Wednesday, April 1, 2009

One Flew Over the Panopticon

The film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest essentially sheds light into a tyrannically run mental institution and its inhabitants. The oppressive and autocratic Nurse Ratched rules the entire ward, meticulously watching and governing the inmates’ every action and utterance. Randle McMurphy, one of the film’s central characters and one of the newer patients, serves as the force that opposes the despotic nurse time and time again.
The nurses’ station, symbolically and strategically placed in the focal center of the ward, signifies the absolute power and control the authority figure possesses. Michel Foucault mentions that “all that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower" (554) and that "any individual, taken almost at random, can operate this machine" (555). As in any society, however, a nonconformist must exist. While throughout the film McMurphy continually tests and challenges the authority of his supervisor, his rebellious and defiant nature is best exemplified in the following scene in which he attempts to strangle his supervisor.



The mental ward in this case serves as the Panopticon, which Foucault describes as inducing “in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power (554). The patients are fully aware that their every move is being carefully monitored; and as long as this is the case, they wouldn’t dare do otherwise than what’s expected of them-to be compliant and submissive inmates. Any patient who refuses subordination is immediately reprimanded with severe consequences (electroshock treatments, lobotomies, etc.). And as Foucault mentions, “the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies"(565).


Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 549-566.

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