BMOAT - Group B - Bracket I

[Mattrick]

I'm feeling better now and noticed feverish hadn't posted them yet. I've actually got a minute to do it too, been so busy.

The Godfather Part II


The Pink Panther


One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest


Philadelphia Story


Deliverance


The Princess Bride


Battle Royale


The Fisher King

[fernandito]

One flew over the cuckoos nest.

[Odetta]

"If anything in this life is certain. If history has taught us anything. It's that you can kill anyone." - Don Michael Corleone

[Girlystevedave]

I love The Princess Bride, but I voted One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest because I really do not want The Godfather to take this one.

[OchrisO]

One flew over the cuckoos nest.

I would have voted for this, except that I have read the book, and it is a horible horrible horrible adaptation of the book. None of the ideas or symbolism that exist in the book are put forth in the movie, and they even change the narrative somewhat. I think that it fails horribly as a film.

[OchrisO]

Oh, and here's a paper I wrote about it that I will post as my reasoning why you shouldn't vote for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

At its core, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a novel about how society, combined with the Mental Health Institution, as it existed in the 1960s, strove to destroy the individual and make everyone fit within the neat mold that made people boring, productive members of society. In the translation to film, the story almost completely loses that crucial aspect, primarily through the loss of the perspective of Chief Bromden.


In the novel, the story is told through the perspective of Chief Bromden, a resident who was committed to the institution because he has delusions. However, his delusions turn out to be symbolic of things that really happen in the world. He believes that there is an organization called the Combine who turns everyone into robots by capturing them and placing control mechanisms in their brains. The Combine becomes a symbol for society, who wants everyone to essentially be robots, which is to say, boring, productive members of society who have no sense of individuality. It is easier to keep people productive if they all fit into a mold and think that they are supposed to behave in a very specific manner. If people did not fit into this mold required by society in the 1960s, they were told that they were mentally ill and sent to an institution. In many cases, society convinces the individual that they are crazy and they go voluntarily, which is the case of most of the residents in the novel.


The character of Big Nurse is symbolic of the Mental Health Institution as a whole. Big Nurse is more concerned with keeping order on her ward than she is with seeing any of her patients get well enough to leave the hospital. More than that, she thinks that order and by the book rules will help her patients to get better and has no interest in any other methods or changes to her routine. As a result, Chief Bromden sees her as a robot at the center of it all, with wires and cables extended to control her ward and maintain order, which isn’t far from the truth. What is a robot, but something that repeats a set list of commands with no deviation?


The foil to Big Nurse’s ordered world comes in the character of McMurphy. McMurphy is the supreme individualist, exactly the kind of person that society does not want running loose in the world, because people like him show people what a joy it is to be different. McMurphy comes into the story with a long record of arrests to prove this. He comes into the institution and does exactly what society feared that he would do out in the world. He makes the residents remember who they are and allows them to take back their lives. In doing this, he becomes a martyr for individuality. He refuses to cease being himself, even when threatened with electro-shock therapy, which doesn’t even seem to affect him. He continues to buck the system after he is given this treatment, and by the end, has turned the ward and its residents into something completely different. He not only bucks the system, but teaches all of the others to buck the system as well. Not only that, but he teaches them to live again. He is eventually lobotomized, which makes a true individual as good as dead, because it makes them a docile complacent being, in other words, exactly what the Combine wants them to be. Chief Bromden realizes this and completes McMurphy’s martyrdom by smothering him with a pillow.


Chief Bromden is the most lost of the residents when McMurphy arrives and McMurphy helps him find himself simply by being his individual self. Bromden sees himself as lost in an obscuring fog, which begins to disappear as McMurphy shows up and lights the way with his burning individualism. As the fog clears, Bromden decides to stop pretending that he is deaf and mute, and tells McMurphy what he believes about Big Nurse and the Combine. As he tells the story, he realizes that he is sounding crazy and tells McMurphy, who agrees that he sounds crazy. However, McMurphy then says, “I didn’t say it didn’t make sense, Chief, I just said it was talking crazy” (190). This helps Bromden to realize that maybe he isn’t so crazy after all, and helps him to find his way back to himself. McMurphy saw the symbolism is what Bromden was seeing. He convinces Bromden, who seems himself as small and withered by society, that he can make him big again and help him to escape. He saw what Bromden was seeing as an individual on the outside, looking in at the works of a society of robots. In this, Bromden is redeemed and rescued by the individualist martyr.


In the film, McMurphy is played by Jack Nicholson, who is the typical, typecast Jack Nicholson character: dark and brooding. In this, the character of McMurphy suffers. Nicholson undoubtedly plays “crazy” well, but it is the wrong kind of crazy for McMurphy. The McMurphy of the novel is a jolly person, who is interested in seeing that everyone has a good time and learns to laugh. Nicholson fails completely in bringing this across. He succeeds in bringing across McMurphy’s occasional violent side, but that is a minor part of the character. As a result, the martyr aspect of McMurphy is almost completely lost. His counterpart, Big Nurse is well cast in the person of Louise Fletcher, as she does a good job of playing the bland, by the rules character with little to no emotion.


One thing that the film does well is to capture life inside of a Mental Health Institution. One of the most effective ways of conveying this is an abundant use of close camera shots. There are almost no wide angle shots in the film. Everything is shot close to the faces of the characters, giving a sense of the claustrophobia associated with being locked up in a ward every day with no relief from the pressures of being locked up. The film also uses cuts almost exclusively, neglecting any sort of panning shots. This gives the film a jumpy, frantic feel, adding to the “crazy” aspect of the institution.


The film changes a number of situations from the novel. One of the biggest changes is centered on the fishing trip. In the novel, McMurphy legitimately sets up the fishing trip, which angers Big Nurse, and has one of the doctors, who likes to fish, take them on the trip. As a result, the reader sees the residents of the institution interacting with several “normal” people, and functioning just fine. In the film, the plot has McMurphy steal the bus and take the residents with him for the fishing trip with no prior, legitimate plan. The doctor doesn’t come along at all, and the normal interaction is lost. It also takes away the idea that all of the doctors don’t agree with the system and are just as beaten by it as the residents.
The film suffers the most in the loss of the perspective of Chief Bromden. In the novel, the reader sees things through the eyes of Bromden, and has to decide what is simply delusion and what might mean something more symbolically. Using this sort of perspective in a film would be difficult, if not completely impossible. As a result, Chief Bromden is relegated to a background character for most of the film. The most important character of the novel merely stands in the corner holding a broom for a great deal of the film. In this, the film loses all of the symbolism of the book. The Combine is never mentioned and Big Nurse is not seen as a tool of the Combine, because we never see things through the eyes of Bromden. This causes the film to neglect the most important aspect of the book. The viewer eventually sees Bromden brought to the foreground of the film when he decides to talk to McMurphy, but he makes no mention of the Combine. Without the Combine, it is impossible to understand Bromden’s redemption and journey back to himself.


While the film is a good look at what it is to be in a mental institution when watched alone, when watched after reading the novel, the viewer quickly realizes that the film loses all of the symbolism of the novel. As a result of losing the perspective of Chief Bromden, the film loses the complete thrust of the novel’s condemnation of cookie-cutter society and the need to make everyone fit in.

[blackrose22]

Deliverance got my vote, again another hard selection to choose from.

Enjoyed reading your paper on OWFOTCN OchrisO you got your points over extremely well.

[jemaher]

omg, the choices get harder and harder. I felt safe in not voting for the godfather because i was sure it would move on. but wow, Philadelphia story and Princess bride are monumental as well!