Summary
As McMurphy spends more time at the facility, his freedom-loving impulses begin to chafe more and more against the structure of the ward. McMurphy spends time outside the facility and observes patients getting on a bus to leave the facility for "recreation time," which promises some semblance of freedom from the confines of the facility. He enviously watches a squirrel walk across the chain link fence that separates the hospital grounds from the freedom of the outside world. McMurphy tries to put Chief Bromden's impressive height to use in a game of basketball: Nurse Ratched watches as McMurphy climbs on the shoulders of Bancini, another patient, to put the ball in the net in order to encourage Chief to dunk. Ratched observes from above as the camera cuts to a record player playing classical music.
The interior of the ward becomes an increasingly confining and harmful environment for McMurphy, who longs for the freedom to determine his own environment. As McMurphy leads the other patients through a card game, the players' inability to retain the rules of the game makes McMurphy increasingly annoyed. Even more frustrating is the volume of the classical music, which McMurphy asks Ratched to turn down. Ratched insists that there are many old men in the ward who would not be able to hear the music if they turned it down. Adding to McMurphy's frustration is the pill he receives from an assistant nurse. He refuses to take the pill because he does not know what kind of pill it is. Refusing to tell him, Ratched teases him by telling him that if he does not want to take the medication orally, they can arrange for him to take it some other way. McMurphy takes the pill and goes to sit at a table where Harding joins him and asks, “tell me lover boy, why didn’t you tell her to go fuck herself?” McMurphy's rebellion against ward protocol appears to have rubbed off on the usually compliant Harding, and McMurphy opens his mouth to show him that he only pretended to take the pill. He bets with the other patients that he can undermine Ratched’s authority within a week.
The second group therapy shows McMurphy attempting to influence ward policy once again. McMurphy tells Ratched that he thinks they should change the work detail so that they can watch the World Series, and Ratched consents to taking a vote on changing the schedule. However, not many of the men vote for watching the World Series, as it is clear they feel manipulated by Ratched's authority and their own investment in ward policy. McMurphy can hardly believe it, urging the men to be “good Americans," but there are not enough votes to change ward policy. McMurphy sees how influenced and subdued the men have become in their time at the hospital.
Games continue to organize the men's daily routine in the ward, and McMurphy introduces bets and gambling into their structure. The patients play Monopoly, and Taber harasses Harding, telling him to “play the game,” a continuation of his homophobic mocking from the early scene. McMurphy sprays them all with a hose and tells them he is going downtown to watch the World Series. Confinement continues to thwart McMurphy and he makes wild claims to the men about his ability to regain his lost freedom. He claims he can lift a fountain in the tub room, throw it at the window, and break out to watch the World Series. The patients, intrigued by his gall, bet on whether he will succeed, but he cannot lift it.
In the following scene Billy Bibbit reveals more about the personal demons that led him to the ward, and the men begin to join McMurphy in his rebellion against the ward. He recounts a time when he told a girl that he liked her and asked her to marry him. Ratched questions him, saying, “Your mother told me that you never told her about it. Billy, why didn’t you tell her about it?” Billy's inability to answer her question does not deter Ratched; in fact, it only encourages her to press him further, when she asks, “Billy, wasn’t that the first time you tried to commit suicide?” Coming to Billy's defense, Cheswick asks Ratched why she is pressing Billy to talk about his trauma even though he does not want to, and asks if they can vote about the World Series once more. Even though more people vote in favor of watching the game this time, Ratched insists that there are still not enough votes to change ward policy and adjourns the meeting, just before McMurphy convinces Chief Bromden to raise his hand. Insisting that the meeting has ended, Ratched refuses to count Chief’s vote, and McMurphy becomes furious. In the absence of a real game on the television, McMurphy narrates a make-believe baseball game for the patients. They are all pulled into the fiction he imagines on the blank television screen, as Ratched tries unsuccessfully to get them to stop, yelling over the loudspeaker.
While Ratched is undoubtedly a heartless villain in the ward, McMurphy harbors a clear prejudice against her. In a meeting with Spivey and another psychiatrist, McMurphy complains about Ratched, insisting “she ain’t honest,” and when Spivey insists that she is one of the best nurses McMurphy disagrees, calling her a “cunt” and saying she “likes a rigged game.” McMurphy's dislike of Ratched is not only based on her abuse of power but in his own misogyny as well. We begin to see the tension between McMurphy and Ratched as not only a battle of wills, but a battle between genders. Spivey suggests that McMurphy has been putting them on this whole time and shows no signs of mental illness, to which McMurphy holds up a playing card with a picture of a naked woman on it and asks, “Where do you suppose she lives?”
Finally, after being continually thwarted by the strictures of the institution, McMurphy finds a way to break free. He utilizes Chief's height to help him climb over the fence of the facility. After inviting the other patients into the bus for a regularly scheduled field trip, he steals the bus from the orderlies. Free from the hospital grounds, McMurphy picks up his girlfriend, Candy, and introduces her to the men, before bringing them all to a harbor. When the men attempt to steal a fishing boat, the harbor master comes out to question who they are. In a feeble attempt to throw the harbor master off their trail, McMurphy lies and tells him they are all doctors from the state mental institution. While the harbor master remains unconvinced, he lets the men take the boat, and McMurphy teaches the patients to fish out on the open water. Billy flirts with Candy on the boat. Candy and McMurphy sleep together in the cabin, and while they are away Cheswick loses control of the boat. Billy catches a large fish, as the camera zooms out from the boat in a bird’s-eye view.
Analysis
In this section we see McMurphy amassing some power in the ward and becoming more and more frustrated by the limitations placed on him and the other men. At the start of this section, McMurphy watches a squirrel move delicately along a chain link fence. On one side is the outside world, the natural world, but McMurphy is trapped on the inside of the hospital grounds. The squirrel's placement on the fence itself—the division between the patients and the outside world—only makes McMurphy more aware of his own captivity. As he begins to understand the corruption that underlies the workings of the organization, he becomes more and more disturbed, and more motivated to change the way things are done. First he must get the patients to grow resentful of their treatment in the ward, to break them out of the controlled social order that Nurse Ratched has imposed on them. If he can do this, McMurphy thinks, he can create the free and instinctual environment that he longs for, and overthrow the repressive authority of Nurse Ratched. In McMurphy's eyes, Nurse Ratched stands in for the institution—and perhaps, in a larger sense, for all institutions and systems that seek to repress the more natural and instinctual drives of human beings. If he can teach the men that they do not have to accept repression, then McMurphy can gain the upper hand in the ward. McMurphy's playfulness on the basketball court and his desire to help the men have fun, when he teaches Chief how to play basketball, is met with suspicion by Nurse Ratched, who watches skeptically from above. He is helping the men find levity and enjoyment, which might be perceived as helpful to the mentally ill, but because it does not fit into Nurse Ratched's controlled image of what treatment looks like, she disapproves. She looks down at the basketball court from above, like a queen looking down on her dominion, and it is clear that Ratched is not only a caretaker but a formidable authority, a ruler who demands that things go her way.
Ratched's authority is tested further when McMurphy asks her to turn down the music. While he respectfully requests for her to turn it down, she insists that to turn it down would be disturbing to the patients' sense of consistency. While Ratched advocates for consistency and protocol, McMurphy lifts himself up as a proponent of agency and change, and a conflict as simple as the volume of music becomes a catalyst for revolution. Their dueling priorities clash yet again when the nurse refuses to tell him what pill he is taking. When she asserts her power publicly, implying that she will administer the pill anally, he affects obedience, but does not swallow the pill. When he shows the other patients that he did not take the pill, he is stirring the spirit of rebellion and dissent amongst them. They begin to realize that if he can rebel against the authority of the institution, they can as well. While they are hesitant adopters of his rebellious ways, his irreverence slowly begins to work them. As McMurphy rebels more, they feel encouraged by his spirited impertinence, as demonstrated when Cheswick is the one to call for a re-vote in the group therapy.
McMurphy becomes a pied piper to the patients in the ward, showing them a mental disposition that they did not know they had at their disposal, and encouraging them to pursue their desires even if they depart from the protocol of the hospital. Nurse Ratched begins to reveal her openly cruel tendencies, as when she refuses to tell McMurphy about the pill he is taking, and when she presses Billy about an evidently traumatic event in a particularly clinical and unfeeling way. McMurphy and Ratched's dispositional incompatibilities are clarified and put in conflict in this section of the movie. McMurphy's perspective is in response to Nurse Ratched's tightly wound control and perverse commitment to order. McMurphy advocates for the primacy of the individual and the instinctual, while Ratched advocates for the primacy of the institution and of systematic control. McMurphy comes to represent the natural world, while Ratched represents the world of humans and machines.
But McMurphy's rebellion against corruption is not, it becomes clear, simply a pure desire for personal freedom. It becomes clear in this section that Murphy's "freedom" has a lot to do with his revulsion against women. Instead of articulating the ways that he believes Ratched to be abusing her power, McMurphy resorts to disparaging her to Dr. Spivey in disrespectful and derogatory ways. He calls Ratched a "cunt" to the male therapists as though to reach some common ground of misogyny. McMurphy's irreverence helps him see the problems with the institution, but the irreverence is so strong that it blocks him from affecting positive change. McMurphy is not necessarily wrong for questioning the ways that the ward operates, but here he seems to shoot himself in the foot, articulating his critique in a way that alienates the people he would need to persuade. In his total refusal to engage with the rules at all, McMurphy only limits himself more and more.
But this refusal to play by the rules also has positive outcomes, as McMurphy is able to make the men have fun and feel liberated from the structures that cause them pain. The joy and fun that he introduces to the ward has a therapeutic effect, especially when the men steal the boat. On the boat, the men are no longer defined by their mental illness, and they are able to connect with a sense of freedom and enjoyment of the natural world, without the judgment of society. They become like the squirrel on the fence, free to enjoy nature without restriction. For all their faults, McMurphy and Candy are nonjudgmental supervisors and show the men an experience that brings them enjoyment for a brief moment.
