Summary
The final section begins with the morning after, and the consequences of the previous night's debauchery. As orderlies enter the ward, they find it in disarray. Trash is everywhere as a bleary eyed Taber awakens on the floor. Nurse Ratched enters the ward with a steely look on her face, visibly distressed. Her usual eerie, straight-faced disapproval almost bubbles up in actual anger, as she finds McMurphy lying on the floor in front of an open window. His plan to escape is evident. Determined to put the ward back in order, Ratched instructs the orderlies to close the window, escort Rose out of the hospital, and make sure no one is missing. To make matters worse, Ratched finds Turkle asleep on the floor in the office.
Nurse Ratched's disapproval becomes focused on the punishment of Billy Bibbit. When Washington reports back that he cannot find Billy, Nurse Ratched questions the patients as to whether Billy left the grounds of the hospital. Finally, the assistant nurse calls Ratched over to one of the rooms, where she finds Billy in bed with Candy. Running into the hall naked, Billy frantically wraps a bed sheet around himself, as the men applaud him. Ratched asks him to explain what happened and asks him, “Aren’t you ashamed?” For the first time in the movie, Billy's stutter is gone and he insists that he is not ashamed. Perturbed by how unrepentant Billy is, Nurse Ratched presses him further, telling him she is worried about how his mother will take this information, which makes him start stuttering again. Ratched insists she will tell Billy’s mother what happened, because they are old friends. With the invocation of his mother, Billy becomes upset and tells Ratched that all the patients encouraged him to have sex with Candy. When she asks him who specifically, he tells her it was McMurphy. Billy begs Ratched not to tell his mother, as Ratched instructs an orderly to take Billy to Dr. Spivey’s office.
Having slept through his own escape, and witnessing the effects of his chaotic party, McMurphy frantically tries to break out of the hospital. Grabbing a stolen key, he starts unlocking the window. When an orderly questions him, McMurphy punches him and opens the window with the help of Chief Bromden. An orderly threatens McMurphy, but they are interrupted by the screams of a nurse, who runs into the hall covered in blood. The men gather around the nurse’s office to find Billy, who has cut his own throat and killed himself.
McMurphy is filled with a blind rage at the sight of Billy's dead body, and begins to strangle Nurse Ratched. Ratched's taunting and coercive control has had horrific consequences, and McMurphy takes it into his own hands to seek justice. Before McMurphy can choke Nurse Ratched to death, an orderly intervenes in the struggle and punches McMurphy. The night of celebration and happiness has been undermined by the terrible violence that comes in its wake.
Even though the morning after the party erupted into such climactic chaos, the workings of the ward return to business as usual soon enough. In the next scene, order has been restored, and once again the men sit around a table playing cards in the ward. The only perceivable difference in the ward is that Ratched now has a neck brace and a scratchy voice, as she speaks into the loudspeaker. McMurphy has not managed to change the way that ward is run, but his violence against Ratched left a scar. A patient tells the men that McMurphy has escaped from the ward, information which some men believe, but others dismiss as hearsay. McMurphy has become a phantom of the past, as the ward settles back into its original routine.
McMurphy's influence has not quite dissipated, however, and lives on in Chief Bromden. That night, when Chief is in bed, he is awakened by the sounds of orderlies bringing McMurphy back into the ward. Chief goes to McMurphy and tells him he is ready to escape, but McMurphy is visibly catatonic. When Chief holds McMurphy, he discovers lobotomy scars on his head. Taking it upon himself to put McMurphy out of his vegetative misery, Chief smothers him with the pillow. As Native American drumming begins, Chief is filled with the motivation to finish what McMurphy started, and throws the fountain that McMurphy attempted to lift out the window. Chief Bromden escapes the hospital, as Taber cheers him on and the men wake up.
Analysis
In the climax of the film, a number of unsettling events occur. McMurphy, as the film's protagonist, is disappointingly unable to escape the ward. We find him passed out in front of an open window, a cuckoo unable to fly the nest. Ratched's stone-faced matter-of-factness in this scene barely contains a deep rage that becomes increasingly terrifying as the scene progresses. As her rage remains internal, and she does not express her disapproval explicitly, Ratched's menace comes out in sadistic methods of shaming. The culminating disturbance comes with the suicide of Billy, an innocent character whose shame is exploited by the institution.
Nurse Ratched demonstrates her full villainous proportions in this part of the film when she finds Billy in bed with Candy. Invoking fear of his mother's judgment, Ratched stomps on Billy's feelings and seeks to make him feel guilty for having sex, rather than trying to understand how the chaos that broke out in the ward came to be. Ratched is intent on making people feel badly as a mode of keeping them under her control and in conformity with the needs of the institution. Impressionable and diffident, Billy is an easy target, and his greatest malady is his shame. The revelation that Nurse Ratched and Billy's mother are friends aligns them in a Freudian way; Ratched is not only an authority figure to Billy, but a stand-in for his mother. Billy is haunted by his disapproving maternal figure throughout his life, and while we do not know the details, we know the shame drives him to drastic psychic lows. His suicide is foreshadowed by the invocation of his suicide attempt in the group therapy session. The foreshadowing makes Nurse Ratched's needling of his shame in the climactic moment all the more cruel.
While McMurphy's violence against her after they find Billy has killed himself feels justified, it also represents his greatest tragic flaw. Where Nurse Ratched is cold, clinical and unfeeling in her cruelty, McMurphy is too hot-headed, too reactive, and prone to violent hubris. The viewer is horrified by the death of Billy, and McMurphy's vengeance provides a cathartic outlet for the rage his suicide elicits, but Ratched still has the institution on her side, so McMurphy is doomed. Rather than cut his losses and escape, McMurphy tries to engage and enact revenge, which only hurts him.
An otherwise tragic story is redeemed only by the escape of Chief who, inspired by the drive of McMurphy, is able to reconnect with his desire for freedom and a life outside the bounds of the hospital. McMurphy is undone by the violence of psychiatric procedure—he proves so untamable that he is given a lobotomy—but his untamable spirit lives on in the bravery of Chief Bromden. Chief, in accessing his "big-ness" and strength, is able to lift the fountain that McMurphy could not lift and carry on McMurphy's legacy. McMurphy's act of heroism is his ultimate empowerment of Chief, even though his actions, on balance, caused more harm for ward than good. While it seemed like McMurphy was the cuckoo who would eventually fly the nest, Chief is the one who finds freedom from the bounds of the institution.
