Expressive Film Techniques in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

When One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was released in 1975 it turned quite a few heads. A novice cast and crew with a four million dollar budget made nearly three hundred million dollars worldwide and swept the 1976 Academy Awards with their callous attack on the American bureaucracy. This filmmaking adventure was a demonstration of the American ideal while it illustrated the failure of a democracy to allow one to achieve the freedom it so adamantly endorses. The scope of this paper will include the following parameters; how the concepts of rebellion and freedom in a repressed environment are shown through mise en scene, cinematography, editing and sound.

Description

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest opens with the morning medicine call. A dozen or so men form a single file line in front of the nurses' station where they are handed a pill and a small paper cup filled with water. Welcome to the Oregon State Psychiatric Hospital. Czech director Milos Forman turned Ken Kesey's hallucinistic novel of the same title into a classic with breakout performances from Louise Fletcher (Academy Award Winner for Best Actress), Brad Dourif (Academy Award Nominee for Best Supporting Actor), Christopher Lloyd and Danny De Vito. However, it was Jack Nicholson's portrayal of Randle Patrick McMurphy, the con man faking insanity to avoid prison work camps, who stole the screen.

McMurphy's admittance into the hospital is the departure of true order. The ward is the State and is governed by a dictator, Nurse Mildred Ratched, played by Louise Fletcher. McMurphy attempts to bring joy into the lives of his fellow patients by teaching them that they're human, that they're men not little boys and that they have rights. In continually bumping heads with Nurse Ratched, Randle becomes the leader of a rebellion for true democracy and all of its ideals, most namely, freedom. He succeeds in freeing the men to a point. Only Chief Bromden (Will Sampson) finds freedom in the end.

Billy Bibibt (Brad Dourif), escapes his boyhood but does not have the opportunity to enjoy his maturity as he is mentally beaten back into submission by none other than Nurse Ratched. Following the routine of nonconformity displayes by McMurphy, Billy makes a statement of his own in killing himself. McMurphy attempts to strangle Nurse Ratched partly for her responsibility in Billy's untimely death and partially out of anger for his contribution to the situation. McMurphy is crucified with a lobotomy which leaves him in a vegetative state until Chief releases him as he had done for Chief. It is Chief "who flies over the cuckoo's nest" as the nursery rhyme Vintery, Mintery, Cutery, Corn sings.# Chief uses one of McMurphy's escape plans and vanishes into the night.

Mise en Scene

Settings

Being released right after the Vietnam War this film about lost and disillusioned men struck a cord with vets. Men found it difficult to adjust to a sane society just as the patients found it difficult to break out of their insanity so they could get back to their lives.# The bleak, barren rooms of a mental institution complement the feelings of isolation and abandonment shared by the veterans. Returning from a war that no one supported these men were outcasts. They were the "geeks", those children who are harassed and belittled for no particular reason other than they are affiliated with some group which the general population disproves of because they are slightly behind the times. Vietnam was a failure. These men were not insane. They has simply failed at some point in their lives and could not find their way back to the main road. In the mental institution the walls are all the same color, there is only one door out, goodies are locked away and an intercom dictates routine. How could these men find the main road when all they had before them to walk on was a narrow path of humiliation?

The barbed wire fences and chain-link crossed windows make the patients feel like prisoners of war. There is no escape. When one cannot see clearly what lies outside because the view has been altered they cannot understand that what they have, their current situation, is not freedom. They lose track of what freedom really is and what it means. When McMurphy hijacks the bus and takes the patients out on a day long excursion he succeeds in awaking them to the outside world. They are able to comprehend that their living situation is not normal, but has only normal to them because of their dependency on the institution Nurse Ratched has instilled in them. The isolation of the surroundings further isolates the men and complicates Randle's mission in setting them free.

Subjects

Randle McMurphy, the film's protagonist, is an unlikely Christ figure and the center of true Shakespearian tragedy. A criminal who causes great disarray in a place of absolute order is typically not viewed as a hero. However, Hamlet was. Thus Randle's rebellious pursuit of freedom against an oppressive bureaucracy is similar to Hamlet's unruly pursuit of revenge. Both are antiheroes. They have an interest in young girls, avoid interrogation with wit and use a disguise of mental inefficiencies to avoid responsibility. More importantly, both Hamlet and McMurphy are leading the undertaking of righting a wrong. In begin true to Shakespearian tragedy they succeed and pay the ultimate price for their ventures, death. Like Jesus Christ, McMurphy exposes the truth before his crucifixion (the electric shock therapy and lobotomy). He attacks Nurse Ratched tearing open her "quasi-military nurse's costume" unmasking her breasts, the symbol of motherhood and nurturing.# Then his most defining quality is taken from him making him an unrecognizable person. His spirit is murdered and a man is ruined. McMurphy gives the men in the hospital a reason to live instead of simply existing. He gives them a change to actually live, to be reborn.

The dictator, Nurse Ratched is emotionally repressed. She is supposed to guide and counsel her patients to recovery as a mother would with a sick child. Instead her therapy involves humiliation aimed at exposing weaknesses that slowly break a man's spirit and make him cower in a corner as a child would. If you don't play her game she will run you down as the government does to those who fail to fall in line with their leadership agenda.# She does not follow through with her responsibility to help boys mature and grow into functional members of society. Her character makes a statement about veterans' view of American democracy. The elections she holds and the way she runs the ward appears democratic enough however it is known like in Cuban elections that a vote against the governmental favorite is a vote in favor of your own despair. An opposing choice can have unfavorable results.

Women are portrayed as tyrants and sex pots. Candy, McMurphy's girlfriend, is the loose, flaunt it all girl as often depicted in pin-up posters for soldiers to drool over. She's the sex item while the nurses are tyrants. With the men away at war women were forced to go to work and take care of business so they became very independent and commanding due to this new freedom after having been pushed around due to their sex and the stereotypes of sexual inferiority. Otherwise the supporting cast and minor characters are politically correct. Asian, black and Native Americans are all represented.

Composition

The veteran Haskell Wexler was initially hired by producer Michael Douglas because of his expertise and unique vision with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and In the Heat of the Night. However within the first few weeks of shooting, creative differences between the two pushed Douglas to fire Wexler and hire rising cinematographer Bill Butler to finish the project although he is often only credited with "additional photography."# The film was shot in sequence with the exception of one scene (the bus expedition) so it is possible to notice the differences in shot composition when the change occurred between Wexler and Butler or perhaps the changes are simply underlying demonstrations which help to develop the story. The beginning of the film relies on skewed close-ups. These are mostly grouped reaction shots skewed to one side showing two, three or two and a half people by splitting the edge of the frame over a person. It divides people and separates them from their concept of freedom. Only the outsiders, the opposing forces, Nurse Ratched and McMurphy, have several individual reaction shots. Nurse Ratched's involve very deliberate camera movement to display her superiority. McMurphy's reaction shots, especially in the early group session meetings, reveal humanity and sanity. Also, the long hallways, windows and many doorways provide splendid means for framing the subjects of utmost importance in a given scene. The composition makes them stand out and command attention.

Cinematography

Lighting

The film is immersed in dull, artificial lighting. It is representative of the life those within the ward are living. It is devoid of life. Everything moves about in a zombie-like manner without hope. Perhaps the lighting scheme is comparable to the dreariness of not being able to find our niche within a society that once admired you and now casts you in the shadows. Indeed in your own shadows. For that is expressed in one scene with the men in their daily group meeting with Nurse Ratched. Dale Harding (William Redfield) holds his hand up and the palm of his hand casts a shadow across his face. He is then ignored by Ratched from making a comment until the shadow disappears. This incident repeats with a few of the other patients as well. They are forgotten once a shadow hides their humanity, their inner characterization.

The use of harsh fluorescent lights to awake the men in the morning is another example of their prison-like environment. Their freedom is repressed. They do not choose when they wish to awake they are forced to get up and follow a strict schedule. The morning wake-up lights blind them into submission. They become similar to caged hamsters. The handler is in control of their heat, that is , he is in control of their existence. He determines when the creature shall stir about and how much freedom they should be allowed to exercise, if any. When the handler chooses to he may let the animal run around beyond the borders of their normal terrain, but only for fixed periods of time and only within certain boundaries. Children call these excursions field trips. The lighting is directly reflective of those in power within the film. It shines on things Nurse Ratched wants to be shown and darkens areas of question.

Camera

There is very little camera movement in the film. When movement does occur it is not obvious, with the exception of the single shot in which Nurse Ratched watches McMurphy try to get Chief to dunk the basketball. There is an obvious zoom in on her watching from a window on a higher level of the building. Besides that one scene there is truly very little camera movement. The actors move, not the camera. Again this is representative of their situation. They move about within a confined space. They cannot move too far away because then they would be out of frame and their actions would mean nothing to the audience. The restriction of the frame versus the actual human eyesight is similar to the theme, restriction of man's natural freedom.

Editing

Sheldon Kahn and Lynzee Klingman's work is simple, seamless editing. Beign seamless it furthers the narrative of this continuous struggle for freedom and search fro self-worth. The pace is somewhat sluggish at points, however, that is done for a pay-off later so Kahn and Klingman could change the pace to a rapid reaction-source cutting scheme when the patients have an awakening and discover something new about themselves. There are two abrupt cuts in the film. Both occur after one of McMurphy's peasant uprisings and result in a trip to visit Dr. Spivey. This cut is abrupt visually, but even more so vocally because of the great contrast in sounds between the spliced scenes.

Sound

The contrast mentioned above is sound-oriented. In one of its two occurrences McMurphy has taken the boys on a fishing trip. Crashing waves and abounding laughter are consumed by helicopter blades. They have been found. The blades come closer and consequently louder until they are cut off completely to be replaced by absolute silence. Dr. Spivey sits at his desk where not even the tapping of a pencil is heard. By making a straight cut between the two contrasting scenes the editors are illustrating the opposition of freedom and repression. This brings us to the use of silence as a metaphor. Silence describes the internal brain structure of some of the patients, tabula rosa, Latin for "blank slate." It creates definition between the tyrant and the common man. One is silently cynical, the other vocally known. In addition to defining characters and working as a metaphor, sound serves as a director. It tells the camera where to move with off-screen actions which create their own importance in recognition by the audience. This is especially important in Billy's death. A scream is heard and the camera moves to Dr. Spivey's office to reveal what has occurred.

Conclusion

An untraditional Christ figure awakens several lost souls during his stay in a mental institution. The characters in the film reflect many of the individuals who, after the Vietnam War found themselves lifeless, imprisoned and belittled. Through its simplistic techniques the complication of psychological disembodiment is displayed with utter clarity. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is about the rise of the soul of man.