Nurse Ratched example essay topic
403 words
This feature looks at the life in a mental institution from the viewpoint of the anti-hero, Randale Patrick McMurphy (Mac). As McMurphy attempts to shake things up within his gloomy atmosphere, the tyrannical nurse Ratched stops him dead in his tracks. This film captures the anarchic spirit of Mac, as well as shows us the workings of a truly destructive system. The film's credits role over an Oregonian wilderness scene at daybreak, as a pair of headlights pass across the screen. Nurse Ratched, coated in black, arrives at the locked, security ward of a state mental hospital, where patients, nurses, and orderlies begin their daybreak ritual of dispensing the morning pills. Randale P. McMurphy is a con man who becomes a 'modern-day rebel and hero'. Escorted into the ward he brings with him an energetic and swaggering persona. He is charming, manipulating, wise-cracking and rebellious; he is a dynamic and non-conforming character placed in an environment that strives on being placid.
He challenges authority. Immediately he begins stirring up trouble; using a strong sense of humor and 'comic exaggeration'. He initiates the changes at the institution and instructs the patients to follow his lead; to wake up and start thinking for themselves. Nurse Mildred Ratched is the ward's superintendent.
Viewed as the ultimate authority she demands obedience and perfect order from everyone; staff and patients. In the eyes, of the patients her power has grown to monstrous proportions and until Mac was introduced into their mundane lives she was swelling to even greater magnitude. The patients are in awe and completely spellbound by her cool and tenacious manner. When Mac becomes assigned to the ward in which the authoritarian Nurse Ratched oversees, she immediately begins to work on him with her emasculating and dictatorial attitude. Mac becomes antagonized and makes a bet with the other patients that, .".. in one week, I can put a bug so far up her ass, she don't know whether to sh -- or wind her wristwatch". Mac proceeds to win a number of rounds against the powerful and internalized nurse Ratched, by bringing life to the dead environment and the patients it houses with a controlled yet frenzied madness.
During an uplifting outdoor exercise period he teaches his fellow 'inmates' an 'old Indian game'-basketball, in a fenced in court.
