Does somebody want to explain to me why she's such a vilified character...

Does somebody want to explain to me why she's such a vilified character? She always seems to be spoken about as some force of raw evil but I found very little to even dislike about her. Am I retarded or autistic or something or is this another one of those Mutiny on the Bounty/Dead Poets Society type things where 99% of people just didn't think about what they watched?

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Nurse Ratched did literally nothing wrong.

She only takes McMurphy for one of the lunatics.

What the fuck was her problem?

1st i fuckin love old milfs would fuck her senseless
2nd what did they do the to the guy at the end so the indiana was forced to strangle him

In the book she has huge tits. Casting a more modestly busted lady changed the dynamic.

However, if you can't spot a ball-busting bitch, then you're still in love with your Mother or a virgin or probably both.

bump!

I think it might be autism.
She deliberately and consciously sought to annoy Nicholson's character when her entire job was to promote their mental health.
Sure Nicholson was a jerk too but look what her actions resulted in. None of that needed to happen.

It was part of a shift in society where the mentally ill where seen as just a bit kooky instead of a danger to themselves and others, so in the film she's depicted as essentially a prison guard to your weird uncle.

You didn't see the lobotomy scar on his forehead?

He's clearly not mad but he's got serious personality issues. I don't trust anybody who's too glib of a talker and McMurphy is one powerfully glib talker. The fucker couldn't stop rustling jimmies for one second and it's not a response to the admittedly not too pleasant conditions of the ward. He was in prison for fucking an underage girl and had a history of assaults, he clearly stirs up shit wherever he goes on a whim and if good comes of it that's purely that's just how it turns out. He's no chaotic-good 2deep4ratchet folk-hero, he's a fucking asshole.

They lobotomized him. Literally cut out a part/parts of his brain to make him permanently docile in a state that borders on braindead. A real thing btw.

Of course she busts balls, but considering what she does for a living I think that you kind of have to. Scatman Cruthers didn't bust balls and look where that got him.

McMurphy didn't have problems with his mental health, she was trying to keep him from stirring up too much shit in a building full of mentally ill people. What did 'her' actions result in? She acted properly according to the system, McMurphy was just fucking around on a whim.

She treated her patients like people with mental illness, people who needed structure and medicine to get better. (Or at least live comfortably)

Considering Ken Kesey was an LSD-crazed hippie, he thought that all authority was bad, and severely ill people only needed to believe in themselves to be sane and free.

She honestly didn't do anything wrong, except guilt trip Billy in the end, she should have told his mother without warning him first.

Better yet, she shouldn't tell anything to his mother.

I got really strong, thoughtless anti-authoritarian vibes from the whole movie. And as for Billy, I understand why she did what she did and think that what happened was a tragic miscalculation on her part. Billy voluntarily put himself into the place because he was getting himself into a fucked up state over women, now he's gone and fucked a prostitute in the place that's meant to be helping these things and seems defiant about it. At that point she can either let it slide, at which point why bother keeping him there since it's pretty much giving up on solving his issues, or she could punish him for it. And the most powerful punishment she had for him, and probably the most effective, was using his mother against him.

I don't really think it would be reasonable to say she should have known Billy would have killed himself after hearing that.

>Billy
Good enough bait to get a reply. Not good enough for a full response. You'll get there one day, kiddo.

His mother is responsible for him, she needs to keep her up to date with her son's situation, it's her job.

Considering her emotional involvement with Billy's situation and her friendship with his mother, she fucked up though.

>She treated her patients like people with mental illness, people who needed structure and medicine to get better. (Or at least live comfortably)

But at the time an enormous number of people who were functional (people who were mentally ill but capable of functioning in society) were locked away in those institutions. There's a reason pretty much everyone, right and left alike, thought it was a good thing when Reagan shut those places down in the 80s.

You're thinking about it like she was running a modern-day psych ward, where pretty much only people who are a danger to themselves or others end up.

Wasn't Billy suicidal from the start?

This. She treated them like incapable children. McMurphy was crude and not a great person, but he treated them like people; like men.

But she was also doing some highly unethical things even if you excuse her attitude as a product of the time or whatever. She was sharing personal medical information with Billy's mother - to the point where she was threatening to do so against his will to control him, leading to his suicide. Billy is an adult and likely in his 30s and also a voluntary patient, so Ratched is outright barred from discussing medical information with him if he doesn't allow it. Technically she may have "acquired" his permission, but she should have, ethically, known that it wasn't really his own choice.

>At that point she can either let it slide, at which point why bother keeping him there since it's pretty much giving up on solving his issues, or she could punish him for it. And the most powerful punishment she had for him, and probably the most effective, was using his mother against him.

She should've recognized that his stutter was absent from his speech, seeing that as the sign of recovery that it is and thus the act being a breakthrough for him getting better so he can finally leave. The tragedy, of course, is that she doesn't notice, and instead causes him to regress into a state whereby the progress he made was for naught and the prospect of him remaining institutionalized is now certain. In light of this she's more a gatekeeper to their freedom than a therapeutic guidance.

His mother was pretty much the reason he was in a psychiatric ward in the first place. As a nurse it was her job to take care of his well-being and she should have anticipated that telling his mom would be very harmful to him.

>But at the time an enormous number of people who were functional (people who were mentally ill but capable of functioning in society) were locked away in those institutions. There's a reason pretty much everyone, right and left alike, thought it was a good thing when Reagan shut those places down in the 80s.

Yeah, what a great idea

It's stated that he had tried to commit suicide more than once before yes.

>highly unethical things
I don't know about that

>sharing personal medical information with Billy's mother
He fucked an illegally smuggled-in whore while his government was going out of its way to help him with his neurotic women problems. Even now medical professionals only devote so much help to people who aren't willing to help themselves. And he tried to defy her about it, I think he needed controlling at that point. The information wasn't medical, Billy had betrayed their trust while they were trying to help him.

Billy was clearly feeling better in the morning and Ratchet knocked him back down pretty soundly, but what other options did she have? 'Oh, good job Billy, your friends encouraging you to fuck that whore and tell me to piss off sure has done wonders for your self-esteem, want to go rejoin functioning society?' Even say that Billy's borderline crippling confidence issues were solved that morning, do you think he was ready to go back into the wider world again? He clearly has no idea how to act around women and generally doesn't have healthy thoughts around them. He acts like an awkward creep around those whores McMurphy hangs out with, he's got more than shyness keeping him institutionalized.

Not only that but she threatens to tell his mom because she was personally upset. She was looking for retribution for a slight by harming him emotionally.

She was a typical SJW, a petty tyrant who gets in a position of power just to control others and pretending she's doing it for their own good. Like a kindergarten teacher, a reddit moderator or a female politician basically.

>As a nurse it was her job to take care of his well-being and she should have anticipated that telling his mom would be very harmful to him.

As a nurse she should have known violating patient/doctor confidentiality is a criminal act. She threatened to do so to punish and blackmail a patient.

She's not Satan or anything, but the point of her character is that she presents herself as a caring nurse but enjoys controlling and sometimes hurting those under her power.

You realize those rates also coincide with the development of the prison industrial complex?

Correlation ≠ causation, my son. That graph is from a shitty Vox.com article that manages to get nearly everything wrong.

>slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/07/reverse-voxsplaining-prison-and-mental-illness/

>...What about that graph? It’s very suggestive. You see a sudden drop in the number of people in state mental hospitals. Then you see a corresponding sudden rise in the number of people in prison. It looks like there’s some sort of Law Of Conservation Of Institutionalization. Coincidence?

>Yes. Absolutely. It is 100% a coincidence. Studies show that the majority of people let out of institutions during the deinstitutionalization process were not violent and that the rate of violent crime committed by the mentally ill did not change with deinstitutionalization. Even if we take the “15% of inmates are severely mentally ill” factoid at face value, that would mean that the severely mentally ill could explain at most 15%-ish of the big jump in prison population in the 1980s. The big jump in prison population in the 1980s was caused by the drug war and by people Getting Tough On Crime. Stop dragging the mentally ill into this.

Get off the internet user, it's rewiring your brain.

What do you mean? You think this is not a phenomenon that existed before the internet or what? It's the same shit as male bullies becoming cops.

Or do you object to me striving to use easily understandable internet vernacular?

Not everything links straight to the internet and trying doesn't make things clearer, it makes them more confused, especially when you use controversial terms like 'SJW' or the 'R word.'

It's a "pick the most horrid human being you can imagine and claim they did nothing wrong" episode.

It's only a controversial term to them.

And are you unaware of the reddit moderator situation? It's literally hundreds of Ratcheds, it's just the most famous internet example, I can give you a shitload of other discussion boards that have the same.

>are you unaware of the reddit moderator situation
yes, can you guess why?

Because you live under a rock? It's the same shit on twitter, facebook, youtube, any mmo forum, etc.

you're supposed to sympathize with her. she has a point up until the ending where she lets evil take over, however, it's not a totally uncommon reaction.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is no more a study of the workings of a mental hospital than Cool Hand Luke is a study of the American penal system in the rural south.

It's a fucking allegory, ya dipshits. This entire thread is retarded or excellent bait.

>up until the ending where she lets evil take over
It wasn't HER fault, was she supposed to know that McMurphy would take over in the middle of the night? Evil did take over but she didn't let it, there was nothing she could do.

>allegory
for?

>He expects us to go on plebbit, facebook and twitter

Watched this on tv on easter and Danny devito cracked me up in this movie every time he was on the screen me and my dad couldn't stop laughing.

man's fight for freedom i.e., his struggle to be authentic in a regimented world

Would you say that the choice to set the story in a mental hospital was arbitrary then?

the universe an staff

Come on nigger, if you've ever been on a forum you'd know mods are almost always tyrannical fuckwits that are the boss' whipping boy irl, it's like the old stereotype of the Headmaster that takes out his frustrations on the schoolchildren because of the way his fat wife takes his frustrations out on him

The movie is anti-authoritarian. If you don't mind authority you won't get the movie, and you won't understand the little things that made her the villain. As somebody who doesn't mind authority I'm sure McMurphy's the villain to you.

Not him, but Kesey worked the night staff in a mental hospital before writing the book. He probably figured that it'd be the easiest setting to write down for him.

who knows
Kesey worked in a mental hospital for while

he grew up in the Northwest and wrote about a logging family in Sometimes a Great Notion

all these questions
what are you, a cop?

I forgive you my child

>>Come on nigger, if you've ever been on a forum you'd know mods are almost always tyrannical fuckwits that are the boss' whipping boy irl
They are not. They are women (or womenkin) who have careers and are generally successful in life.

I think you're projecting here. I don't remember any implications that Ratchet had significant personal problems in her life and I didn't perceive any of her actions as tyrannical, arbitrary or cruel.

You want to see what that really looks like look up a British movie called 'Scum.' It's about the old Borstal system they used to run. That movie was certainly saying those things about the guys in charge, but I didn't see many, if any of the same traits in Ratchet.

I don't like what you're implying here.

'Easiest,' or did he have something he wanted to say about mental hospitals specifically? I find it hard to believe that he had the outline of the story in his head then just landed on the setting of a mental hospital out of convenience.

>what are you, a cop?
No, I just need to drag everyone's thoughts out as far as they go when I'm discussing everything. If you do that by the end you'll always either learn something or prove the other person wrong.

Is that babylon 5? Never saw that show.

>I think you're projecting here. I don't remember any implications that Ratchet had significant personal problems in her life and I didn't perceive any of her actions as tyrannical, arbitrary or cruel.

I was talking about moderators fuckwit

I mean, the statement of mental hospitals really being unnecessary for a majority of functioning patients was a smaller theme, although the most obvious. But it was clearly him taking something he had familiarity with and applying it to his story in a sense. Also, what was I implying by my previous post?

Then get out of my thread faggot. If you hate moderators just do what I do and never leave Sup Forums. For all the shit they get they're actually solid and reasonable here.

>what was I implying?
I feel like I'm being condescended to for not being a 'momsgonnafreak'-tier edgelord and not 'mind(ing) authority,' like that's a problem. I don't think that the movie has a villain but I definitely think that McMurphy was a negative influence on his fellows.

And what are the little things that make Ratchet a villain?

And for what the story's about, I think that the setting definitely dominates One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and if it wasn't what he primarily wanted his readers to think about he made a mistake by setting the story there.

I think that he may have failed in exploring individualism v institutions because I'm not entirely sure what he wanted to say. Was his intention to present both sides as flawed? Because McMurphy's refusal to play by the rules seems to do nothing but get people hurt while the mental hospital is just doing its best to clean up the messes made by others acting on their own.

>No, I just need to drag everyone's thoughts out as far as they go when I'm discussing everything

his Mom is still getting lunch ready

I don't understand how that quote is connected to what you wrote. Who's 'his,' the user you're quoting, one of the user he's quoting? If it's me, the one you gave the (you) to, I can't have lunch now because it's 1am.

He's saying you're an autist senpai

Well no shit it failed in getting readers to look past the hospital. The hospital was much more interesting than what it's representing. And if I came across as condescending, I'm sorry. There's nothing wrong with holding high regard to authority, just saying that it's difficult for you to understand why anybody would be anti-authoritarian, same as I can't fathom the idea of being told what to do. And I agree, he really failed at making connections with what he was trying to say.

Fair enough, I am putting loads of thought into whether or not a fictional character acted responsibly considering their role in a dead institution. Could have put it a lot better though.

I can understand anti-authoritarianism, or at least I think I can, but I think that if you ditch all social constructs, or abstracts, or spooks or whatever you call them McMurphy was a net negative influence on most of the people around him.

McMurphy isn't really a good guy in any way, just a stand in character to stand up to Ratched. I think he made both a little grey, letting the viewer decide who's in the right. Whether he intentionally did it or accidentally is the bigger question.

>did it
what?

Whether or not he intentionally made them both grey.

ah, yeah that's what I can't get. I feel like the general audience consensus implies that McMurphy was meant to be a hero and Ratchet a villain but maybe that just happened and nobody felt like saying anything on the contrary because they were so successful.

"first time in a whorehouse, Billy?"

the autism continues...

Nurse Ratched's represents control above all else. Within her ward, she is practically God, her power over her patients absolute. And, like any god, she thrives on the devotion of her followers, her patients. Think for a moment about the fact that most of the ward are "voluntary" - what would happen if they tried to check themselves out? Would they be released, or find themselves committed? She has that power. One stroke of a pen, that's all it takes. She can keep them there as long as she wants, either by coercion or by force, and if they disobey her, she has incredible power to punish them - antipsychotic drugs, electroshock therapy, and the frontal lobotomy. Welcome to the Hotel California.

>he's got more than shyness keeping him institutionalized.
No he doesn't, the system and his fucked up mother had conspired to make him believe he does - even if they hadn't recognized it themselves. That's the point of his character. The very last thing Billy needed was more controlling.

She's not god though, she answers to higher powers. And not a handwritten order from the president or anything either, decisions regarding the mental health of those under her care are made by a committee of several members of which she is only one. Sure, her opinion would hold a lot of sway there since she's the one working closest with them but she doesn't seem willing or able to ruin anybody's life on a whim

>She has that power

did you even see the movie?
most of them were in there by their own volition, they could leave at anytime

this thread is costing me IQ point with every post I read - need to kill myself

He has highlighted a well known stereotype. Don't get your panties all in a twist.

Martini is literally the best.