One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
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Author Mona Simpson comes to Metrograph on Saturday, April 8 to celebrate the publication of Commitment, a masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother’s collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s. Simpson will introduce a screening of Miloš Forman’s 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, followed by a special conversation in-theater with The Drift co-editor Rebecca Panovka.
Mona Simpson
When Ken Kesey published the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which he’d written as a graduate student while working as a night orderly in a veteran’s hospital, the book chimed with the anti-authoritarian spirit of the times. A movement against psychiatry was already coalescing around the work of Thomas Szasz, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and Goffman, many of whom believed mental illness did not exist or, if it did, that it was caused by oppression or impossible parents and best treated with talk therapy, certainly not pills or electroconvulsive therapy.
While the book may have contributed to the end of the institutional era, there’s no question that Miloš Forman’s film adaptation, appearing in 1975, had reach far exceeding the novel (though novels in the ’60s and ’70s arguably had more cultural penetration than they do today). Moreover, the film is still widely regarded as one of the best of all time (#17 on IMDb’s Top 100 list) and has had an enormous influence on the way we view mental illness and, especially, its interventions by psychiatrists.
Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed in Oregon State Hospital, where Forman used patients, aides, and doctors as extras and in supporting roles, including the director of psychiatry at the hospital, Dr. Dean Brooks, who was cast as Dr. John Spivey. All this lent an air of realism to the enterprise. Nonetheless, many of the practices dramatized in the film were already obsolete by the time of its release. The discovery of antipsychotic and antidepressant medications in the ’50s-so-called miracle drugs-led to hospitals scaling back their former invasive treatments (lobotomies, etc.).
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
Whatever we feel about the film’s aesthetic merits, it seems wise to also question the nature of its influence, particularly at a moment now when more psychiatric patients than ever are incarcerated, in jails and prisons, or living on the streets. Politicians-Eric Adams, Gavin Newsom, and others-are asking for a return to involuntary confinement. Many psychiatrists feel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was one of the most damaging films ever to their field.
There’s a key moment in the film when McMurphy (indelibly played by Jack Nicholson) finds out that most of his fellow patients are voluntary admits and are not compelled, as he is, to stay in the ward. This piece of information blows his mind. There is, of course, one explanation in the Stockholm syndrome. But recent essays from within the field, such as Dr. Oliver Sacks’s 2009 piece “The Lost Virtues of the Asylum,” portray the old state hospitals, where Sacks worked for years, as flawed and overcrowded, yes, but also as places offering pockets of safety and refuge to the mentally ill. It seems worth considering whether deinstitutionalization, like many corrections, was an overcorrection and may have done more harm than good.
Mona Simpson is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, and Casebook. She has received a Whiting Writer’s award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, an NEA fellowship, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace Prize, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Mary McCarthy Prize. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the publisher of The Paris Review, where she worked as an editor in her twenties.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)