Yesterday, somebody stole my laundry basket. A centipede later jumped out of my sink and scurried into a hole in the wall. Sometimes at night I feel a stifled frenzy in my limbs, and I consider overturning my furniture and burning this damn house down. I drift in a grey sea of the mundane, a nausea of complications. If they weren’t such caricatures, I might feel great affinity for Billy Bibbit and Dale Harding.
With its low-lit documentary aesthetic and its struggle between an anti-establishment hero and an oppressive authority figure, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest has the ‘70s all over it. But Nicholson’s McMurphy isn’t the brooding, alienated anti-hero of Cool Hand Luke or Five Easy Pieces: he’s a Dionysian dancer. He grins and laughs and rages and burns. He is fleet of foot, quick of tongue—and he gives birth to a dancing star. He is the rupture of the mundane, the proclamation and lustful affirmation of life. His enemy is not authority, but banality, negativity and ressentiment.
And what defeats him is not authority, but impassivity. He overwhelms his surroundings with mercurial vigor, but Nurse Ratched will not be affected. She holds herself at a distance from life; she is the nexus of frustration, the unreachable, impervious being that stares out from the black pupils of the Other. And life conforms itself to her insidious will because she will not be touched by it. When McMurphy finally lashes out and tries to throttle her into feeling something, he can only transform her into burning red fleshiness—he cannot touch the impassive, indomitable Other hidden somewhere within that flesh.
The film undulates under the influence of these two characters; theirs is a battle for the soul of the Last Man. However, the film’s pseudo-realist stylings, and the nuanced performances of Nicholson and Fletcher, are not for nought. McMurphy and Ratched are not reduced to pure symbols: they embody the meanings of those symbols as real, living people. They would not be those symbols if they were not living them. This is the meaning that wells from the film’s four close-ups: Ratched’s aforementioned throttling; McMurphy’s red face as he undergoes electroshock therapy; his thoughtful, wistful face as he thinks he has won his freedom; and his thoughtless, lobotomized face just before his death. The second shot mimics the first, as McMurphy’s lightning individuality is momentarily reduced to pure flesh. The third forcefully reminds us that McMurphy is not just a symbolic entity, but a particular personality. And the last demonstrates Ratched’s victory by emptying the flesh of both the symbol and the personality.
But these four close-ups are merely the well-spring of the narrative; the narrative itself, the undulations caused by this welling, is traced out by the movements of the secondary characters, the Bibbits and the Hardings and the Chiefs. These characters and their personal tragedies are only vaguely sketched, their representations of mental “illness” naïve or irrelevant, but they needn’t be more than those vague sketches. They are made just realistic enough for me to empathize with them in their grey sea.
