This is the year everyone is celebrating, or at least talking about, the fiftieth anniversary of the first screening of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster, Jaws.
And sure, why not?
This summertime shark saga is probably the ultimate film portrait of communal fear. Composer John Williams’s throbbing soundtrack of lurking, lumbering, low strings is probably more famous than even Bernard Herrmann’s piercing score to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho.
And yet, when all two hours and ten minutes of Spielberg’s opus is over, is it not true that all we leave with afterward is an irrational fear of swimming in the ocean?
Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest stormed the box office the same storied year as Spielberg’s shark, and also marched on to conquer the Academy Awards, but never fixed itself to our cultural imagination in the same way. I suspect this is because most of us adore movies that give us a big thrill, as opposed to movies that sit in our consciousness like a big question that cannot be answered.
The sight of an unruly mental patient destroyed by a forced lobotomy is no match for the spectacle of swimmers devoured alive by a mindless sea creature. No match at all. Spielberg gave us a nail-biting epic of a monster barely, but eventually, slain. Forman, by way of Ken Kesey’s best-selling 1962 book of the same name, gave us an extended portrait of the happy rebel Randle Patrick McMurphy, played to the hilt by Jack Nicholson, then capped it off with one of the most lachrymose endings in cinema, albeit one laced with faint hope. When I saw the film in a theater as a kid, the Israeli soldier on leave who bought my ticket to this R-rated fare called it “a thinking man’s tear-jerker.” I agreed, even if it would take me years to understand just what Kesey and Forman wanted their reading and viewing audiences to think about.
Reading Kesey’s novel as a teenager was an enchanting experience. Paired with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, it was a book everyone in my high school social circle agreed must be read. Suckers and phonies read J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and left it at that. The ambitious among us graduated to Heller and Kesey. Catch-22 was funnier than Cuckoo’s Nest by at least a mile, but Cuckoo’s Nest had the goods. It had a “Message” with a capital M. That message was to trust no one in assessing your sanity and worth, because all worth is relative and normalcy itself is a myth in a world where individuals must be prized above conformity. That message was also never to give in to “the system,” symbolized—a critic might say painfully so—by the cruel retinue and routine of Nurse Ratched’s psychiatric hospital. Kesey laid the symbolism on thick throughout his novel, an aspect that “sophisticated” readers today find distasteful. Yes, the notion of McMurphy as a Christ-figure during the physical sacrifice of his electroshock therapy is heavy-handed. But is anyone going to deny that physical and mental suffering, as written, are not often a core element of drama?
A crucial difference between the book and the film is that Chief Bromden, a Native American character, narrates the former while McMurphy takes center stage in the movie. It was a difference that nagged Kesey so much that he refused to watch Forman’s movie, but it remains a difference without too much distinction because both the book and movie retain their power to disturb and sadden us. The message I remember from both is one I have carried throughout life: Rebellion against authority may be futile. It may even be juvenile and pointless. But that does not diminish the fact that rebellion, aimed for a targeted punchline, lends us life and spirit we would not otherwise discover. As Chief Bromden puts it, “he [McMurphy] knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.”
Kesey’s book is full of quotes that mix joy and pain, that speak to our power and solace when we remind ourselves that we are never fully known to others. And if we are never fully known, we are never finally conquered. The book and the movie show us how rebellion against indifferent, even cruel, power structures is never definitely suppressed when we find ways to laugh. Joy and laughter hold their mysterious power, even for those powerless.
Watching Forman’s movie again recently, I was struck by how much charm it retains, even if its most famous set pieces now seem hopelessly dated by countless films that have imitated it since. The disruptive spirit of McMurphy is introduced with fanfare. He teaches his charges to stand up for themselves. Everyone bonds. Comic scenes lighten the drab lives of men committed to a mental hospital. Power struggles ensue. And, finally, our hero is cruelly, devastatingly felled.
Was McMurphy a fool to go up against Nurse Ratched? Was Nelson Mandela a fool to spend twenty-seven years in prison? Was Alexei Navalny a fool to taunt the Russian powers girding Vladimir Putin and suffer poisoning, prison, and death?
Millions of us in 1975 walked out of movie theaters with a lighter step after the explosion of a mammoth shark. We still do with every re-watch of Spielberg’s classic film. Wrestling with the many Randle Patrick McMurphys we have met since Forman’s 1975 movie and Kesey’s book is a far taller order.
