“We all go a little mad sometimes,” declares one of the creepiest villains in cinema history. No one debates the mental illness of Psycho’s Norman Bates, but R. P. McMurphy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is almost reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in that while pretending to be insane he actually exhibits characteristics of madness. McMurphy’s deceitfulness in order to get out of jail work and into the asylum exposes the atrocities of the hospital for the mentally ill both to him and to us viewers. But even beyond this social commentary on the treatment of those considered insane is the dominant question of whether or not the supporting characters who live in the asylum are actually mad. McMurphy would say no.

Upon learning that he must remain in the hospital until the evil Nurse Ratched and the other staff members decide to release him, McMurphy is even more shocked to learn this is not the case for most of the other patients. Rather, the other men are “voluntary,” meaning they have committed themselves to the asylum; and honestly, many of their struggles don’t seem significant enough to warrant their continuing presence in the ward for the mentally ill. Harding, for instance, can hardly (excuse the pun) discuss anything other than his jealousy for his wife’s attention, repeatedly harping on his paranoia that other men are looking at her. Young Billy has difficulty interacting normally with women due to his skewed relationship with his mother. McMurphy recognizes that these problems do not automatically qualify these men as insane. Instead, McMurphy tries to encourage the other men to get out of the hospital and indulge in the freedom they deserve: “What are ya doin’ here?…I mean, you guys do nothin’ but complain about how you can’t stand it in this place here and then you haven’t got the guts to just walk out!…What do you think you are…crazy or something? Well, you’re not! You’re not!” One of the most memorable scenes in the film lends support to McMurphy’s claim that the other hospital residents do not belong there. Stealing a bus—and a bunch of patients—from the asylum, McMurphy commandeers a fishing boat by claiming that he and the other men are really doctors, hinting at the possibility that even people struggling with psychological and emotional issues can live in the world and be whomever they want to be.

McMurphy and the other “doctors” on their deep-sea fishing expedition.

Another interesting note regarding the fishing scene is the significance of water—its fluidity, flexibility, unpredictability—in this film. Water is freedom. We see this in the fishing scene when the patients get a taste of what their lives could be like if lived outside the asylum. Water is also important in McMurphy’s escape plan with the wash station (spoiler alert!). By using the water station as his instrument in breaking out to freedom, Chief demonstrates how in this film something fluid trumps something fixed—and this is the reality of the conflict between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched as well.

The sinister Nurse Ratched.

Nurse Ratched is so enamored with her schedule that she views it as the patients’ salvation. The schedule trumps the spontaneous joy of bonding over a World Series game and is proposed as the coping mechanism to lean on in the bloody aftermath of Billy’s suicide. Nurse Ratched refuses to recognize the waste of human life for which she is responsible. Rather than focusing on healing and rehabilitating her patients so they can reenter society, she revels in her position of authority and keeps the male patients under her thumb. McMurphy’s attempt to strangle her after Billy’s death confirms that her threats to tell Billy’s mother about his one-night stand with Candy are to blame for the tragic loss of McMurphy’s protégé. The nurse’s rigidity eliminates her heart. Her control is more important to her than Billy’s life. In this way, she is the exact foil of McMurphy to whom Billy’s life is more important than freedom.

For Me Then…

Just like we can debate the presence of mental illness in the patients of the hospital in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we can also wonder just who exactly ends up gaining the freedom McMurphy so values. Is death really the same as freedom in this film? I’m going to say no, and I think the key is in the movie’s title. While Billy’s death delivers him from the domain of Nurse Ratched as well as the threat of his domineering mother, the viewer of this film does not feel at the end that Billy has attained the peace and security that he seems to be craving. In the case of McMurphy (spoiler alert!), the victim of a frontal lobotomy, Chief’s “mercy killing” is also disturbing. While McMurphy’s death, like Billy’s, delivers him from the pain and suffering he would otherwise endure if he had lived out his days in the asylum, this viewer believes that the release McMurphy receives is sub-par to the freedom he had envisioned throughout the film. Only one man “flies over the cuckoo’s nest,” after all.

McMurphy unknowingly walks away from freedom as he enters the ward for the mentally ill.

The film’s title comes from a nursery rhyme called “Vintery, Mintery, Cutery, Corn” about three geese: one flies east, one flies west, and “one [flies] over the cuckoo’s nest.” McMurphy and Nurse Ratched are probably the two geese that fly in completely different directions, which makes Chief the one who “flies over the cuckoo’s nest,” the one who escapes. And yet, what hope rests out on the mountains Chief traverses as the credits begin to roll? He no longer needs to pretend that he is deaf and dumb. He now can hear, and he now has a voice. But as Chief treks off apparently to Canada to start over, the film closes without offering any hope to its viewers. In fact, it seems that it is lack of hope (not fatigue or drunkenness) that hijacks McMurphy’s escape out the window during the “party” he throws one night in the ward. McMurphy fails to complete his sentence declaring what he will do once he is out of the hospital. He cannot find a purpose for his life, and this lack of meaning pulls with it a deep hopelessness—something that undoubtedly led to the self-committal of many of the patients in the first place. In the end, then, one might escape the “cuckoo’s nest” and find before him a world of possible freedom, but what he does with that liberty is never revealed to the film’s viewer, who wonders if even the world outside the hospital can offer any hope.