Randall Patrick McMurphy – One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Compared to other sorts of heroes, R. P.‘Mac’ McMurphy is in many ways very different. No city-saving, child-defending, or years of unfailing valour for him, McMurphy has very little to work with other than the four blank walls of an asylum, and seven men in various states of mental stability. Yet from here he manages to become one of the most beloved champions in cinematic history – and one of the most tragic.
We meet McMurphy in the office of a mental hospital, having recently been transferred from a prison farm where he was serving a sentence for statutory rape. Immediately seeing the opportunity to avoid any more hard labour, McMurphy agrees to cooperate with a period of evaluation and finds himself on a ward in the company of some fairly alarming patients – and the distinctly terrifying Nurse Ratched. A diabolically manipulative woman, so hard and impenetrable that Thor could use her as his hammer, Ratched makes Snape look like Santa Claus. McMurphy may not be classed among the conventional types of hero, but his enemy is most definitely among the most notorious of movie villains.
McMurphy has little understanding of the men, and even less patience with them. But this is exactly where his revolution of their world begins; McMurphy’s disruption of the ward and of Nurse Ratched’s despotic regime is partly his attempt to relieve his own boredom and frustration, but it is also a direct result of his wonderfully flagrant disregard for any kind of authority or rules. And gradually, this concept reaches the minds of the wretched men around him. Whether he is teaching them to gamble, assembling a basketball team, breaking them out for a day at sea, making it possible for Billy to spend one night with a girl or just handing round Juicy Fruit gum, McMurphy’s very presence brings one simple message to their narrow existence: This is life – for God’s sake live it.
Unlike many movie heroes, McMurphy was defeated by his nemesis, and in one of the most grotesque and demeaning ways imaginable. The famously vacant face and motionless body of the lobotomized McMurphy are so heart-breaking because of the contrast of that sight with the person he had been before – with his spirit and his relentless enthusiasm for being alive. But as the Chief finally takes hold of the water fountain – and his own life – in order to escape the place for good, there is no doubt that McMurphy saved lives, even if he had to lose his own in the process.
It doesn’t get much more heroic than that.
