If you want to pay tribute to Louise Fletcher, who died at her home in southern France on Friday at the age of 88, then perhaps not with three dates and two quotes and the note that she also appeared in the “Star Trek” series “Deep Space Nine” starred. Perhaps it’s better to revisit her most famous role, with which she won the Oscar in 1976 and from which she basically never escaped again: the head nurse Mildred Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.
On a list of the greatest movie villains compiled by the American Film Institute, Sister Ratched ranks fifth – behind Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, Darth Vader and the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. The character is often described as “nasty” and “diabolical”. Didn’t she rule a ward in the closed psychiatric ward where she could terrorize her patients at will, most notably the rebellious RP McMurphy aka Jack Nicholson? If it were that easy, she would never have achieved immortality.
One could even say that Louise Fletcher’s genius lay above all in playing heroically against this banal and inviting reading. The two screenwriters Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman gave her the necessary basis and Miloš Forman directed her in such a masterful performance that he was never to surpass himself again. On the other hand, she had to forget about Ken Kesey and his novel, because the very first scene of the book shows a Nurse Ratched who is practically shaking with hatred. What a dull film that would have been!
The figure of the matron becomes one with the system she represents
You’re always amazed at how friendly Fletcher starts off as Ratched, how sensible everything she says actually is. This woman is neither diabolical nor hateful, she genuinely believes that she is helping the patients on her ward – often with rigor and following fixed rules, but how could it be any different with the severely mentally disturbed? She never sharpens the tone, never loses the aura of professional composure. In this way it becomes one with the system it represents.
Logically, it’s not just about a few crazy people. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is a counterculture tale of America and its modus operandi as an open society in which the powerful invent ever new and more subtle ways to manipulate the game to the detriment of the powerless and unwanted. That’s why, for example, there’s the famous scene where inmates get to vote if they want to watch baseball on TV instead of doing their duties. Why are they allowed to do that? Since when do the inmates in psychiatry decide where to go?
They are allowed to, only to make the fact all the more painful that despite democracy, they cannot win. Nurse Ratched still has a seemingly compelling rule up his sleeve, which is why even the majority finally won doesn’t count. If she sees that as a triumph, it’s buried deep within Fletcher’s performance, behind layers of logic and righteousness.
In this way, this woman becomes the ideal executor of the USA system, a function that makes no mistakes, whose evaluations and justifications would withstand any judicial scrutiny that can never be prosecuted. It is fitting that most of the patients, as it turns out, are there voluntarily. You wouldn’t have to endure Ratched’s regime. But they do.
But the decisive factor is that it is not exempt from all supervision, it does not have the license for total despotic arbitrariness. She knows she must explain and justify each of her steps in a meaningful structure of checks and balances. And yet she manages to torment people. That ends up being more terrifying than Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader combined, and that’s what’s increasingly felt beneath her increasingly frozen smile that embraces McMurphy’s challenge of the system. Actually, it should be number one on the list of the American Film Institute.
Did Louise Fletcher think her character was doing something bad?
And then there’s the moment in the film when a larger group of specialists discuss whether the troublemaker McMurphy shouldn’t be sent back to prison where he came from – some of the doctors agree with the film and the viewers that he mentally completely fine, just recalcitrant. If this opinion prevails, his freedom would be within reach. All eyes now on Ratched, who says that sending McMurphy away is just making others have problems that you don’t want to solve yourself. That’s the deciding factor, he has to stay, indefinitely, maybe forever.
Does Louise Fletcher think her character is doing something bad right now? That she’s already rubbing her hands inwardly because she can keep the adversary in her sphere of influence and can continue to torment him? Her expression is opaque, but one would bet: no. Ratched is already known as a woman who, above all, wants to keep order in her small area, perhaps rightly so. McMurphy only bothers, she could make life easier for herself. Instead, possibly out of a sense of duty, she enters the final escalation.
This is genius. Anne Bancroft, Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, the big names of the time, read and turned down this role before Louise Flechter. They probably felt how much they would become the face of a hateful system. Fletcher obviously didn’t feel it, which just shows once again how beneficial it can sometimes be for actors to limit their own horizons of thought. “I didn’t understand the gruesome dimension of this role until I saw the film with an audience,” she recalled, “and people clapped enthusiastically when Nicholson choked me.”
That’s neither stupid nor naive, it’s the miracle of this film and this performance that Mildred Ratched can also be read as largely cruel. Until the end. And that when McMurphy alias Nicholson finally chokes her and her eyes pop out of their sockets, all the hatred for the system, for America, for oppression and standardization of any kind is in his hands, that one wishes him all the strength, even wants to choke with him .
He will pay for it with a lobotomy, will be reduced to a finally powerless and willless state, and yet in this final moment he can transfer his desire for freedom to at least one fellow inmate, the giant Chief. A small triumph, a tender flame that can burn. While the system wins and Nurse Ratched will continue to rule – now even beyond the lifetime of Louise Fletcher. When you hear the news of her death, you see her face the way it was then, and for once you don’t want to choke her. But eternal gratitude to her and her comrades-in-arms who have truly penetrated the banality of evil in the world. If that doesn’t deserve the deepest bow, then what does?