Bacchic Redemption in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975)

Nurse Ratched likes a rigged game, according to R.P. McMurphy. And it’s true that the game he is playing—lawless and hedonistic, but also vital and free-spirited—is unwinnable on her sandlot. As their conflict develops, we seem to be asked to compare the therapeutic value of McMurphy’s introduction of the Dionysian, to Ratched’s attempt to enforce an ordered calm within the psychiatric ward over which she is absolute ruler. What happens when the Godzilla of superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Wes & Erin discuss the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Upcoming Episodes: Erin’s book “Avail,” “The Third Man,” “Julius Caesar.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Nurse Ratched likes a rigged game, according to RP McMurphy. And it's true that the game he is playing, lawless and hedonistic, but also vital and free spirited, is unwinnable on her sandlot. As their conflict develops, we seem to be asked to compare the therapeutic value of McMurphy's introduction of the Dionysian to Ratched's attempt to enforce an ordered calm within the psychiatric ward over which she is absolute ruler. What happens when the Godzilla of Superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Today we discuss the 1975 film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, what would you do if someone tried to stop you from watching the World Series? Would you start a riot? 1:21 Erin: I would and I have. 1:23 Wes: I know that baseball is very important to you. 1:25 Erin: It is, yeah. That was one of the more personally affecting moments in the film. I will say let them watch the World Series. The significance of the way he calls that imaginary game was not lost on me either. I thought, interesting that that was a series, which is a little painful for me to think about because the Yankees were swept in four games by the Dodgers. But he imagines that Sandy Koufax is being beaten by the batter, which, you know, not literally, but he's imagining that Koufax is. Is pitching and his. And the ball is being hit out of the park, which I think is, you know, a pretty anti authoritarian kind of statement in and of itself. You know, pitching is basically fascist and batters are. Batters are trying to resist the authority of the pitcher, which, you know, baseball is also the only, I think the only sport that I know of where the defense has the ball. Listeners can correct me if I'm wrong about that. Yeah. So he imagines that the. The anti authoritarian batter defeats the great pitcher Sandy Koufax in that moment, even though it's not literally true. It is a fantasy. 2:29 Wes: Did you know that from memory that 2:31 Erin: I know that the 63. Yeah, I know the record. I know that's an infamous World Series if you're a Yankees fan. So I don't know. The play by play. Somebody might have gotten a home run off of Koufax over the course of the series, but I just thought it was interesting that he was imagining they were getting beaten. 2:51 Wes: So this is set in 1963. I don't think I knew that. It's a 1975 movie. Right. Based on a novel. Do we know when the novel was set? I mean. Sorry. When the novel was published? 3:03 Erin: Yeah, I think It's. I think 62, for some reason. So I don't. 3:06 Wes: Yeah, it is 62. Yeah. Ken Kesey. Ken Kesey. 3:11 Erin: Have you read it? 3:12 Wes: No, I haven't. I downloaded it. I thought I might read a little bit, but I didn't end up reading anything. Have. Have you. So I think that was his one big. He wrote another novel. I don't know if he had any other big successes, but. Yeah. When I. When I suggested we do this movie, I was curious about whether you were excited to do it or. Where does this movie stand for you? Well, yeah, there you go. This is what I thought I did. You didn't see that. Excited. 3:41 Erin: Is this the kind of movie I'm supposed to get excited about with? You know, I mean, I think the. The title. You know, when one thinks of this film, you don't think it's gonna necessarily be the most fun you've ever had, 3:54 Wes: but it's got Jack Nicholson, but it's. 3:57 Erin: Yeah. Acting like it has something. 3:59 Wes: Are we gonna get a Jack Nicholson impression from you? 4:01 Erin: No, no, I wouldn't dare. I wouldn't dare. 4:03 Wes: No. Because we got a compliment on your 4:08 Erin: Daniel. Plainview. 4:10 Wes: Your Daniel Plainview. 4:11 Erin: I'm slipping. 4:12 Wes: That's my impression. 4:15 Erin: No, I mean, I think I had seen it in my early 20s and it had really disturbed me. You know, maybe not the best time personally for me to be watching a movie like that, frankly, but I think the prospect filled me with a little bit of dread because I wasn't really remembering that. There were a lot of funny moments. It seemed like it might be something that would be heavy in various ways, and it was. But I just came away with a real admiration for the performances. I mean, one of the best supporting casts ever, I think. I just absolutely love those group scenes. 4:51 Wes: Danny DeVito. 4:52 Erin: I know. 4:52 Wes: Getting the ball out of the park. 4:54 Erin: Yeah. 4:55 Wes: He can act, actually. 4:57 Erin: How dare you? 4:58 Wes: Oh, no. Because you like the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Is that the. 5:06 Erin: Oh, that's. Yeah, that's the. That's the bar, huh? No, like Romancing the Stone and. I don't know any of his sitcom performances. 5:18 Wes: Yeah, but in Romancing the Stone, you know, he's just doing his Danny DeVito thing. 5:22 Erin: Yeah, but that's. That's. That's what I like. 5:24 Wes: He's a real character. He's not just himself. He's a. But. Yeah, so while I picked it, I was just looking at a list of. Maybe I was looking at that AFI list of Hundred greatest movies or something. Something I wanted to see. And specifically the 70s, of course, since that's the. For me, the golden age of filmmaking, it's gotta be in the 70s. But I didn't remember having any particular feeling about the movie, except, I mean, I think it had been so long since I watched it. I remember being impressed by it, but I remembered very little of it. I think, as I watched it, I remembered the ECT scene with Jack Nicholson. That was something that really stayed with me. The iconic final scene, of course, but also that's been parodied so much that, you know, how can you not know that scene even if you haven't seen the movie? 6:15 Erin: I had forgotten that scene. 6:19 Wes: Wow, that's interesting. 6:20 Erin: Yeah. 6:21 Wes: We'll have to discuss what that means. 6:24 Erin: That part of my brain was cut out. 6:27 Wes: The large part of you, the free. The large part of you, the big man yearning for freedom. I remembered Nurse Ratched and her general demeanor. Although I always thought her name was Nurse Ratchet, I did not realize there was a D at the end of that name. And I wonder if when I hear people say it, am I just mishearing it or are they making the same mistake? I don't know, but it's a really clever name. And maybe we should just start with that because it seems to be combination of ratchet and wretched. And I think we could say she has both of those aspects to her character. Right. So Ratchet being a kind of wrench that you. You can move and only, you know, it's tightening will only happen in one direction. So you don't have to actually take the wrench off and put it back on and then tighten again. So if you're in a tight space, you can just do a back and forth motion. It's very convenient. So, you know, you can use it to loosen as much as to tighten. But I think we think of her as someone who is very tightened and also maybe someone who. The way she manipulates others in her very iconically passive aggressive way. You could think of the Ratchet as being involved in that. Winding people up, so to speak, during group therapy, which is not really what you're supposed to do. And then the other part of it is just wretched, we imagine. Well, the ratchet is the way to deal with the wretchedness in her case. And we're left to speculate about what her wretchedness entails. Although we can see in her character and her personality that there's a lack of vitality. There's a kind of flatness. Therapists would say her affect is flat. She does give off a sense of peace and serenity. I think before you get to know her. Right. You could call it a poker face of a certain sort. But we see that there's a lot of anger underneath all that. 8:24 Erin: It's one of those moments where I'm grateful to be hosting this podcast with a man, because I never would have thought of that ratchet. I don't actually know how ratchets work, so that's very helpful. 8:37 Wes: Well, you're also a big baseball fan, so I don't know. 8:41 Erin: That's one of the few things I can say. 8:44 Wes: I know pretty well. And I would not have been surprised if you were secretly a car mechanic. 8:50 Erin: I know, I know, I know. It would be very Marisa Tomei of me if I were. But alas, I'll just come out and say that I think there are some elements of misogyny in the film which bother me. I Wonder about dressing Ms. Ratched up in the Civil War nurse kind of cape at the beginning of the film. What we're supposed to ultimately glean from her character. I mean, she's certainly sadistic, and she certainly does wind these men up, and she certainly is no help to them in group therapy, and she's certainly an extremely emasculating presence. But are we supposed to get the sense from her that she believes she's helping? 9:29 Wes: Yeah, I would say at a conscious level. 9:31 Erin: Okay. 9:32 Wes: That's the impression I got. 9:33 Erin: You know, we could say that she's sort of the ultimate evil mother figure and that she seems to want to keep these men in a state of dependence on her, which seems to counteract the therapeutic intentions behind her behavior. Basically keep them in this womb where they're not going to make any progress, where they're not going to have any agency or think for themselves in any way. And she seems also to have, I mean, I think this other nurse that Miss. What is it? Pilbow? Is that her name? You know, this is sort of silent. She does say a few things at the beginning of the film, but then it seems as though she reacts to Jack Nicholson's sort of characterological force by retreating more and more into herself. And then the only expression or noise that she makes past a certain point in the film is to scream at seeing Billy. So is her silence a result of Ratched's dominance? Is it a result of Nicholson's force, which, you know, the force of his personality which seems to cause her to become more and more submissive or more and more silent or unable to move, or the battle of wills that goes on between Nicholson or I should say McMurphy and Ratched is really interesting because I remembered it being more aggressive than what actually happens, which is, in fact, very little. Except for when he's strangling her. There's. 11:01 Wes: Yes, yeah, maybe let's pause on that point because I think that's important, which is that if I had the same experience, if you re watch the movie, after some time, you'll think, oh, well, she's not so bad for a while. 11:15 Erin: Right, Right. 11:17 Wes: She's. What is she? You know, she's dealing with a bunch of crazy people and she's keeping her calm and, you know. Yeah, her affect and the way she presents herself is a bit creepy, but it really is kind of a slow boil, I think, with our discovery of her sadism. I mean, we do get a sense of it in the. In group therapy with her, I think, actively trying to humiliate men around romantic relationships. Right. So with Harding talking about his wife and then with Billy, Billy seems to be very ashamed of his sexuality and she's really rubbing that in, which is important because in a way, Jack Nicholson's character, McMurphy as a sort of representative of Dionysius and a satyr and a sex criminal, you know, he's very much about anti shame when it comes to sexuality. So that's another sense in which he represents an opposing force to Ratched. So I think we can speculate that she's in a situation. This is her way of relating to men. And it may be her only way of relating to men is being with men who she has complete control over men who are vulnerable because of their mental health. And then she plays out this thing which really has something to do with her by intruding into their sex lives. Right. So normal therapy and normal group therapy is not this intrusive. You don't. I think as McMurphy later objects or someone objects, you don't try to get people to talk about these things if they don't really want to. Yeah. So the point I was trying to get to, just to reinforce what you were saying is that she's likely entirely unconscious of her sadism and thinks that she's helping even as she's hurting. But this is something all therapists have to watch out for. So it's very easy to be convinced that what you're doing is in the spirit of being constructive and helpful. But maybe it's not right. Maybe the question you ask the patient about some detail in their life is not really about being helpful to them, but it's about your own morbid curiosity or your own even perverse curiosity, or it may be even something sadistic that's coming out some kind of enactment. And this is something we do all the time in relationships. You know, it's not. Not just in therapy and trying to get good at noticing these enactments. I mean, that's a real art and it's a lifelong project. But, yeah, she is deep into it. 13:41 Erin: Yeah. I think certainly the group therapy sessions I saw as a form of ritual humiliation. And yet one of the things that bothered me about the film, one of the things I perceived as being perhaps misogynistic, is the fact that there's hardly a character in the film who is not there because of a woman or because of a problem with a woman. Even that opening scene where McMurphy comes in in those shackles that are attached to that, you know, that belt in the. I guess it's the atrium of the asylum, and there's that winding staircase above him and all of these matronly women in plain clothes, presumably the mothers of the patients that are visiting them, you know, looking down on him. It's like this, you know, this image of just incredible maternal oversight or overbearing. 14:34 Wes: Oh, I thought these were female patients. 14:37 Erin: They're in normal dress. 14:39 Wes: Are they? 14:39 Erin: Yeah, and I don't know that they would be. You know, we don't get any indication that there are female patients in the build, I think. Would there not be hijinks to try and get to that supply of. 14:52 Wes: Well, I was thinking they were in a different ward or unit or something, but, yeah, maybe. Sounds like I hallucinated this. 14:59 Erin: So there's the idea that these men are here because of some negative relationship with a woman. Or in McMurphy's case, it's statutory rape. But women are somehow made to be responsible for their either voluntary or involuntary commitment, possibly accepting. Chief. But still, it seems that, yeah, the purpose of harping on this in these group therapy sessions is to humiliate them around these relationships so that she's protecting, particularly exploiting this. And, you know, I wonder what the position of a female nurse is or should be to these types of patients. Like, it seems just inappropriate to me that they would have a female nurse working with these men. I mean, that's like a huge problem right there. And then I also thought about the fact of her dress and what seemed to me to be a very clear sort of civil war coded like she looks like Florence Nightingale when she first comes into the building. There's a very Civil War era type of look to that cape. And I thought about the position of nurses historically, battlefield nurses, as women who are. They're in the position of serving men who have been wounded over the course of, you know, enacting this large scale aggression against each other. So that seems to be sort of inverted for Nurse Ratched or flipped on its head, whereby the only way that she can relate to men is in this wounded state, as I think you've already suggested, but that the more helpless they are, the more she seems to like them. Which seems to be why she's catering her treatment to the most emasculated or denatured of the men in the ward. You know, she's insistent that even men who are not coherent have a vote for the World Series. She's insistent that the music needs to be turned up for older men who may not be able to hear it, even if it affects those men with good hearing and makes it impossible for them to talk to each other or makes them aggravated so that everything is tailored or catered to the most wounded among them. So it seems that this is not about traditional nursing in which you would help these men get back to the state of vigor so that they could go back out and be men and fight on the battlefield in this particular case, but that you wish to keep them in a state of needing your care. And I wanted to tie that back to the fact that they seem to be there because of women. So that too seems to be a kind of, you know, she's not nursing them because they've been wounded in battle. They somehow had a wound to their masculinity. And rather than putting them in a position where that masculinity can be restored, Nurse Ratched is trying to leech more and more of that from them somehow, so that it's sort of a double bind that she has them in both in her position as a nurse and in her position as someone who's supposed to be helping men with a particular kind of wound. 18:04 Wes: Yeah, I think she has something important in common with those men, which is that she like them this is speculation, but I think this is what we're meant to believe. She, like them, cannot really be in a romantic relationship and this is a replacement. So for the men, they don't have the maturity or the mental health to do that. And that is part of why they're there. And romantic relationships, of course, features prominently in people's mental health problems or in their distress. And that includes the very first romantic relationship, the one with one's own mother, which is why. Part of why misogyny is such a prevalent thing in men and in women. Mothers get a lot of blame, consciously or unconsciously. And she is also, in a way, a quasi maternal figure. I think it's. It wouldn't be uncommon to have a woman running group therapy. And as you know, as I've mentioned on the show, I ran a halfway house for the mentally ill for seven years and that was a live in position. And I had four staff members and usually my staff members were female. And that's just based on the applications that I was getting. And mental health now is a very female dominated field. 19:16 Erin: But even in a specifically male, like in an institutional setting with only male inmates, it's just surprising to me that there are no men that are there to administer any kind of therapy. 19:29 Wes: Yeah, I mean, there's Dr. Spivey, but we don't see him very. Is that Spivak maybe? 19:35 Erin: Is the name Spivey. Spivey or Spivey, let's call him Doc like everyone else. 19:39 Wes: Yeah, Spivy. All right, Spivey. But we don't see much of him because Nurse Ratched is one of the most capable nurses. 19:47 Erin: Right. Well, there's a. Did you see the sign at one point at the nurse's station that says if you would like to make an appointment to see the doctor, see Nurse Ratched, you have to go through her to see a male authority figure. And then those male authority figures, of course, are shown as being extremely ineffectual and ultimately under her thumb. They take her advice. 20:10 Wes: She's got a bunch of orderlies who are very much under her thumb. And then I think you're talking about the other administrators as well, anonymous administrators, because she is able to convince them to keep McMurphy there. And we'll talk about later why that's so important when they think he should be cut loose and sent loose, so to speak, and sent back to jail. I had a similar thought that it was odd in the sense that, well, the orderlies are there to deal with aggression. So there's that as Far as the safety factor goes. But there is an odd aspect of the setting in the sense that you have. Right. She can go behind the desk and there's a window there that can be closed, as if that's some element of safety. When, as we find out, it's easy for one of the patients to just go and open the door and go into that little office. And it was relatively easy for McMurphy to punch through that window when the time comes. So the window is window dressing, so to speak. And she is often out right on the floor anyway, so there's something interesting there about the division. Her sense in which she's a spectator, where she kind of remains aloof, remains behind that window. And the same thing with using the use of the microphone. Neither of them is really of that much use the microphone or the window. I mean, you know, she can make announcements on the yard, but it doesn't seem like there's much to do in that respect. I think it has more to do with how she needs to relate to the men, which is to have this position of control, but to do it at a distance. 21:48 Erin: Yeah. Thinking through that a little bit. The microphone allows her to never have to raise her voice so she can keep that same volume level and that sort of flat affect in the voice but amplify it through the microphone. 22:02 Wes: Very good. Yeah, very important. 22:04 Erin: I think there's probably something similar happening with the ultimate ineffectualness of the window in the nurse's station. And yet the idea that it's there to enforce some sort of sense of a barrier, even if the barrier doesn't really exist, or some sort of power distinction. 22:20 Wes: Role distinction. Yeah. 22:22 Erin: And also a sense of serenity as well. Like a sort of veneer of, you know, you have to go up and you have to knock on the window. And there's almost a. Come to think of it, you know, there's almost a kind of a courtliness about it, like they have to go up and they have to advance up to the window and make their request and, you know, Nurse Ratched has to then let down her hair or whatever, that kind of thing. There's a little bit of a fortification of her power which at the same time preserves a kind of femininity where she doesn't have to become aggressive or assert any kind of vim or vigor into what she does. 23:01 Wes: Yeah. I think the movie conveys this sense of serenity from the very beginning where we see her car driving in at a distance, you know, in the landscape. The one that Chief will end up running out into. In the end. And then she's, you know, she enters and walks down the hallway and says her good mornings. This will be bookended, you know, near the end of the movie when they find the aftermath of the party, those good mornings happen as well, but in a much different context. So she's saying her good mornings to the orderlies and then moving on to medication and then music. So there's a lot of alliteration. And then after that, McMurphy, morning, good morning, medication, music and McMurphy. But the. Yeah, the first three are all about serenity and pacification. Pacify them with medication, pacify them with pleasant music, but music that's too loud and so is in a passive aggressive way, driving them crazy at the same time, right? And so, yeah, it's a very Apollonian world, a world of peace. Right. That McMurphy, as a representative of Dionysius, I think, will intrude upon. He's given a very contrasting entrance, right? We see him come in through the same gate as Nurse Ratched comes in, but he, unlike her, is dancing and playing the fool and doing all that, being the satyr, being the trickster. We get that sense in the very beginning. We get the sense that these two people are characterological opposites. This power dynamic I think we're talking about, you can see it repeated in different ways. So, for instance, there's an interesting power dynamic between Harding and Cheswick, where Cheswick is almost like the helpless, dependent part of oneself. He's a bit of a baby. He can get stressed out and start crying easily. He's impressionable, maybe, and in need of someone in control. And then Harding is very, very much in control. And they seem to be a kind of pair, feeding off of each other in the beginning in their game, although McMurphy is going to very much interfere with that dynamic. But we can think of this as an intrapsychic dynamic as well, between the powerful side of oneself, the part of oneself that's in control, and then a potentially disavowed helpless part of oneself, what Jung would call like a shadow ego. So naturally, we'd speculate that this is a dynamic that's internal to Ratched's own psyche, her own character. And what she is ultimately fending off is her own sense of helplessness and humiliation. Something which, of course, is going to show up in the context of romantic relationships and keep her, if my speculation is correct, keep her from being able to engage in that. And the same thing for the men in this. This ward that's part of why they're not capable of engaging in these relationships because of the kinds of power dynamics involved in intimacy, surrender, helplessness. Things that just can be too unbearable if you don't have your psychical shit together, so to speak. So now she enacts this. She enacts her role as a nurse, a mental health nurse as a kind of substitute for a romantic relationship with a bunch of helpless men that she can be a helper to nominally but also engage in sadistic control of. 26:30 Erin: That's really well put. What do we take then of the fact that McMurphy seems to feed off of her as well? I mean, I thought one of the more interesting observations that these doctors make is that the person that McMurphy is closest to is also the person he dislikes the most. Right. They're in this. It's like mom and dad. Mom and dad are always fighting in the ward. And that, I don't know, need to put a bee in her bonnet, or however he puts it. Need to. The need to dress her down somehow seems to also be the compulsion that's driving him. I mean, one would, I suppose, say that he sees her as a repressed person who it's his job to sort of antagonize or bother out of her repression. And that's going to be his therapeutic role with her. I mean, I don't know if he sees her in those terms. He seems to view himself as a more proper therapist for the men than she is. So certainly has a therapeutic relationship to the other men. But I wonder if that extends to her as well or if he simply sees her as a sort of like, asexual, antagonistic force. 27:44 Wes: Yeah, I don't think he's thinking about being a therapeutic presence at all. I just think he inadvertently is. Right. He's, like, stealing from people. He's robbing all these people of her cigarettes. This becomes a big deal later on. And Ratched kind of has a good defense of herself. Keeping your cigarettes in the room, in the office so you won't get robbed by this guy. It's not. Not everything she's doing is completely unfair. Right. He's selfish. He's sexually. Right. He's sexually ravenous to the point of not really caring about the other person. I assume the two women in the movie are prostitutes. I think it's clear in the book. But that's probably about the kind of relationship that he can have, is a relationship with prostitutes. So he is also, you know, impaired, I think, in this way, as the other the other men are. But with Ratched. Let's look at that moment, because there's a moment where there's a card game. This is really kind of at the end of the first act, but at the end of the first act, there's a card game that goes awry. 28:47 Erin: Is this the Martini? 28:49 Wes: Oh, yeah. 28:50 Erin: Martini, sing Hit Me over and over again. 28:53 Wes: Yes. But also, the way it starts out is hilarious because Martini wants to bet a nickel and so breaks the cigarette in half because each cigarette represents a dime. And McMurphy says, if you break it in half, you don't get two nickels, you get shit. Try and smoke it. You understand? Yes. At a certain point, this ends up with Martini impulsively asking McMurphy to hit him in blackjack. And then what happens? 29:23 Erin: He shows remarkable restraint and not hitting Martini. Same thing in the Monopoly game. I feel really bad for Harding, who 29:32 Wes: I love, by the way. So I'm just seeing this in my notes here. This is the first time, because I know some essays have compared him to a Christ figure, right? And is he Dionysius? Is he a trickster? Is he a Christ figure? And before I'd even seen any of that, this is the moment where I thought, God, this is like Jesus and the lepers. He's surrounded by all these needy people. He's inverse Jesus, of course, because he's just trying to take advantage of them, really have fun. But he is showing a certain amount of restraint towards them. And then he loses it. And. Right. And he doesn't take it out on them. He takes it out on the Pharisees, so to speak. So he's like, jesus Christ Almighty. Do you nuts want to play cards or do you want to fucking jerk off? Sounds like a lot like a lot like Jesus. Play the game. I can't even hear myself think already here. All right. Now, there's a good reason he can't hear himself think is because Martini is saying, hit me over and over again. These guys are off their rockers, but instead he heads towards the nurses station. In fact, he goes into the office and Pilbow screams when she sees him in there and says, stay back. Again, this is like the whole weird office thing where suddenly they're dangerous because they're in the office. You're around them on the floor all the time. But patients aren't allowed in the nurses station, as she said. So he's broken a rule. Law and order has been defied. So he has to get out of the office and get in line at the window and Ask for the music to be turned down. And then she'll say, that music is. And this is ratchet. Now, that music is for everyone, Mr. McMurphy. I know, but do you think we might ease it down a little so maybe the boys didn't have to shout? What you probably don't realize is that we have a lot of volt. And then she gives that explanation. She's not just trying to drive them all crazy with loud music. She's trying to do a good thing for the people who can't hear. In any case, that's the. After that, he will go back to the sit down with the other guys. And then he reveals that he hasn't actually taken his medication by blowing a pill onto Harding's forehead. And then he'll say, God almighty, she's got you guys coming and going. What do you think she is, some kind of champ or something? This way of viewing the world through the lens of sports, World Series or basketball, it's very important to understanding McMurphy's character. Is she a champion boxer? Do you think she's going to knock you out? And then Harding says, no, I thought you were the champ. And that's where he says, you want to bet? I bet in one week I can put a bug so far up her ass she won't know whether to shit or wind her wristwatch. 32:18 Erin: Yeah, that's a pretty good line. 32:20 Wes: Later on, of course, he's going to be upset with these guys. They didn't warn him. When he finds out that they can keep him here as long as they want. And he's got a lot to lose in this confrontation, he finds that upsetting. But at this point, he doesn't know that he has that much to lose. And after that first real confrontation with Ratched, yeah, he's ready to go to war, so to speak, or to be a kind of tormentor to her, to give her a taste of her own medicine in a way, right? 32:50 Erin: Well, she doesn't. He's upset because she doesn't fight fair. And this is one of the things that's really subtly done early on. For instance, with Martini and the cards, right? He's counting the queen as a number card and doesn't recognize that the queen is somehow. That logic does not extend to the queen. You know, the queen is outside of the logic of numbers, right? And to a certain extent, you know, when these guys are being antagonized by a woman, there isn't really a way for them to fight back. I mean, eventually, McMurphy will fight back physically. You know, maybe this is related to the idea of the window I was thinking about. Okay. There's the sort of the soft window, if you will, of the nurses station and then the hard window of the outside of the building. Right. That they have to crash through. And this imagery of punching. And our introduction to McMurphy as a fighter who compares himself to Rocky Marciano and says, you know, he gets millions of dollars for fighting and how come I'm here? Because I'm a fighter. And. And again, yeah, the Ratched thing. Calling her a champ. But he's going to be upset because she doesn't fight fair. 33:51 Wes: She likes a rigged game. 33:52 Erin: She likes a rigged game, Right. 33:54 Wes: Speaking of the World Series. 33:55 Erin: Right. Because she's the queen. She doesn't have. She's not a number. She's not, you know, one of these guys with. In McMurphy's case, maybe a number plate in the cases of the other guys, one of the numberless masses of inmates. Right. 34:10 Wes: And he's referring back to the rigged vote they take about the World Series, which is that she. They unanimously vote in group therapy to watch the World Series that evening. But she wants to include all the people left on the ward who can't communicate, which turns out to be nine people. And then he has to lobby them. And finally he gets the chief to raise his hand, but by the time. To vote for watching the World Series. But by the time he does that, she says the vote. Right. The meeting was terminated and the vote closed or something like that. Some very officious bureaucratic thing to say. So she rigs the game, so to speak. She rigs the vote on the watching of the game. 34:51 Erin: Right. Again, this is the catering to the patients who are more debilitated. So keeping the volume up. Giving the catatonic patients a vote in the proceedings, even though they can't hear what's going on. And they're also, like, even too far away to hear, the majority of them, there's that old man who's always dancing, who's my favorite character, I think, but, you know, does not. Well, actually, I love Cheswick. He's. He's so adorable. I love that actor. But, yeah, the old man dancing is like a very fanciful. He seems like a fun guy. I don't know. Anyway, they're very concerned that he's gonna tire himself out, which seems to be, like, probably a good thing if they want him to stop, but whatever. I don't know. I don't have their qualifications. So what do I know. Yeah. So she's playing these passive aggressive games which seem related to this again, this queenliness or this idea that because she's the nurse and she's in this sort of untouchable and yet literally quite touchable little fortification, she can make these pronouncements and everybody just has to adhere to her rules. And she sort of hides behind catering to the most defenseless among the men, which seems like she's standing up for them, but which is in fact this way of enforcing passivity to emasculate those who are not passive or something. It's, it's this perverted feminine game that she is playing, which is one of the reasons why I find this, this very frustrating to watch. So she's sort of leaning on a certain kind of passive aggressive femininity as a way to enforce this control. I think, I think this is what it ultimately comes down to, though. I don't want to put things in those terms. It's like hitting a guy over and over again and saying, haha, you can't hit me back because I'm a woman. You know, there's an element of that to this dynamic. 36:48 Wes: Yeah, it's a very hidden form of violence, if you want to call it that. So I think psychoanalysts would call it project what she's doing, projective identification, where she takes emotions or parts of herself that are objectionable, like for instance, helplessness. And she finds suitable objects outside of herself to put that into. And it may already be there to some extent. Right. That makes them even more suitable. But she can create a little drama with a bunch of characters around her in this particular situation that are acting out her internal psychological dynamics so that she can see them outside of herself and get some sort of gratification from that and not have to feel as chaotic inside. She creates the chaos outside. You know, with men, men are often more likely to be just physically aggressive. So in my house, for instance, where I was residence director, I dealt with a lot of women with borderline personality disorder where this kind of projective identification dynamic is very common. Although we all do it right. It's really about a spectrum, men and women. We all do it. Borderline personality disorder is more common in women than men, although you see a few men narcissism common in both sexes. But what I didn't have, I didn't have physically violent men because those men usually just end up in prison like McMurphy. I had men who were schizophrenics, I had men who were depressed or bipolar, usually the aggression is turned inward in the type of people who are going to end up in a hospital setting like this, which is why McMurphy stands out. If I had a McMurphy, I could easily, and I may have been called Nurse Ratched at some point. I don't even know. Because you are trying to keep control and you're trying to keep calm and you're trying to get people to follow rules, and everyone thinks you're an asshole to some extent for doing that. So I'm very sympathetic to her. But if I'd seen someone with sociopathic qualities and had it happened maybe on a couple of occasions, including someone who I thought was very dangerous, in which case you really have to treat that person with kid gloves and a lot of respect, even as you're enforcing the rules. You have to be careful not to humiliate, not to shame, because that's a situation. It can legitimately lead to physical violence. And you can feel it. If you have any intuition. You. You know the situation you're in and you know you have to be careful. But again, very rare in the kind of setting I was in, because men like that tend to go straight to prison if they have a propensity for physical violence. But social violence, of course, much easier to get away with. And we all engage in it unconsciously to some extent. But what she's doing, she has a very toxic, extreme level of this. This passive aggression that Ratched is engaging in. And it doesn't help that she's in a position of power that where she can it facilitates her engaging in it. Right. Who knows if when she was younger she was in a better position where she wasn't tempted by that power to feed this part of her psyche. [email protected] subtextpodcast otherwise, you can wait a week to listen to it as a separate episode in the feed. 40:16 Erin: All right, thank you, thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. 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