Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

  According to Mews, “We used the book as our guide, almost like it was a script.” She described taking “all the character stuff” from the book, while the script itself was very well-written, “and I had those wonderful lines to say from Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman.”13 Likely, the seeming contradiction is easily solved by considering the novel more as guide to theme and sensibility rather than content and structure.

  Of course, the most dramatic—and cinematically necessary—shift was from a first-person interior narrative to a third-person neutral one, a change that also more commercially placed the focus on Nicholson’s character. Berryman explained that Kesey “always thought it was through the eyes of the Chief, and the star was truly Jack as McMurphy, so that’s how it happened,” resulting in this “incredible film!”14

  Nicholson established his character at once as juvenile glad-hander, class wisecracker and ingratiating schemer. Just after being led into the facility, he performs a pretend “crazy” jig and kisses a guard. During his processing with Dr. Spivey (played by Dr. Dean Brooks, the real-life head of the Oregon State Hospital, where much of the film was shot), McMurphy adopts a conspiratorial “just between us” manner when explaining his grand plan to avoid work detail at jail by faking mental problems. Mac’s ensuing confusion when opening up about this to the facility director comes across as part genuine, part contrived, culminating in a nice, probably unscripted moment when he reaches to squash a bug and Dr. Brooks reacts with delayed raised eyebrows.

  Jack Nicholson: Anatomy of an Actor author Beverly Walker watched the interview sequences being filmed, witnessing how they “evolved from extensive improvisations between Nicholson and Dr. Dean R. Brooks, the hospital’s game psychiatrist.” She perceived Nicholson as “playfully devilish” in his attempts to shock the doctor (an ironic turnaround of sorts). “Every take was hilarious. Nicholson—adept at playing overlapping actions within a scene—presents McMurphy as both impudent and clueless.”15

  McMurphy immediately asserts himself in group sessions and effortlessly grabs the unopposed leadership position over a bunch of dope-placated, introverted inmates. While his first session devolves into madness and anarchy, you witness the first realization that Mac’s scheme wasn’t such a good idea.

  These scenes took place in an actual mental institution environment to enhance the disassociation from the outside world and the claustrophobic effects of confinement, while adding realism no set could replicate.

  Vincent Schiavelli (Fredrickson) reported that the confinement went beyond a mere visit, as the inmate actors arrived on location a week before filming began and “allowed ourselves to be locked up in the ward” each afternoon, choosing their own beds and collecting their own personal items, “so we essentially became the characters whom we played.” The actors visited inmates and attended group sessions. “In Cuckoo’s Nest,” the Amadeus and Fast Times at Ridgemont High actor explained, “it became clear that you had to reach inside yourself to find your own insanity and its manifestation.”16

  Of course, the cast must not have been totally closed off from the outside world, as Josip Elic, who played Bancini joked to me that Jack was “a pain in the ass!” because he always wanted to finish in order to watch the Lakers games.17

  Small described the hospital as an eerie place, with 150 patients on the film’s payroll who were there because they didn’t understand what was going on in their lives. “In the shock treatment ward,” she explained, “all of those people except for Sydney [Lassick], Jack and Will [Sampson, who played Chief], they’re all the real deal—the real doctors, the real nurses.” She told me how director Milos Forman used the reality to set a mood, such as when he “pans around so you can see the faces. The first picture you see in the film, you look in that doorway and there’s a person looking out of the doorway. That is a patient, not an actor.”18

  Berryman set the scene by explaining, “It was 127 days and we had two weeks of rehearsal with camera for the major scenes, blocking for two weeks, and then we started rolling principal photography. And it was a real hospital with real doctors, with Dean Brooks, and some of the patients upstairs were real patients, and they performed a lobotomy while we were there. And we knew it was us or them.”19

  That feeling of “us or them” permeated the atmosphere. McMurphy increasingly views Nurse Ratched as an enemy who is there not to help the patients, but keep them under a system of rules and procedures more about control and conformity than treatment and care for the individual. “Us” represent people; “them” is the system—or, applied more broadly, the individual vs. society.

  McMurphy can’t help but become upset at what he views as the squashing of the inmates’ personalities and needs, manifesting itself in mistrust and rebellion. He plots in ways that matter and can make a difference, yet he also plots about things that simply betray his own inner conflict and ingrained tendency to stir things up.

  These natural tendencies are showcased in the initial scene on the basketball yard, as McMurphy tries to teach the massive Chief the fundamentals of the game (something he knows about from having directed Drive, He Said as well as from all those Los Angeles Laker games) in order to take advantage of it later.

  Mac’s hopefulness combines with his scheming and his personal strength at “mixing.” The J.D. who never grew up always has a game going, whether the metaphorical game against the system or literal games such as hoops, cards or watching the World Series. The games are not always fun or satisfying. In his first card game, his impatience with the other patients foreshadows a trouble in socializing. McMurphy can only fit in so much, misfits as they all are. Some are simply beyond being reached, because of their mental condition and because of the institution’s conditioning.

  The vote on whether to watch the World Series stands as pivotal to McMurphy’s mental state, as well as his attitude toward the facility. Nicholson is coquettish and even a little boyishly seductive with Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched. At first.

  When the door to opportunity begins to close, we see his change. When that door is closed for good, locked and bolted as compulsively as if by Melvin Udall himself, Nicholson moves his character’s nature from boy Randall to leader Mac to troublemaker McMurphy.

  During the first World Series vote, Jack ranges from helpful to hopeful to confused, then from dismay to disgust to disappointment. All one man, all one scene, yet embodying three aspects of Randall Patrick McMurphy’s personality—not a split personality, but a splintering away of his necessary buoyancy to reveal his underlying authority problems and anti-feminist core.

  On the second World Series vote, McMurphy loses on a technicality, with men unable to comprehend what’s going on, let alone take a position on it, counted among the total to defeat the motion. Nicholson shows how the man is thoroughly shattered, first with a classic Jacksplosion and then through denial, by pantomiming his own play-by-play as if watching the game in triumph.

  The choice of the words “henhouse shit” (as in “You’re not going to pull that now…”) gives away McMurphy’s attitude about strong females making the rules. Creating a fantasy response falsely put the man in charge, with Mac pretending he won against Nurse Ratched and her system. In his temporary world, which he probably knew was not real even as he was enjoying it, the men get to watch the ballgame despite what the women say.

  As Dr. Cannon pointed out, Randall did not have a mental illness. He was in touch with reality. He just didn’t like it.20

  Berryman reflects that this “was the major question. ‘What is reality?’ ‘What is real life?’ We were being medicated constantly, [while] the humanity came from Jack’s character, which Louise had to crush because of her issue of control and rigid thinking.”21

  R.P. McMurphy responds to the control by building up his own pressure. He actually believes that extra pressure could give him superhuman strength, and he gives it all he’s got when he attempts to pick up a huge bathroom fixture. He believes. And he is not showing off to t
he other inmates.

  Try watching this one scene without the sound distracting you. Nicholson is in the bathing area with this imposing porcelain sink structure. Watch his eyes for the range of emotion and expression that reaches beyond his eyes to his feelings. Then, switch the sound back on and hear the groans and gurgles and wordless—yet completely understood—utterances, as he off-camera starts his struggle to lift it. Having seen the concentration and exertion without sound, and then having heard the accompanying full-on intent and physical strain, we now feel the actor’s total energy, his intensity in the moment and focus toward the action, as it happens.

  It’s entirely credible that he could have succeeded, as impossible as the task was. He believed. And he nearly burst in order to make it happen. McMurphy sums it up to the spectators, but Mac might just as well be summing up the film’s message of rebellion against a mindlessly controlling society. He does so even with the rational knowledge that only total failure can result, stating forcefully that giving up is not an option. Mac spits it out in disgust about the reality of a guy getting beat down by the system, throwing out the words as if the words themselves are the enemies: “I tried, goddamn it, at least I did that.” Let this serve as Randall Patrick McMurphy’s epitaph, and the epitaph of generations of those who could only abhor conformity, yet were ineffective in combatting it.

  The pressure is relieved by the presence of Candy (Small) and Rose (Louisa Moritz), introduced when a jubilant Candy is pulled onto the bus from her trailer for the inmates’ escape trip. Small reminded me that the film had been shot in order, “so when the girls showed up, the guys didn’t have to act excited,” describing the fishing sequence as “four days of fun … except for those who were sick.”22

  Even cinematographer William Fraker, who took over for Haskell Wexler and Bill Butler, was seasick the whole time. Mews remembered that money was running out and staff was cut, so that this final shot sequence used a skeleton crew in a place where the water is usually very rough. “We only had four days to film, and we had to finish the film in four days,” with luck intervening for those four days, before conditions returned to storminess. “Out there, we’re all free on the boat. I was one of those who didn’t get seasick, and Jack didn’t. All of the actors were wonderful,” including Christopher Lloyd, who passed the time reading Shakespeare while so many colleagues dealt with seasickness.23

  There’s joy in this independence, and Randall shows leadership outside in contrast to his bossiness inside. As mentor, he encourages participation and what today would be called empowerment. All respond favorably and all seem normal, or at least their own versions of normalcy.

  This Mac is a different man than the one imprisoned as much by the helplessness as by the institution’s walls and fences. When he finds out, from a guard who enjoys destroying Randall’s hope far too much, that he’s in to stay (unless those in charge deem him fit to leave), the life drains from Mac’s face in a way that foreshadows the electroshock scene.

  With all the hope in his mind wiped out, McMurphy’s reaction is to put his body into the fight. He twists it and stretches it, burying his head into his fist, all leading to his ultimate attack on the facility itself. His frustration explosively escalates from a battle over cigarettes to beatings, from breaking the glass on the nurses’ station to a fight with an attendant.

  This is where everything gets serious. Cuckoo’s Nest’s matter-of-fact use of shock therapy and lobotomizing has contributed to a lasting negative view of mental health treatment and its practitioners, according to Dr. Cannon, but that image has improved over the years. “Since earlier movies such as Bedlam and The Snake Pit, there has been a gradual shift toward portraying characters with mental illness and mental health treatment more accurately and in a way that is less stigmatizing, with recent examples including It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Lars and the Real Girl and Silver Linings Playbook.”24

  Here, however, the stereotype and its dramatic possibilities burn intensely. When Cheswick is dragged away for shock treatment, Mac’s confusion and horror is real, just as real as his joyous and surprised reaction when the Chief thanks him for a stick of gum. Mac delights that they have something in common, something still meaningful to him, even in this moment of frustration and defeat, that they both can still put one over on the system, Mac and this “sly son of a bitch.”

  Facing his own electroshock experience, Nicholson’s false bravado and chumminess with the staff heightens the terror and inhumanity of this medical “treatment.” Cringingly photographed in close-up by director Forman and cinematographer Haskell Wexler, McMurphy’s punishment is harrowing and stark, that is until his braced and distorted body gives in, and he becomes infant-like in his breathing and jellied in his structure.

  But this is not the end of R.P. McMurphy. Nicholson introduces additional facets to his character, nearer to developmental adulthood than the juvenile delinquent has come before. He’s tender and caring with the Chief, showing a depth and maturing that society does not want him to possess and which he himself would likely deny. McMurphy also becomes big brother to Billy (Brad Dourif). Upon recognizing Billy’s interest in Candy, he sets up the stuttering and shy young man with his sometime girl, an act about which he later explodes in guilt when it violently backfires.

  In these intimate scenes between Candy and McMurphy, Jack “treated me just like a younger sister,” Mews fondly remembers. “He really spent some time helping to calm me down, because I was nervous.” There is a behind-the-scenes snapshot that shows Nicholson conversing with Small between takes on a bench, not noticing the camera, a moment captured that she calls “magic.”25

  Small says that the scenes were not rehearsed, but that “we would block, set up and shoot.” Light rehearsal protected the reality, and everybody knew their lines and knew their part, “and sometimes we’d run it once and sometimes we’d just shoot it.” She believed that Forman’s approach was to spend significant time casting and therefore didn’t feel the need to provide much direction. “Milos is very interested in people being real,” looking for performances after he cast actors he thought could do what he wanted them to do. Mews recalled that he mostly let the actors be and that he didn’t say much to her unless necessary. “One day, Jack and I were a little lazy and he said, ‘Just pick up, just pick it up a little bit.’”26

  After sending Billy in with Candy, Mac retreats from the melee of the party and sits down, showing for just this one time Nicholson’s devilish triangled eyebrows. Then, in an extended medium close-up free of words, McMurphy travels through an amazing array of emotion. McMurphy tires … becomes concerned … uncomfortable … pleased … reflective … disturbed … morose … happy … calmly content … sleepy. One man, one unadorned and uninterrupted study in acting fundamentals, a nuanced impression that’s perhaps his character’s sole glimpse into the possibility of having a mental illness. Mews described this as “that moment in your life when you decide to do something and you know your life might end and you do it anyway.”

  When Nurse Ratched and the staff return the next morning, the party turns into a nightmare. She knows Billy’s mother and threatens to tell her that her son had been with Candy. The actress who portrayed Candy still feels the scene when seeing it many years later, almost as if it is real and is happening. “Poor Billy. Louise [Fletcher] says she’s going to tell his mother. It was just devastating.”27

  Nicholson watches with revulsion and true empathy as Dourif’s Billy reverts to a sniveling child, begging and animalistic, becoming a creature destroyed. Once that destruction is complete, Ratched must be destroyed.

  Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) pushes Randall Patrick McMurphy (Nicholson) over the edge in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) as Martini (Danny DeVito) and Col. Matterson (Peter Brocco, in wheelchair) look on. Mews Small, who played Candy, explained that producer Michael Douglas showed Jack the choking technique used in this brutal attack: “It looks like you’re pulling in, and you’re pulling out.�
��

  As with Cheswick and his cigarettes, McMurphy loses control only when it is on behalf of the other inmates, most dramatically when he rightfully blames the head nurse for Billy’s suicide. Clinically or functionally, Nurse Ratched does drive Randall insane. He attacks her with such force and abandon that Nicholson must have hurt Fletcher, until he is struck on the back of the head, causing him to fall forward on her as if in sexual release. This serves as the ultimate comment on their twisted feelings and distorted relationship.

  Mews recalled that it was producer Michael Douglas who showed Nicholson the choking technique. “It’s the reverse. You pull out. It looks like you’re pulling in, and you’re pulling out. She did get red, but she was not injured.” Small also mentioned that the only times she saw the real patients react were when Mac strangles Nurse Ratched (“That was unbelievable and they all applauded afterwards”) and when Chief breaks the window to escape.28

  Michael Berryman explains that Nicholson “played it the way it was written, which was that he was just taking advantage of the system. Just like when Nurse Ratched says, ‘You’re a con artist,’ and he was fine with that until he realized what happened with Billy, and that’s when the whole story changes.”29

  Again, more punishment than therapy, a more extended and extensive procedure is deemed necessary to render McMurphy safe. He is destroyed by lobotomy, reduced to a vegetative state. This time it’s no act, as Randall Patrick McMurphy is no more, having been defeated as a person; made devoid of his humanity; rendered inert and harmless the way society always wanted him to be. The con man is out-conned.