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50:169 Doctors in Film
Film Notes
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey (1935-2001) wrote the novel upon which this film was based. The novel appeared in 1962. According to various sources on the novel, including interviews with Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest was partly inspired by his experiences working as an orderly on the psychatric ward of a Veteran's Administration Hospital. The film appeared in 1975, and won five Oscars, becoming an icon of the anti-psychiatric movement that began in the late-1960s. The book, and the film, are compeling and widely influenced a generation that had turned against "the establishment" in medicine as well as politics. Psychiatry, and psychiatric institutions, were seen as complicit with the arrogant use of power by the state to silence those who dissented from the mainstream or those who were simply seen as different from middle-of-the-road suburban white America.
Discussion questions:
- How are various health care personel depicted in the film? who has power? what sort? why?
- How does the film critique, or question, definitions of mental illness?
- In what ways does the film critique the institutionalization of the mentally ill?
| Synopsis and commentary: Literature, Arts and Medicine database |
| Synopsis and commentary by Tim Dirkes |
| Frankenstein | M*A*S*H |
| Arrowsmith | The Hospital |
| Young Dr. Kildare | |
| No Way Out | Gross Anatomy |
| Magnificent Obsession | The Doctor |
| The Interns | The Patriot |