SOURCE: MacDonald, George B. “Control by Camera: Milos Forman as Subjective Narrator.” In A Casebook on Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, edited by George J. Searles, pp. 163-72. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, MacDonald analyzes the intent and effect of the subjective camera technique that Forman employs in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, highlighting Forman's use of color and point-of-view.]

The film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is that rare adaptation which balances a respect for its literary source with a rich contribution of cinematic meanings. [One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest] establishes Czech director Milos Forman as a major director in contemporary American filmmaking.

Forman's role reaches far beyond the shaping of the actors' performances. It extends into the entire visual design and the literary structure of the film. Forman insisted that the film not be told from the first-person point of view of Bromden, for he wanted no single character's viewpoint to dominate in his adaptation. Partly as a result of Forman's intransigence in this matter, Kesey disassociated himself from the production, and two other writers, with Forman's help, wrote the final scenario.

Forman's elimination of the first-person viewpoint places McMurphy and Nurse Ratched outside the subjective coloration of Bromden's projections. In the film McMurphy and the Nurse are equally matched and realistically ambivalent characters. On the whole, Forman's McMurphy is less admirable than Kesey's hero. The McMurphy in the film is generous, spontaneous, and eager to teach what he knows, but there is also much in him that is unheroic and even mean-spirited. This is the McMurphy who complains to Dr. Spivey behind the Nurse's back instead of confronting her directly; who repeatedly punches Washington while the aide's body is pinioned by Bromden; and who becomes maddened with infantile rage as he screams, “I want that television set turned on—right now!” In a way Forman's McMurphy simply has less character than Kesey's hero. This is evident in the two protagonists' attitudes toward work. Kesey's McMurphy is a brawny, Bunyanesque figure whose hands are calloused from his days as a logger. He sees certain kinds of work as tests of strength and forms of self-expression. Forman's McMurphy is just the opposite. He is a shirker who looks on the state asylum as a “feed farm.” He allows his sanity to be questioned partly because the hospital which is observing him is also giving him a place to eat and sleep.

Thanks partly to actress Louise Fletcher, the Nurse Ratched of the film is a more admirable character than Kesey's nurse. Although ineffective as a counsellor to the patients, she works hard at her job and honestly believes that her “therapeutic” measures are what the patients need. Perhaps not surprisingly, Forman's Nurse Ratched partakes of the feminist politics of the seventies. We are never allowed to forget that much of the exacting physical work of this hospital falls on the shoulders of the nurses: Nurse Itsu may do the work in preparing McMurphy for his electroshock, but it is the male doctor who operates the control panel which sends the volts through his body. Nurse Ratched's proximity to the three black aides indicates that her officious personal identity is inseparable from her subjugated political identity as a woman and a laborer. Even the Nurse's worst quality, her consuming jealousy, is partly mitigated by the care she must expend on a group of male patients who despise her and yet who cannot live without her.

Forman is absolutely evenhanded in dealing with McMurphy and Nurse Ratched. Each character is equally sympathetic and unsympathetic. A kind of parodic Adam and Eve after the Fall, they are locked in a deadly contest of “masculine” and “feminine” egos in which each tries to humiliate the other in a series of progressively more brutal agons. What the film makes clear is that McMurphy and the Nurse are equally dangerous. McMurphy, the male ego of exhibitionism, is solipsistic and socially irresponsible. Nurse Ratched, the feminine ego of bonded labor, is overly repressive and absorbed by form. Billy Bibbit, the androgynous child, is a symbolic externalization of what both McMurphy and Nurse Ratched have repressed and slain within themselves. Bibbit's suicide is an indictment of both McMurphy and the nurse, each of whom knows that Billy has attempted suicide in the past because of his sexual anxieties. The Nurse provides the immediate catalyst for the suicide when she invokes the name of Billy's mother after finding him in bed with Candy, but she is not the only one who pushes the boy to his death. McMurphy too is culpable in casually prescribing a sexual encounter for someone clearly not ready for such a “cure.” The imagery of the film underscores the inappropriateness of McMurphy's therapy: Billy is pushed into the trysting room in a wheelchair, and the bed of love is festooned by leather straps used to belt down violent patients.

Forman has not made a work of pure realism out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Rather, he has turned Kesey's novelistic monodrama into a realistic allegory in which characters are both realistically and symbolically conceived. There is certainly a greater sense of history and time in Forman's film. The film opens around early autumn of 1963 and continues through the fall and early winter. Television newscasts keep us informed of such events of the day as the Birmingham Sunday bombing, the Christine Keeler saga, and the Cold War dramatics at the Berlin Wall. These events invoke images of racial conflict, scandal, and warfare. They are more appropriate to Forman's hospital than to Kesey's. Milos Forman has given us a film in which there is little hint of growth, development, or progress. Certainly Forman's eye is compassionate and full of comic appreciation, but it is an eye which rather pitilessly beholds a world gone mad, a world in which institutional rigidity makes it impossible for human beings to interact and learn from each other. Forman's is a gray film, suitable to the fall of 1963.

Rather than discuss further the film's departures from the novel, I would like to examine the ways in which Forman uses cinematic idioms as visual surrogates for elements in Kesey's novel. Two areas particularly rich in this respect are color and point of view. Through them Forman and the screenwriters convey the spirit of a literary work of art by using the techniques of the film maker's medium.

In Kesey's novel green and white play important roles in characterizing the ward. Patient uniforms and shower tiles are green; walls are white. McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, on the other hand, are associated with brighter, more dynamic colors. McMurphy's red hair suggests fire and heightened life just as the nurse's red-orange lipstick carries the weight of repressed anger. Milos Forman uses color imagery in a similar but even more pervasive way. When Forman picked one particular ward as his major set at the Oregon State Hospital, he had the walls painted in colors that would photograph as off-white, green, and a washed-out lemon-beige. The film creates a homogeneous color design by playing these watery shades into the liquid blues and yellow-greens of other parts of the hospital interior. Frequently all of these shades are set off by the richer, more saturated, seaweed greens of the trees and grass which are visible through the windows in the backgrounds of many of the interior shots. The pastel aquamarines evoke the medicinal and bodily fluids of a contemporary hospital. Forman immerses us so thoroughly within this watery chromatic haze that we sometimes feel as if we are drowning in a swamp of disinfectants and bedpan odors.

During the first part of the film Forman deliberately uses chromatic monotony to give the viewer a feeling of captivity within the ward's miasmic hospital colors. This helps to explain why we feel a sharp sense of release when the camera joins the inmates on their bus ride to the pier. The yellowish orange of the bus provides a change of color which is also a change of mood and meaning. One of the most lyrical shots in the film is the tableau shot in which the orange bus recklessly snakes through the green and beige exteriors of the hospital grounds. The meaning of the shot lies as much in the contrast of colors as it does in the movement of the bus and the promise it offers the inmates. Forman continues to work in orange in the next major sequence. The colorful orange life vests worn on the boat convey inner meaning through a chromatic alteration. It is a relief to see the patients out of their dull-colored, pajama-like uniforms. The color of the vests suggests the internal change of character which McMurphy briefly makes possible for the patients.

Like Kesey, Forman often uses bright colors to convey not simply freedom, but anger, danger, sexuality, and frustration. When, for example, Nurse Ratched glares at the patients after their party, Forman places the camera so that the glowing red night light appears just above her head, externalizing all the rage that is just beneath the surface of her rigid countenance. Perhaps the most shattering use of red lies in the thick film of blood which surrounds Billy as he lies dead on the floor of the doctor's office. The meaning of Billy's death is partly embodied in the colors of this shot, for the rich hue of the blood clashes in a particularly ugly way with the pale green shade of the floor. Somehow the clash between these two colors signifies the lack of harmony which prevails at every level of this film. There is no compromise between the wet greens and the hard orange-reds of the mise en scène. The bright colors conflict sharply with the duller tones. From color to idea, nothing is reconciled in Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The second area of cinematic expressiveness which needs attention in Forman's film is point of view. Forman may have upset Kesey with his unwillingness to accept Bromden as the narrator and central consciousness, but on the deepest level of cinematic expressiveness, Forman has respected the idea of the subjective viewpoint which prevails in Kesey's novel. He universalizes the narrative consciousness by using the “subjective camera” to give virtually all of the major characters their own points of view in the film. Even more, through his camera placements Forman reveals his own presence as the directorial architect of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In this sense he has not so much eliminated the first-person viewpoint of Bromden as he has usurped it.

The term “subjective camera” usually refers to any shot in which the camera photographs something through the eyes of one of the characters in the dramatic situation. An example of this technique from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the low-angle shot of the squirrel on top of the fence of the hospital yard as it appears to McMurphy, who is standing below the fence looking up. Usually the subjective camera indicates what a character sees in the film, but, in a more encompassing way, it can present the director's viewpoint as well. In Hitchcock's films, for example, both levels of the subjective camera are present. Hitchcock identifies his camera with various of the individual protagonists in his films at the same time that he identifies himself as the directorial presence with an encircling viewpoint which watches over the characters as they watch one another.

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Forman's use of the subjective camera is similar to Hitchcock's. Through this technique Forman reveals himself as the central consciousness of the film while at the same time “translating” the subjective consciousness of Kesey's novel into a cinematic idiom. The entire structure of the film is designed around variations of the subjective-camera technique. Let us look at two examples from the opening and closing framing passages of the film.

The first shot of the film is a fade-in on a mountainous landscape near dawn. The vista is without human life as the credits begin to appear on the screen. Suddenly a single flickering yellow-orange light appears at the left side of the screen. Then a second light appears at its side. These two headlights turn on and off in irregular rhythms as a car moves from left to right toward the center of the frame. Forman deliberately makes the lights flicker in a stylized manner so that the viewer will associate the car with something uncanny, magical, or at least subjectively conceived, for this is the car bringing Randle Patrick McMurphy to the mental hospital. As the car continues, Forman pans the camera to follow it out of the right side of the frame. At this moment Forman cuts from the rightward panning exterior shot to a leftward panning interior shot within Nurse Ratched's ward. In this second shot the camera pans and moves among the sleeping patients. The composition and editing of these first two shots suggest that McMurphy (the first shot) is in part a subjective projection emerging from the collective dream life of the patients (the second shot). Throughout the film Forman will use the subjective camera to suggest that many people see not the social world of fact but the projective mirror images of their own anxieties and expectations. The opening shots of the film presage these pervasive “mirror shots” by implying that McMurphy has a partly subjective existence in the minds of the helpless and sleeping patients, some of whom may be unconsciously anticipating and even projecting his arrival.

The concluding shots of the film are similarly subjective in design. In this sequence Bromden lifts the tub-room panel, throws it through a window, and disappears into the wilderness. The composition and the dramatic development of the film's last shot presents the exact reverse of the design of the first shot of the film. In the last shot Bromden runs away from the camera into the darkness of a mountainous landscape. As he slowly descends the slope of the hill, his entire body disappears from view until we are left with the same image which opened the film: a vista of New World nature wholly devoid of human civilization. On one level, Bromden's absorption by the land signifies a suicidal triumph of fantasy over reality; on another level, his escape to the wilderness is a subjective dream-fantasy in the minds of the hospital patients. Bromden escapes not during the day but at night when all the patients are asleep. At the moment he leaps out the window he is watched by the suddenly awakened Taber, whose cries of manic joy arouse a number of the other patients. There is the suggestion that Bromden's epic gesture lives as a fantasy image in the mind of the inarticulately helpless Taber, who may well have dreamt Bromden's superhuman feat of strength. The picture ends as it began: an image within an image.

All the individual characters in the film are defined by the subjective camera. None of them sees the world. Each merely looks at the world and tries to control it with the annulling and objectifying Look of Sartre's ocular assassin. When McMurphy talks with Dr. Spivey and when Nurse Ratched talks to the patients, the subjective camera usually cross-cuts between the various interlocutors to reveal that each individual is trying to “stare down” and degrade the other through the medium of a paranoid and aggressive Look.

Forman uses a number of techniques to deliver the viewer from the paranoid subjectivity of the individual characters of the dramatic situation. Frequently he plays the patients' subjective-camera views against the more universal subjective camera of the director. In these instances Forman develops a sequence by cross-cutting among the subjective views of the individual characters. Then he unexpectedly cuts back out of a scene in order to give us the artist's subjective viewpoint, which embraces a multitude of individual viewpoints. This technique is especially dramatic at the end of the fishing sequence. In the last shot of this sequence the camera leaps above the boat, where some of the patients are absorbed in catching a fish, to a helicopter-level shot of the boat. In this final shot of the fishing scene, the camera looks down with a rather merciless objectivity. What the camera sees is no longer a playful image of a group of people fishing, but a pathetic image of a boat going round in circles. The cut to the helicopter perspective is startling because the breadth of its compass makes the obsessiveness of the patients seem disturbingly private and self-centered. Here Forman has pulled us away from the insane subjectivity of the patients into the sane subjectivity of the artist.

There is also a Brechtian quality in the way Forman uses the directorial subjective camera. In a number of instances he breaks the viewer's emotional identification with the patients of this mental hospital by a shock technique in which the director functions in much the same way as a first-person narrator functions in telling a story. During one of the playground sequences, for example, Forman dramatically calls attention to the camera as the controller of the audience's sensibilities. In this scene McMurphy is trying to get the inmates to play a game of basketball. During the game, Martini, who cannot obey the rules of any game, receives the ball and, to our astonishment, throws it directly at the camera. The spectator inwardly ducks as the ball disappears below the lower border of the frame with a loud changing noise. We do not understand what has happened until McMurphy cries out in frustration that Martini has thrown the ball into the fence. By this camera placement, Forman reminds the viewer that the director's camera is the central consciousness and the guiding viewpoint of this film. The ball flung at the lens is meant to wake us up to the fact that we are not the patients but the watchers of the patients. In the style of Brecht, Forman repeatedly catches us off-guard. Here he breaks our emotional rapport with the zany basketball game to warn us against becoming too involved with these characters, who are not “zany” at all. Forman wishes us not to become the people of this film but to learn something from their experience. The basketball, which all but bounces off the lens of the camera, keeps us alert to the much more serious “game” being played in and by this film.

A more audacious acknowledgment of the camera's power occurs during the boating excursion. After taking the boat from the pier, McMurphy turns the wheel over to Cheswick, who holds the wheel until he becomes anxious at being abandoned by the other inmates. They have become distracted by the love-making of McMurphy and Candy below. When Cheswick lets go of the wheel and heads below to join the others, Forman manipulates point of view in an unexpected manner. He fixes the camera upon the wildly spinning wheel. During this shot the audience feels as if it has been abandoned on the bridge of a boat which has no captain. Forman is again provoking the audience into realizing that we are as much at the mercy of the director as the passengers of a ship are dependent upon their captain. The camera's presence is acutely felt in this shot because Forman refuses to “rescue” the camera from its entrapment on a boat that is careening over the water under no control at all. As viewers we are made to feel somewhat like the helpless Cheswick as we watch the wheel spinning furiously in the foreground and feel the ocean swelling beneath us. Once our response has become this primitive, we realize that again Forman has caught us off guard. Again he has called our attention to the fact that the camera sets the boundaries of the audience's attention and that the way a screen narrative is told is just as important as what is being told. On a thematic level, this crazily subjective use of the camera is a serious warning to the audience, for it indicates how dangerous any society becomes which loses its principle of social organization. Forman is not an American primitive like Kesey. Nor is he an authoritarian East European social realist. He is an artist sensitive to the need for some kind of order in any social grouping. A society without cohesion is like a ship without a captain, or a camera without an artist behind it.

Forman's use of subjective-camera techniques thus creates in cinematic terms a world analogous to the subjective viewpoint of Chief Bromden in Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In acknowledging both the dangers and the positive values of the subjective viewpoint, Forman's film is closer to Kesey's novel than one might think on a first viewing.

In imposing his own subjective viewpoint on the story, Forman altered somewhat Kesey's attitude toward insanity. Whereas Kesey sees the poetry in paranoia, Forman is more attentive to the destructiveness in all forms of mental unbalance. Kesey has more faith than Forman in the chances of the individual outside of social forms. Although there is some hope, even if rooted in fantasy, in the last page of Kesey's novel, there is nothing but a haunting image of self-annulment in the concluding frames of Forman's film.

It is possible, of course, to see Forman's film in a more optimistic light. Some viewers regard Bromden's use of speech and his climactic escape as indications of growth in at least one of the characters of the film. My own view is that to an extent Bromden is to McMurphy what McMurphy is to the rest of the patients: a fantasy screen. When Washington is beating up McMurphy, Forman uses a subjective camera to photograph Bromden's approach from the floor-level viewpoint of McMurphy. This camera angle tends to portray the Indian rescuer as at least partly a fantasy projection from the desperate McMurphy's point of view. There is a similar use of the subjective camera in the scene in which Bromden talks for the first time. Just before Bromden and McMurphy have their initial conversation, Forman photographs Bromden from McMurphy's viewpoint, suggesting that it is (only?) through McMurphy's eyes that Bromden becomes a speaking human being.

Forman's pessimism regarding the possibilities for human growth is emphatic in the last ensemble sequence in Nurse Ratched's ward. McMurphy is dead, and Bromden is gone, but relatively little has changed, except perhaps for the worse. Life on the ward ends as it began, with four of the patients playing cards at a table. Three of the players are the same ones who were playing at the beginning of the film: Harding, Cheswick, and Martini. The missing player is Billy Bibbit, the one patient who might have been saved. Replacing him at the table in this final scene is the irrevocably deranged Taber.

The film version of Kesey's novel is an extraordinary achievement. Its individual performances and its subtly orchestrated ensemble acting are remarkable. The screenplay is virtually without cliché. It manages the difficult task of consistently and imaginatively developing a large number of highly individualized characters. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a brilliant adaptation of a literary work at the same time that it is an original and lasting achievement of cinema.