Word: warded
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...Latter-day Saints in New England (14,000 at last count), including the 700 members of three congregations that share a modest brick church off Brattle Street in Longfellow Park. Many of the 700 are affiliated with universities in the Boston area: one of the units--the second Cambridge ward--overflows with married students enrolled at Harvard's graduate and professional schools and includes several married undergraduates. The third congregation, which is technically only a "branch" because its members are generally single, has 11 Harvard undergraduates. Newly seated as president of the "University branch"--a job that mixes the roles...
WHAT HAPPENS next is the key to the film. When Nurse Ratched arrives the morning after McMurphy's orgy she is justifiably upset at the shambles the ward is in--the medicine has been spilled, the patients are filthy, etc. She vindictively turns on Billy and reduces him to a state of utter pathos by threatening to tell his mother about his night with the woman. Left alone for a minute, the boy commits suicide. McMurphy thereupon throws himself on Ratched and comes very close to strangling her. A guard knocks him out just in time, though...
...keep patients under her domination and not to help them. Or are we supposed to take her preference for order over chaos, for cleanliness over filth, as the real prelude to such a cruel act? Her chief role has been to protect the weaker members of the ward from McMurphy--she rations their cigarettes after she finds out that McMurphy has been bilking them away at poker. That the Indian smothers McMurphy is supposed to mean that life as a vegetable is not preferable to death--perhaps this is true. It is appropriate that the film closes with...
...told anything about the possible origins of their psychoses. They are putty to be shaped in McMurphy's hands, and McMurphy is basically out to have a good time--for him that means "fighting and fucking." Since there's precious little of the latter in the all-male ward, he is reduced to a stance of constant truculence which eliminates any trace of compassion he might have ever felt. The funny thing about Forman's film is the complete disharmony between any objective evaluation of the facts and events of the film and the attitude the film clearly wants...
...with crude '50s locker-room talk. The feminine principle represented by the nurses is that of order--but order conceived of pettiness, primness, and bitchiness, all summed in Nurse Ratched's threat to "tell your mother." The revolt of the masses is put in terms of the all-male ward standing up to its female overseers, and part of the reason we are supposed to sympathize with the revolt is that we are expected to consider the sight of women telling men what to do offensive to our basic human instincts, part of the reversal of basic humanity that...