Monday, February 14, 2011
cuckoo's nest and madness
I have on the course website some "Madness Discussion Ideas," which I hope can spur some blogs from you (particularly those of you who've not yet written one). Ergo, I won't get long-winded here. Suffice it to say that we will be talking very directly about the narration in these texts (whence and how we get the info we get).
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Recalling ones experiences can be difficult. What if the recollections are described by someone who is mentally ill? How could this person’s word ever be reliable? Even though Chief Bromden narrates One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, how can he prove that anything he is saying is the truth?
ReplyDeleteKen Kesey structures his novel by giving the Chief moments of lucidity in order to give the reader a sense of reality. However, in telling the story, his of “foggy” hallucinations and visions of “green seepage” break the evenness. At times, the Chief’s narration is heterodiegetic, in that he reveals emotions and feelings of others that they are not outwardly conveying. However, this could be his madness talking as quite possibly, none of the action taking place is really happening.
The Chief recalls Nurse Ratched as passive-aggressively provoking the patients and weakening them to the point that they question their masculinity and their functionality in the outside world, thus they voluntarily give up their freedom to remain in the mental ward.
Nurse Ratched thrives on that weakness to maintain order, stability, and power. Patient Randle McMurphy has no signs of mental illness, so his clear mind is reminiscent of the Traveler in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, in that he is essentially an outsider with a clear, objective perspective who can see that treatment in the ward is barbaric. He challenges the authority by disrupting it.
Much can be said about Frederick Wiseman’s documentary, Titicut Follies, in that the fly-on the-wall perspective is much like the Chief’s erratic recollection. Wiseman films and edits what he wants the audience to see. In many scenes, the camera is unflinching. Thus, the passive attitudes of the staff allow the “crazies” to become crazier in the eyes of the viewer.
I think its difficult to give an audience true "cinema verite" style. Frederick Wiseman most like shot much more film than what he presents. Then he took whatever film he felt like showing as the 'truth' of an asylum, and presents it as such.
ReplyDeleteNot to say that he's not showing the truth, he just shows us his version of it, or the version of it that he at least wants us to see.
Of course there's even moments of Titicut Follies where, even though Wiseman (or whoever is behind the camera) is not provoking any action, they acknowledge he is there. The fly coming off the wall, in a sense. One such moment being early in the film where a patient is looking directly into the camera, and, in my opinion it felt as though he was looking right at the audience. Interestingly enough, it feels as though the cameraman does not want to continue gazing upon this man as he very soon after pans around the room which he is in.
But why leave that moment is acknowledgment in?
It seems to me the issue with a “truth cinema” is the subjectivity and fluidity of truth itself. Wiseman shows a series of actual events and people, but his arrangement of them creates the biased truth as he sees it. The mere fact that he chooses to show images of this institution at all shows a degree of bias. Werner Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration claims, “Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth,” alluding to the vast discrepancy between the two. Each arrangement and each different person’s opinion of a set of facts can create dramatically different truths. Thus, the entire idea of a “truth cinema” disproves itself from the start because truth itself is subjective.
ReplyDeleteParticularly in Titticut Follies, the time and place of the film brings the images even further than other films from any kind of essential presentation. Although Wiseman acts as a kind of “fly on the wall,” his presence is screamingly different from anything the gentlemen in the movie are accustomed to. Film was still in its earlier stages at the time and it was the first time any camera or filmmaker had entered the facility. The foreignness of the entire situation is emphasized by the frequent stares and unusual reactions given by some patients toward the camera. The staff is obviously “putting on a show” for Wiseman (during both normal hospital footage and musical performances). The fact that nearly everyone in the film reacts in a certain way because of the camera brings Wiseman further from the real. Wiseman attempts to become an invisible part of the walls of the institution, but it becomes clear that he is as foreign to this environment as the viewer is—he is an outside Traveler observing and placing his own judgments on the institution. Reality becomes even more unattainable and it becomes clear that this is a RE-presentation.
Something I found interesting in the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the connection between the routine nature of the Institution, the control implemented by the staff and what this does for the madness of the patients. The Chief has been in the ward a long enough amount of time, seemingly deaf, that he has picked up on information and details of his surroundings giving him an interesting vantage at which to tell the story. He notes details of the ward's inanimate objects (walls, lights, wires, etc.) that seem to rise from never escaping the monotony and control that they place. His "foggy" memory is sometimes unreliable being a patient in a mental institution, but the narrative is built up of moments that the Chief witnessed, believed to be deaf. His insight into other characters seems to be attributable to the routine relationships between the patients and staff.
ReplyDeleteI've been giving some thought to the way in which the novel narrativizes symbol and am, as a consequence, reminded of the Simpsons episode in which Lisa confronts boy-band promoter/naval recruiter L T Smash about the subliminal message she discovers in the Party Posse tune "Drop Da Bomb." Smash declares that this represents but one part of a "three-pronged attack: subliminal, liminal and superliminal." Smash demonstrates super-liminality by leaning out a window and shouting, "Hey, you! Join the Navy!"
ReplyDeleteBecause the book is ostensibly Bromden's first person account, the imbuement of symbol seems to occur liminally through Bromden's associative tendencies, or 'between the lines' through Kesey's 'selection and arrangement of the material.' But in one instance Kesey, so to speak, leans out the window to shout.
I refer, of course, to the 'three-pronged attack' inherent in McMurphy's under shorts. The liminal presence of the black boxers with the white whales, acquired from a "Literary major" has a subliminal function for the attentive reader by promoting associations between One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the inescapably symbolist novel, Moby Dick. But to make sure the point isn't missed, McMurphy "snaps the elastic" and declares that the Literary major "gave them to me because she said I was a symbol."
Despite this outburst of super-liminality, Bromden and the reader are still left to decide exactly what McMurphy symbolizes (note that the symbolic function has transferred from the clothing to the man). For me, this seems to be the operative equivalent of Wiseman's direct cinema aesthetic - the authorial bias is demonstrated in what we are shown but we must extract our own 'truth' from the 'facts' as they are presented.
While reading this novel, I have been trying to imagine if it were written in 3rd person, would it still be able to function in this way? Often, the Chief's descriptions and almost omniscient presence in the story would lead one to believe that you could just as easily tell it in 3rd person. However, there were a few passages I came across that led me to believe that if you were to write this in 3rd person, a lot of the imagery we get would become sterile, much like the hospital itself. In order for the narrative to be captivating and still maintain its charm and intimacy, you would have to tell the story from a first person POV. Otherwise, the reader comes out of it much like they do after Wiseman's film, not feeling close to the story or characters within.
ReplyDeleteThe passage where Bromden is describing Nurse Ratched loading the hypodermic needles could easily be read as a 3rd person omniscient. However, the fact that we know this is a 1st person account of events transpired, places us in a the spacial location the Chief himself was in at the time. This blurring of 1st and 3rd person happens over and over again, allowing us to experience these very intimate moments as the Chief did.
If Titicut Follies is supposed to be direct cinema, then the question is how can One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest be something like direct cinema showing the truth? For one, Cuckoo's Nest is a little bias because it is narrate in the first person, so we only see the world through Bromden's eyes. It presents a problem with finding truth in Cuckoo's Nest. Also a problem with direct cinema is that the filmmaker only shows you what they want you to see and make you believe the truth. So in Titicut Follies there might have been something that Wiseman might have left out. For example, he could have actually filmed the guards treating one of the patients from the film nicely when the guards were preforming for the camera. Finding the truth is something to think about for these two stories.
ReplyDeleteWiseman and subjectivity.
ReplyDeleteThe class discussion Monday ended with the question of whether or not, or the implications if, the film "Titticut Follies" was biased, or rather subjective in any voice or mode. Even Cuckoo's Nest. Both bodies are essentially subjective. But the argument that Wiseman was a mere "fly on the wall" needs some critique. Most all of Wiseman's films document life within an institution, so his films focus on the "institution" and those forced into it. "High School", mandatory by not just state but federal law, and the draft, which was implicated in the Vietnam War, as seen in "Basic Training". We can then say that those institutionalized in "Titticut Follies" were definitely not their by their own will. Wiseman vs. Institutionalism. Not a fly, but a voice. Chief acts the same as Wiseman's camera. Both as if reporting to us.
"Titicut Follies" and "one Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" both raise questions of reliability of their narrator.
ReplyDeleteAs we discussed in class, Wiseman's documentary, as every other documentary, is subject to criticism concerning its objectivity. Even though the material that constructs "Titicut Follies" is real and actual footage, it still has been "creatively treated". It is up to the viewer to evaluate the documentary's "truth", and to decide whether to trust the filmmaker or not.
In the same way, the novel's narrator is by default unreliable. By having one of the patients narrate the novel, Kesey leads the reader to doubt the "truth" of the Chief's descriptions. Most of the novel is written in what seems to be moments of mental clarity for the Chief. Other times, however, the narrator experiences hallucinations, or goes on to describe this dream-like conspiracy of the world being a Combine. So the narrator loses some of his credibility. On the other hand, who would be better at describing how being mentally ill feels, rather than someone who actually suffers from schizophrenia?
Thus, in both the documentary and the novel, the reader/viewer is left to decide the truthfulness of the information conveyed. Mental illness is a very odd and hard subject to discuss, because its a condition that can only be understood if experienced. Wiseman attempts to achieve objectivity by giving an account of a mental institution as experienced by a mere observer. Kesey, attempts to reveal the truth by offering the insider's point of view, by having an actual mental patient describe the ways of life in a mental institution. Two different approaches to objectivity that both allow, and even encourage, the reader/ viewer to evaluate as accurate or not.
As the Chief himself admits:
“you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen."