS is not a fine one. It is, at heart, an inappropriate response to the issues raised by what society should do with those incapable of functioning within it. Compassion should be the guiding rule of society's response, and this film entirely lacks compassion. The assemblage of mental patients caricatures each one--and each behaves in the manner you'd expect from caricatures of mental illness. One thinks he's Jesus Christ, another can't stand disagreements, another just waltzes and waltzes all day. No attempt to portray the characters in depth is made. The fact that genuine patients...