Cereal Monogamist

MASH, Cuckoo’s Nest, and Internalized Sexism in American Culture

MASH
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I promised earlier that I would elaborate on why both of these classic films made my AFI hate list and why I pegged them as being sexist. Here I am. Let me first note, for the record, that I have not read Ken Kesey’s book, on which one film is based, nor have I seen any episodes of the TV show spawned by the other film. All my criticisms are restricted entirely to the two movies.

It’s like this; both of these movies were all about that seventies-era rebellion (Easy Riders and Raging Bulls) in which any kind of institution is bad, and rocking the boat is good, even if it makes you an ass. The characters played by Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland in MASH were, frankly, jerks. Not just to the nurses, not just to their nemesis “Hot-Lips” O’Houlihan (I report that nickname with the same distaste I would have holding a dirty diaper between two fingers). They are jerks to each other, to their superiors, to everybody. Being a jerk was apparently very edgy and cool in the 70s, or so this movie would have you believe. Jack Nicholson in Cuckoo’s Nest was also a jerk. It seemed that he was put into the mental institution because he had played crazy to get out of work duty while in jail, and that he thought this was a pretty awesome plot. Forgive me if I don’t think the same.

Click ahead for more.

Once in the mental institution, Nicholson’s character makes it his goal to liberate all the other inmates and take down evil dictator Nurse Ratched. I’m not going to sit here and write that she was just doing her job, that to keep in control of what could be a very dangerous unruly mob, you sometimes have to make tough choices about how nice you can afford to be. That any position of authority involves a power struggle and that she would have surrendered the authority she needed to do her job if she had acted in any other way. No, I’m not going to write any of that, because that’s beside the point. The point is that the movie decided to make this character a woman—much like MASH’s evil dictator of military law and order was also a woman—and that both of these incidences are in keeping with a very common trope in American culture.

I won’t go into too much English major detail, but there is an scholar of American literature called Nina Baym, who has written several books, and who once proposed a theory. She noted that American literature, much like the nation itself, was founded on the idea of rebellion, individualism, and the pioneer spirit of man. She pointed to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the quintessential American novel, in which a boy takes a raft down a river because he doesn’t like living amongst polite society. Baym pointed out that in Huck Finn, polite society is almost solely characterized by women—Huck’s aunt and other ladies who want to make him put on nice clothes, sit still, not get dirty, not say anything or do anything. Huck’s rebellion is thus against two things at once—the constraints of community living, and women.

And American culture has stretched on in this direction right into these two movies I am speaking of now. Gould and Sutherland are actively rebelling against religion and the military. Military rules are given a perky blond face in O’Houlihan, and so when they assault her (P.S., they assault her, and it’s all SO FUNNY) they are cheered on for sticking it to The Man, who is, conveniently to the brotherhood, a woman. Religion is given a face in Robert Duvall’s character, who is a traitor because he finds O’Houlihan attractive and sleeps with her. Thus they both must be humiliated.

Cuckoo’s Nest follows this trajectory, too. A female nurse runs the ward that Nicholson wants so desperately to break out of, and rebellion against her is ostensibly rebellion against tyranny. I’ve already described why I don’t think her reign is tyrranous, but even if it was, that’s irrelevant. The fact that she is a woman is culturally important. When men are unable to actively, publicly abuse women, they come up with this kind of symbolism to make it OK.

That Cuckoo’s Nest was emphatically anti- mental health care of any kind is also, to me, a major failing, honestly. The way Nicholson tries to get these people who are clearly schizophrenic, or who have crippling anxiety and anti-social tendencies, to quit being babies and get out in the world and LIVE! is just extremely irresponsible. Both of these offenses come to a head when the Brad Dourif character commits suicide immediately after being refused release. This is, for some reason, portrayed as Nurse Ratched’s last act of evil. She doesn’t want him to be happy, she wants him under her thumb. The fact that this kid who thinks he can function in the outside world meets up with one obstacle and IMMEDIATELY OFFS HIMSELF is apparently of no importance to anybody. Yeah, it’s because she was so mean, and not because he is dangerously depressed and unstable.

Both movies also feature a scene where a woman is pimped out, persuaded by one man to sleep with another to make him feel big and strong. Didn’t care for that development much, either.

In short, these movies both reflect an ideology which says that women must recognize the superiority of men, and accept both unwanted sexual attention as well as abuse, if that’s what the man feels obliged to give. That a woman who has her own agenda is not just a figure under suspicion, but a figure who has severely overstepped the bounds of appropriate femininity. People can accept that reading of those movies or not accept it, but that’s what the movies said to me, making it impossible for me to enjoy any of their valid good qualities. A shame, really.