Episode 061: McMurphy’s Stay at the State Hospital — One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

CinemaPsych Podcast

Join Alex as he discusses One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), a tour de force from Milos Forman, Jack Nicholson, and Louise Fletcher! The film follows Randall McMurphy, an inmate at a work camp in Oregon who successfully (?) tricks them into thinking he's insane and so he gets transferred to the Oregon State Hospital, a psychiatric facility. This episode explores the state of treatment in the early 1960s in America and elsewhere in the Western world, as well as the Dark Triad set of personality traits — the hallmark of psychopathy — in the character of McMurphy himself. Did the system fail McMurphy or did McMurphy fail in the system?

Check out the following account Alex references in the beginning of the episode (CW: discussion of suicide): https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/looking-back-journal-mental-hospital-user-1960s

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Legal stuff:
1. All film clips are used under Section 107 of Title 17 U.S.C. (fair use; no copyright infringement is intended).
2. Intro and outro music by Sro ("Self-Driving"). Used under license CC BY-SA 4.0.
3. "Et Voila" used under license.