Film Analysis:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Adapted from the 1962 novel of the same in name, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was released in 1975. It is set, presumably, in the 1970s in an Oregon state mental institution. The film is a portrayal of the institution of mental illness- diagnosis, treatment and response to, along with a critique of psychiatry and the medical model .
The deviants portrayed in the film are the patients in the hospital ward. They are all suffering from emotional or psychotic disturbances and are all seeking therapy and drug treatment. The main character, Randall “Mac” McMurphy, is a self-actualizing deviant but not a self-labeling deviant. His experience with criminality and the mental institution is both relative and subjective (and probably voluntary) from a constructionist perspective. The film’s director, however, also takes the positivist perspective by acknowledging that all of the self-committed patients are not psychotic but rather have their issues rooted in emotionality.
The film takes a constructionist approach to mental illness by depicting all three subcategories- relativism, subjectivism and voluntarism. Within the subcategory of relativism, the labeling model is employed: deviance is a label and defined by the …show more content…
Their problems are depicted as emotional hang ups (psychosocial) by the director but seen as biological by the fictional powers at be; an allegory for societies response to mental illness as deviant, whether psychotic or not. These four patients are not “crazy” but are still institutionalized (albeit voluntarily) and subjected to societies “cure” (psychiatry) for it [mental illness]. While conditions and control are not overly dreadful or unreasonable , the ward is certainly not therapeutic for the patients (as the staff thinks) or cathartic (as the patients think who are using it to
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Adapted from the 1962 novel of the same in name, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was released in 1975. It is set, presumably, in the 1970s in an Oregon state mental institution. The film is a portrayal of the institution of mental illness- diagnosis, treatment and response to, along with a critique of psychiatry and the medical model .
The deviants portrayed in the film are the patients in the hospital ward. They are all suffering from emotional or psychotic disturbances and are all seeking therapy and drug treatment. The main character, Randall “Mac” McMurphy, is a self-actualizing deviant but not a self-labeling deviant. His experience with criminality and the mental institution is both relative and subjective (and probably voluntary) from a constructionist perspective. The film’s director, however, also takes the positivist perspective by acknowledging that all of the self-committed patients are not psychotic but rather have their issues rooted in emotionality.
The film takes a constructionist approach to mental illness by depicting all three subcategories- relativism, subjectivism and voluntarism. Within the subcategory of relativism, the labeling model is employed: deviance is a label and defined by the …show more content…
Their problems are depicted as emotional hang ups (psychosocial) by the director but seen as biological by the fictional powers at be; an allegory for societies response to mental illness as deviant, whether psychotic or not. These four patients are not “crazy” but are still institutionalized (albeit voluntarily) and subjected to societies “cure” (psychiatry) for it [mental illness]. While conditions and control are not overly dreadful or unreasonable , the ward is certainly not therapeutic for the patients (as the staff thinks) or cathartic (as the patients think who are using it to