Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
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Still crazy after all these years: Cuckoo's Nest turns 50
Now a half-century old, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest remains a powerful chunk of American literature. Informed by personal experiences with LSD in the MKUltra program (Google that shit; totally cray) and as an orderly in a mental ward, Ken Kesey spins the riveting, almost-allegorical tale of an Oregon psych ward getting turned upside down by a brazen new patient. A description like that might make you think we’re in life-affirming, Awakenings/Patch Adams/Dead Poets Society territory, but no. There are bigger things at play here, darker things, and not even the movie version of Cuckoo’s Nest — which deserved all of its Oscars — could quite grasp the psychological machinations Kesey has constructed.
Know what else?
After spending so much time among these motley mental patients, I’ve developed something Google has informed me is a common delusion: Imagining One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a dystopian novel. True, the present-day (well, recent-day) Pacific Northwest bears little resemblance to George Orwell’s industrial ant colony of Oceania but, like 1984, Cuckoo’s Nest is the story of little nobodies pitted against a force that has immense cognitive sway over them; instead of Big Brother we have the all-seeing, all-controlling Nurse Ratched, whom our narrator, Chief Brompton, refers to as “Big Nurse.” As with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the subjects are kept in line with drugs and groupthink. Alone time is emphatically discouraged. And, like those murderous kids in The Hunger Games, the mental patients might actually have a shot at taking the whole system down.
Hope, if you can call it that, comes in the form of Randle McMurphy the rambunctious and gregarious new guy on the ward who challenges the status quo daily, often with hilarious and/or dire consequences. He’s sort of like Huxley’s John the Savage, a dude who acts out against the system because he hasn’t had the ego scared out of him (yet). Nurse Ratched, of course, runs rules with an iron fist, and methodically emasculates the men in her care, one way or the other. One patient, Dale Harding — whose only “psychosis” may be his homosexuality — warns McMurphy that Ratched’s not above playing the lobotomy card. “Frontal-lobe castration,” he calls it. “I guess if she can’t cut below the belt she’ll do it above the eyes.” Sorry, Patch, there’s no room for a guy like you in a place like this.
