One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest Movie Analysis Essay

📌Category: Entertainment, Movies
📌Words: 794
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 16 June 2022

The movie, “One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest” was released in 1975. Directed by Milos Foreman and based on the classic book, “One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest”, it stared big box office names of the time such as Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, and William Redfield. The movie was set in 1963 in the state of Oregon. It starts with the main character Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) pleading insanity so that he can be instituted into a mental institution instead of going to a prison where he would be forced to do hard labor. Shortly after arriving at the mental institution, Randle meets the antagonist of the movie Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher). He quickly learns that she loves authority and having complete control over all the patients. Louise quickly started to dislike Randle because of his rambunctious and rebellious behavior. Randle would go on to do things such as lead a vote to watch the world series, break out some of the patients so they could all go on a fishing trip, and much more. Eventually, this all lead to Louise lobotomizing Randle. Randle’s cellmate (Chief Bromden) could not stand to see his friend in this state so decided the best course of action was to kill his friend quickly and painlessly. After this Chief Bromden broke out through a window and was never seen again. 

Upon first glance at the film, it would seem that the protagonist was not a good man. He was a convicted rapist who was going to be given a more lenient sentence After the film started to develop, it is seen that Randle, although he made some poor choices in the past, is actually a good man. He went into this system that was full of helpless people being controlled by the head nurse and decided that he would lead somewhat of a revolution in that facility. Another important plot point that should be noted is how poorly the patients were treated. At the time that this movie was released the treatment of patients in mental hospitals was very poor. Because of a lack of knowledge and treatment a fair amount of people had to be admitted to these institutions. People that could operate and live on their own with current medical knowledge. 

One of the largest issues seen throughout this entire movie is the issue of conformity to absolute power. As is known throughout the psychology community through study’s such as the Stanford prison project, when you put men and women into an institution in which one side holds all the power and the other side's only option is to obey then you start finding issues with free will and rationality. This is seen in the movie when the antagonist starts talking to the individual patients in their sessions. She starts targeting their biggest insecurities in life and then using that focal point she goes on to convince them that they are not capable of living in the normal world. After a few of these conversations the patients (even after being given the option to leave) decide that the only course of action for them is to stay in that institution because it is the only safe place. 

Another large issue that this movie actually negatively impacted was the use of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy). In this movie, ECT is depicted as something that when used would force the participant to be under mind control. This has a few issues, the biggest of which is the fact that ECT and treatments associated with it can be very good for someone with specific mental or neurological illnesses. Treatments such as trans-magnetic stimulation and vagal nerve stimulation have been used at a much slower rate because of their association with ECT and the bad press that comes with it. 

In the article “Mental health professionals’ attitudes towards and knowledge of electroconvulsive therapy” (Russel D. Lutchman, Tim stevens, Amir Bashir, Martin Orrell) the authors dive into what mental health workers think about ECT. The study they conducted was based on the idea that people often have a negative attitude towards ECT. Their theory was that the more educated you are on the topic the more favorably you will look upon it. They tested this by sending out two hundred and sixty-eight questionaries to staff from four different mental institutions. The results were analyzed using the Kruskal-Wallis test. Their findings were as follows. First, the responds rate was around seventy-four percent. This means that one hundred and ninety-eight people responded to the questionaries. The questions revealed a rather large difference in knowledge and opinion towards ECT based on profession. Psychiatrists were the most in favor of this treatment, followed by nurses, social workers, and then psychologists. From the article, “The attitudes scale was shown to have good internal consistency and split-half reliability” (Paragraph two). Their findings conclude that despite disciplines being an accurate predictor of opinions towards ECT, there is still a need for general awareness towards the topic so that better treatment can be conducted. 

D. Lutchman, Tim Stevens, Amir Bash, R. (2001). Mental health professionals’ attitudes towards and knowledge of electroconvulsive therapy. Journal of Mental Health, 10(2), 141–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638230124779.

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