The director, writers, and producers of One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest faced a formidable challenge in
adapting Ken Kesey’s novel into a story that would work on the screen.
Kesey wrote the novel while working as an orderly in a psychiatric
ward and while participating in psychology-department experiments
with LSD, mescaline, and other chemicals in order to earn extra
money while attending graduate school at Stanford. He began to have
hallucinations of a large Native American man sweeping the floors.
The Chief became the narrator of his novel, and all the events of
the story were told through his eyes. Like Kesey, the character
of the Chief suffered from hallucinations: he held a firm belief
that Nurse Ratched worked for an evil Combine that twisted and manufactured
men. The novel became very popular with the counterculture movement after
it was published in 1962, and its paranoia
suited the antiwar activism of the era.
Because a film is a very different storytelling medium
from a novel, Forman knew that Kesey’s story had to be changed to
fit the new format, as well as updated to be relevant twelve years
later. Equally problematic was the fact that psychedelic illusions
of humans changing form or walls sprouting arms would not translate well
to the screen, nor would the mythical Combine suit Forman’s interest
in cinematic realism. The Broadway play of 1963 retained these
features of the novel by having the Chief slip to the front of the stage
to address the audience in asides, but this approach would look
stilted on film.
To adapt the story so that it would work as a motion picture,
the filmmakers changed the point of view to an omniscient, all-seeing perspective.
The camera focuses upon the characters directly rather than interpreting
them through the Chief’s eyes. This choice eliminated the need for
both the hallucinations and the conspiracy of the Combine. Rather
than being controlled by an evil machine, in the film adaptation
Nurse Ratched is the ultimate authority-wielding bureaucrat. Forman
understood that audiences would better relate to the struggle against
a personified, rather than mechanical, enemy. His Nurse Ratched
relies upon rules and her power to change them arbitrarily in order
to enforce conformity over individualism.
Although Forman elected to retain many of the novel’s
references to McMurphy as a Christ figure, he chose a more subtle
approach for the film. For example, his electric shock table is
not in the form of a cross, and McMurphy does not ask whether he
gets a crown of thorns, as he does in the novel. The ending of the
film, as of the novel, deals with death and resurrection. However,
Forman modifies it for the screen: in the novel, by the time McMurphy
returns from his lobotomy, most of the patients on the ward have
already signed themselves out and managed to escape before McMurphy and
the Chief do. In the film, all the characters are still on the ward. Forman’s
Chief escapes alone, leaving the window gaping open behind him for
those who might choose to follow—a visually satisfying image that
also underscores the importance of independent thought to a joyful
life.
