“The Way The Whole Darned Human Solidarity Keeps Perpetuating Itself” One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Intentional Distancing, Accidental Empathy, & Rebellion as A Way To Pass The Time

Can selfishness be intersectionally liberating? Can assholes help to free strangers?

Those are two sentences saying the same thing, and I’m being repetitive only because I feel like I’m going to be fighting both of those conflicting impulses while I write this whole thing. Sometimes my philosophy degree is more trouble than it’s worth.

I’d say the same tonal conflict is true for this cinematic masterpiece One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. At its surface, it’s just a story of a randy-horny good ole boy trying to stir up trouble at a mental institution and have some fun, until he gets smashed by some know-it-all in a white doctor’s gown who’s never known real human joy in her whole suffering life. On the other hand it’s a weighty allegory for the challenges and depths and risks of human freedom, with undercurrents of messianic allusions on the main character.

But all these things have already been written about this movie & book (I know, I read most of them; I was nuts about this book & its author Ken Kesey for quite sometime in college—Hunter S. Thompson too obviously; I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my basic-ass white boy soul). Other than the old things about this movie, what is new about it—obviously not because the movie has changed, but without changing is the movie still pertinent to modern age? Do we have new characters currently that are reflected in the old characters back then, falling into a future that the creators from decades ago were unknowingly reflecting now, because time & its art is a pair of flat stupid circles?

Worth first obvious mention—it’s always been cool to not trust the government & to piss off authority. But why is Randle Patrick McMurphy so much more whimsical about his rebellion than the current crop of illiterate face drooling plague rats we’ve been cursed with? Was it just “the 60s?” I’m going to say, probably not. I’m willing to bet my last 41-year-old Square dollar that there were more than enough jingoistic racists floating around San Francisco & Woodstock. They were just luckily never in charge of the microphones & bullhorns.

But upon my contractually obligated re-watch in order to weave this essay, I’m struck with how OFOTCN can still act as a skeleton key of some sort for our current fascist malaise, at least as far as recruiting the unrecruitable & accidentally helping the ignored and marginalized without direct intent. What if being a bored, selfish cur with ADHD and a deck of porno playing cards was a legitimate route to metaphorically knocking down the walls for everyone else on your way out of the smashed windows you shattered on your way to Canada?

As far as first monikers go, it’s important to mention that Randle Patrick McMurphy is initialized to RPM—revolutions per minute, which you might accuse me of being cheeky except for the fact that Ken Kesey has mentioned in numerous interviews that he intended that directly as Revolutions Per Minute, which is somehow both the most subtle and also the most ham-fisted thematic metaphor I’ve ever read. The Randle character is intended to be a living avatar of the aphorism from Albert Camus (an author even better than me & Ken Kesey combined, if you can believe that), “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” That’s all a given, that’s symbolically presented on a silver platter for anyone watching the movie. That part’s easy. My question is, can a character who’s living all this freedom only for themselves inadvertently foment the liberty, freedom, and independence of those around him without even trying, or in fact even giving a shit? Like a rising tide in a leather jacket that accidentally also lifts all the boats around it.

The movie wastes no time letting us know that RPM thinks quite highly of himself. He’s a “marvel of modern science” when the doctor asks him if he thinks there’s anything wrong with himself. Certainly an answer drenched in shamelessness and self-acceptance, obviously contrary to the entire energy of the literal building and all its inhabitants and staff and tiles and formica and glass and concrete right down to the foundation. He’s so irrefutably chipper about (only) himself, that even when he fails to lift the sink in the wash room, he drops the utterly savage line that “I tried didn’t I? God damn it at least I did that” right in the faces of all the men who just watched him fail. Even failure is a victory for his irrefutable faith in himself. A victory while stuck in this emotional gravity sink of an edifice ergonomically designed to make its inhabitants hate themselves.

But for the whole first half of the movie, we can tell he’s only doing any of this for himself. Out of boredom. To kill time since it’s saving him from the work prison. And anything that contributes to that boredom is verboten to him. That’s his only priority. He doesn’t want to watch the World Series because it’ll “help the boys” and “their struggle is his struggle.” It’s because he just likes baseball. He hasn’t thought any further than that. The same is for his “bet” to wind up Nurse Ratched until she doesn’t know whether to “shit or wind her wrist watch.” As if he needed the boys to egg him on. He would have hassled her for free without an audience. He’s not taking on a Goliath in order to “pursue intersectional liberty for his fellows in solidarity with their incarceration.” He’s bored out of his ass. And he’s likewise shortsighted enough that he doesn’t even consider that there might be consequences (for himself) to his 24/7 game of treating human beings like his own personal fidget spinners.

This is ramped up & revealed at the group therapy session near the middle of the film, which devolves into a screaming match, smashed windows, and a riot for cigarettes. Blowing well beyond Ratched’s control, and Randle finally for once understanding there are stakes here that he hadn’t noticed up until then. This is reiterated when they take Cheswick away for electroshock therapy; RPM isn’t exactly consoling. He mostly feels confused & hassled that Cheswick is holding on to him for dear life. But he immediately wakes back up when Chief Bromden reveals that he’s been playing a fast one on the whole building by only pretending to be deaf & mute.

And this is the beginning of RPM learning to care. When he has a friend. When he has someone keeping his own secret, that he shares with RPM. Chief Bromden is the introverted version of the Camus quote—he is living in pure rebellion every second of every day to every single person around him. And the honor he bestows on RPM by letting him (and only him) in on it. And RPM is literally giddy AND flattered. Someone had one over him, even HE thought Chief was a deaf mute. RPM is ecstatic to be outsmarted by someone else for once. Someone else is running a grift. Now he’s not a solitary grifter. And the loneliness of that lifestyle– marching to your own drum can be exhausting if no one else hears the music—finally punctured by one person who’s finally doing the same thing he is.

Now this sets us up for the second half of the movie, when RPM actually starts taking an engaged interest in the other lunatics. He actually cares about their development. Having one friend actually taught him how to care about everyone else. The re-introductory scene begins first with Sefelt lying to Nurse Ratched to cover ass for Fredrickson—reminding us that friendship can be two people willing to lie to other people for each other (especially to the cops). Then the first wink to Chief Bromden from RPM before revealing his newly electrically invigorated mental health to the rest of the Mental Defectives.

You’re all adults with impeccable cinema tastes, so I know you’ve all seen the movie already, so we all already know how the story plays out (with the book actually ending with all the self-committed inmates actually electing to set themselves free, which nicely plays into my theme much better, thanks Mr. Kesey). What’s important here is that we have no indication that RPM is, let’s say, woke enough to explain what he was doing or why he was doing it. RPM is many things, but I don’t think “reader” is one of them. I don’t think he’s read Marx, he does not understand praxis, solidarity, or any of the other utterly insufferable lexicon from the Communist Reader at my feet covered in sand grains from my one-eyed pirate cat’s shit box. RPM did not need–and in fact would not have sat still for—any intellectual convincing, and a library card would have been wasted on him. As I said before, he didn’t even register “wrongdoing that required heroic rectitude!” He was just dying of boredom. And he didn’t know boredom was everyone’s problem until he had made a friend. And he doesn’t know that boredom can actually give you a mental illness—he’s been lucky enough (to be born with enough moxie & born white– let’s not pretend that doesn’t buy him leeway with authorities) to be able to fight against it his whole life. And most control-cultures have a vested interest in making their inhabitants bored: I’m reminded of La Haine where boredom literally leads to paranoia and violence, which is lashed out upon one’s surroundings and fellow travelers in your immediate vicinity—it almost never goes up the chain of command. This is shown in OFOTCN in the first group therapy session, when the inmates are egged on to verbally attack each other, instead of unifying against The Nurses—one of the course-corrections that RPM eventually, inadvertently, drives them towards with his ne’er do well-ery.

But by the end of the movie, does all this actually portray an actual change of heart for RPM? I don’t know. True to form, I don’t even think he knows. He sits in the chair, waiting for Billy to finish banging Candy. Does he care? Is he perturbed? Is he thinking desperately about how to save everyone else? Is he just too drunk to climb out a window and just needs to rest his eyes for a minute? After Billy dies, why does RPM try to choke out Nurse Ratched? Is it “for Billy”? Is it because he feels guilty for Billy’s death and he’s projecting? Is he just sick of her always telling everyone to remain calm? Who knows. All we know is that it happened. It’s what his reflexes told him to do. And they’ve got him this far in his life, and you dance with who brought you, so he followed through on them. I wouldn’t even say “consequences be damned,” because that implies he even considered those at all, which we know is not his forte, to say the least.

Then the denouement at the end of it all. The Nurse’s neck brace (showing she’s not invincible). The lobotomy. Chief Bromden’s act of rescue (there’s a wonderful little quick cut-in shot where Chief is undoing his own bed straps by himself, just to cinematically remind you of RPM’s influential effect on those around him). Chief breaking the sink off its foundations, setting the water free from the pipes & himself free from the window. But it’s ultimately Chief’s liberatory act of murder, his reciprocated endowment of freedom back onto RPM that is the greatest act. The smashed window leaves a path for the other inmates, but whatever has happened to all of them, because of RPM, will spread to anyone else they run into, for the rest of their lives. Solidarity doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s more like a pathogen they caught from him, that you use as a vaccine to fight the greater disease of boredom. They’re all inoculated now.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Hippie Road Trip Masterpiece (Film as a Self-Care Text About How It’s Totally Fine to Go No Contact With Your Family)

Pulled pork tacos were a poor choice.

That was my first thought when I started this movie. After the opening flash photography montage depicting half-decomposed human bodies, leading into the zoom-out reveal of a pair of putrefied corpses mangled and reassembled into a fetish totem, I was temporarily put off my protein entrée for my movie dinner. Thinking back, I can’t recall too many movies that began with my full attention gripped as immediately as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There is no curiosity. There is no mystery. “I wonder what this movie is about” is not a thought that crosses your mind. This movie is about evil. Its every frame is a painting, if the paintings were done by Francis Bacon.

Being that this was only my second time seeing it, everything was still fresh and horrifying enough to write about. But now with just enough breathing room to Think About What It All Means, it is about a great many things. Like all great art, it can be a great many number of things, but for the interest of this essay, we’re just going to lock in on how this movie is a seminal text in the hippie ethos culture, specifically how your parents are square and their lives are bullshit. The most terrifying thing in the American Mythos is the Family Unit. The horror lies in not escaping the hive. It’s like a Faulkner novel, but with chainsaws.

Our opening, our idyllic setting, our status quo to be shaken by the coming movie nightmare, begins with our penta-protagonists on a road trip to Texas to check on the status of a dead and buried relative—there’s been grave robbings in the area, and they need to check to make sure their grandparent is still interred in the earth (where the dead belong, where they can have no interference with the living). On their departure back to proper civilization, they pick up the Hitchhiker (unbeknownst to them as the first member of the Sawyer Family who’s been doing all the desecrated digging). It’s worth noting the celluloid beauty in that pickup scene. The rolling one cut scene, which has the van slowing to a stop and the Hitchhiker climbing into the van, is shot with the greatest rolling cinematic vista in the film up to that point so far, and even from then on. After that one moment of showcasing the great breathing windswept natural open freedom that is America, beginning immediately after that very moment that they pick up the Hitchhiker, from then on it is all claustrophobia and decay and dead brush and dried up river beds and murder and massacre.

All fecundity begins to expire once they interact with a Traditionalist, which the Hitchhiker definitely is. He waxes nostalgic and philosophic about how it’s a shame that the local slaughterhouses moved away from the old fashioned skull-hammer-smash meat murder method, and instead embraced the air gun method (even though it’s cheaper, faster, safer, more humane, and leads to better meat that’s not tainted in flavor because of adrenaline from the livestock’s fear of dying—that’s not mentioned in the cinematic text directly, it’s just stuff I happen to know; don’t ask how, you just have to know these things to be philosopher king, you know). All to say, the Hitchhiker is a man who thinks things were better in the Good Old Days. Even though the old way is an inferior idea that leads to an inferior product, the new way lacks cruelty, and that’s the Hitchhiker’s favorite part. At the expense of all other possible economic, moral, and efficiency advantages, the cruelty is the point.

And where do Traditionalists spring from? From where do they breed and breathe and beget their barrenness? From the Home. The Home is little more than an aquarium of preservation, and preservation itself is not an inherent good. Preservation is only preservation, and preservation for the sake of pure preservation leads only to pure rot. But (other than an utterly wicked zoom shot that has the house swallow up the entire frame as the second victim makes her cursed approach) the movie wisely doesn’t make the home the villain, that’d be boring and pretentious. The concept of the Home is just the base for the violent antagonists to be antagonists. These are the Sawyers, and their heirloom is cruelty. Every home is where the preservation of Tradition, the greatest horror, is always perpetrated. A healthy home is made to be birthed in, and then flown away from. Otherwise the blood will pool in the cul-de-sac. Like the bard said: Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, with chainsaws.

The moral punishment of the 70s that is visited on these free-wheeling road-tripping hippie children is that they had the audacity to leave their homes and to expect that the world, or at least their lives, would be better than what came before them. To be better than what they were escaping. That the 60s had some semblance of imagination, or consideration that maybe the next crop of Americans could set their own boundary on evil and not turn into their parents from the 40s and 50s if they got far enough away. But the slaughterhouse monster snatched them right back in again. It’s like the ending of Easy Rider, except with chainsaws instead of shotguns. America doesn’t like it when you try to change America, even if it’s for the better.

There’s an offhand scene in the third act, where the oldest Sawyer has captured our main heroine and is bringing her back—retrieving the lost sheep who dared to run for freedom—and he’s almost mindlessly pummeling her with his off driving hand, poking her with a large stick while she cries in the potato sack. It’s the purest, most bored sadism. It’s doing nothing of any pragmatism or use. Only the cruelty is the point.

Leading into the Dinner Scene. The clearest and most obvious reflection that the Nuclear Family is the Toxic Family. It’s fair to say that not all families of all time are inherently toxic, but I’d say that was the general assumption coming out of the 60s and 70s, at least for kids Sandy’s age. Any Tradition & All the Houses that Protected It that led to that Vietnam War are found guilty by association, as far as this movie is concerned. All the archetypal members of this macabre meal are accounted for—even Leatherface in his best housewife skin-face, with makeup & lipstick—and the most trapped, incessant, unbearable horror scene of the whole film. All of the heroine’s earlier and luckier friends were allowed to just simply be murdered. She has to sit through actually interacting with her fellow familial inmates. Most importantly for our theme of rot feasting on growth, the scene where they feed the blood cut from our heroine’s hand to Grandpa Sawyer, the desiccated corpse of the past (well overdue for the cemetery) is literally feeding off the vitality of its nation’s youth.

These are the things you get with a family comprised entirely of Traditionalist dead-end losers. Shit always rolls downhill, and with the sun in angry solar flare (“when the earth is having a bad day” to quote the director Tobe Hooper) the bottom of that intergalactic shit hill is the Sawyer’s front door. And the only thing they have on hand to even attempt to maintain some superiority over others is the act of sheer violence; whatever they can do to you that you can’t retaliate, just for the fact that you can’t retaliate is what makes it fun. The cruelty is the point, because they have no other point. They have nothing else going for them, except what they can do to hurt other people, to put people below them. Whomever they are beating and eating, that is who they are winning against, if even for a moment. It’s a Cormac McCarthy book about the inescapable stain of violence burned into the soul of America, but with chainsaws. We already have a movie version of Blood Meridian. It’s called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

And it is a cycle. It is each of them hurting each other, and hurting whoever they come in contact with. As the Bible says, hurt people hurt people, with chainsaws. There is no forgiving or fixing a cycle. There is only breaking it. In one regard, it remains unbroken—the sun rises on a new day in America, The Day of Leatherface. The Joy of Cruelty. But Sandy, our heroine, is still alive. And she did not defeat the Sawyer family. She did not redeem, heal, chastise, fix, or accept that cavern of unhinged and violent men. She got in another car and she left. The movie bookends with automobile liberty, the grace and freeing myth that has sustained the best parts of America: to Keep It Moving Somewhere Else & Leave All That Old Shit Behind (it used to be horses, it used to be boats from the Old World to the New One, but the theme still stands). She kept running from what wanted to kill her. There is no fixing a broken family. You are one person. They are legion. There is no resolution of justice, there is only escape. Perpetual forward movement away from what tried to kill you. No forgiveness, no forgetting. There is only movement away.

The Dirty Dozen: Your Dad’s Favorite Movie Before FOX NEWS Got To Him

An ensemble masterpiece, where one dozen of the worst and most violent incarcerated American soldiers are offered a suicide mission in exchange for their freedom. A rotten deal from a rotten wartime government, offered to rotten men, to get them to kill the only type of people even worse than they are–NAZIS.

I was thinking just today, speaking with my yuck-em-up co-workers at my comedy show, about how much more fun art is when it’s big and stupid and loud while being coated over a pertinent social message—which as an aside is why we all picked comedy (“I don’t want to write a 700 page novel about a bunch of boring-ass people getting a divorce” I believe was my actual comparative statement, about why stand-up comedy is the superior mode of artistic expression). I believe this can all be classified under the “medicine with a piece of cheese” type of message delivery. If you make it fun, or funny, or loud, or bright etc. etc., you can get things to sink in to the audience, much better than if you just told them.

All that to say, The Dirty Dozen is one of the greatest pieces of cinematic cheese-wrapping, around one of the most pertinent social messages of the twentieth & (now because we didn’t learn the lesson hard enough) the twenty-first century: NAZIs and fascists will always suck, and anyone fighting them is The Good Guy. Philosophically, a simple premise, but one we’re apparently having trouble remembering. The Dirty Dozen plays a vital role in the delivery of this required social ethic.

Let’s begin with a few premises we all probably agree on (I do only have about 1500 words here):

The Dirty Dozen rules (If you didn’t already think so, why are you reading this? Also get your shit together, this movie rules)

Fascism and NAZIS are bad (You’re reading this, which means you’re literate, which means you’re probably neither of those things, good job you)

A lot of Fascists are The Worst Dudes. They are dudes. They are whiny frightened cowardly little manly mongrels who mess their pants daily and need their bottoms pampered and their media fed to them in little spoons so they don’t hurt themselves.

For the interests of this essay, we’re going to concentrate on how this is a Male Problem. This is pertinent to mention, because this film has almost no Female Speaking lines. There is one German woman with lines, in German, whose only dialogue is calling for a Nazi dude to bone.

This is a misogynist film, designed to reach misogynist dudes, because they need to learn the lessons that this movie has for them. That is the first layer of cheese.

It’s important that you know, I’m not hand-waving all this like “Oh it was a different time.” No, the characters here are awful. They’re violent, simplistic, and dangerous men, incarcerated or otherwise. And as our real-world time continues to go on, “the good guys” in this movie will continue to age more and more poorly, and yet they will still, always be better dudes than the NAZIs they are killing in this movie. This is a remedial film, because apparently there are remedial minds out there who still need it.

“NAZIs bad. America good.”

And when is America goodest, Jethro?

“…when killing NAZIs?”

100%. Gold star.

I yearn for the day that The Dirty Dozen can fade into history’s sad and dusty pages and be forgotten, because we’ll have learned the lessons it had to teach us. But we haven’t, so it doesn’t.

So here we are, still watching The Dirty Dozen. And as medicine wrapped in cheese goes, we could do worse. This movie is funny, it’s fun, it has Lee Marvin being insubordinate, it has prostitutes being prostitutes (“I could only get eight, they’re like cops–when you need one you can’t find them”). It has guns, explosions, knives, punching, obstacle courses, and male bonding. The best homework is homework that doesn’t feel like homework.

My other favorite part of the Secret Homework Wrapped in Cheese for our students is in both how wonderfully underhanded AND overhanded it handles race. Not just in Jim Brown’s black character, but in every character in this Dirty Dozen Colors of the Rainbow Coalition. Greek, Spanish, Polish, Italian, and American Indian (played by a white dude in Redface—not great!) But this is all of course not directly mentioned in the text—about how America is only at its greatest strength when it lives and breathes on its racial diversity—because the people who need to know it will get very scared and sad and whiney if they have to hear it with words. So instead you sneak it in with guns and punching. Not only, obviously, by killing NAZIs. You can also see that Colonel Breed’s antagonist platoon from the American air-drop school are all White-White. Clean cut. Pure, one might say. And Dirty is something to be proud of in this movie, thank you very much.

The most important chess piece in this racial message (my favorite message in this film, that America’s greatest and infinite strength is when it welcomes in all the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to kill NAZIs), the man who bears the incredible thespian responsibility of playing a convincing and irredeemable asshole, one of the most repugnant cinematic villains I’ve ever seen in movie history, the Judas who must act or we have no counterfoil with which to make our point of racial unity in service of killing Fascists and the righteousness thereof, we have Archer Maggott, played by Telly Savalas with such incredible visceral and evil aplomb that it would not be matched for 45 years until Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained. Archer Maggott, the role turned down by Jack Palance because the director refused to give the character a redemption arc where he “learned his lesson.” Apparently director Robert Aldrich believed some Americans don’t deserve to be invited back. Once you call Jim Brown the n-word, you don’t get to patch that up. And see the clear metaphorical equivalence made in the film, with one scene where Maggott relaxes and plays catch with himself with a grenade, while lying in a palatial king-sized bed in a NAZI chateau. Make yourself at home, Maggott, you fit right in! And all the while throughout the movie before that point, with the incessant religious haranguing from the character, at all times and every opportunity, it’s all a very clear message that Fascists can grow quite easily in local American soil—that the NAZIs who claim to be atheist can have more than enough in common with an American-born Christian. This is symbolically proven most completely when the shooting starts, that Maggott is also the first one shot and killed by a Dirty Dozen-er: Maggott deserves to die in this mausoleum just like the rest of those racist scum.

There are other, greater, and even more beautiful themes and subtleties in this masterpiece. Cinema things are going on that can teach you about the union solidarity of communism, and who holds the power of death (first used as a threat against the Dozen, then stolen by the Dozen as The Power of Desperation & its Leverage—if they’re going to die anyway why do they have to follow your orders?) But that is all pretentiousness from a philosophy major. That would all be gilding the lily. The central message, and the exploding cheese around it, is already perfect for those who must learn it. There is no “greater message” behind the Front Message of the film, because it is already the Greatest Message—kill NAZIs, get out of prison. Don’t be a fascist, be the good guys.

Who are the Good Guys?

Anyone who’s not a Fascist.