REVIEWS Ome Flew Owner The Cuckoo's

Scan page 8

The use of psychiatry in the oviet Union to discredit and carcerate critics of the areaucracy is favourite rget for anti-Soviet propaunda in the bourgeois press. But the use of dubious medical iteria to give a cloak of respectility to the subordination of nisfits" in society is probably red on a wider scale in the West. It is the use of psychiatric ethods to break a petty criminal hich is the subject of the muchaised film "One Flew Over the ackoo's Nest" : R.P. McMurphy, played by Jack cholson, is the inmate of a state ison, an easy going con-man with record of fighting ('What's wrong ih that? Rocky Marciano had 40 ghts and ended up a millionaire!") id statutory rape.

He is refered to the state mental ititution on the assumption that ryone who fights must be looney d is incarcerated with inmates hose deviations owe as much to le conditions under which they • held as to any illnesses they ay suffer.

LESS REGIMENTED During his stay at the hospital Murphy undertakes to make the mates lives fand his own) less gimented and more stimulating playing og "mat for money stead matchsticks, ¿Murphy's enrichment). Although ime of these ventures are fartched, they illustrate that when ren the opportunity, the nuts are aer than the hospital will ever ermit them to be.

The reward McMurphy receives • his troubles is "treatment"

the distinction is cluding electro-convulsive therapy Tried out without anaesthesia (a ichnique discredited medically but used in American penal stitutions). : Unbroken, McMurphy continues , spar with hospital authores, passing up several opportunto escape. Finally, after an larious drunken party in the ward ranged by McMurphy, the head urse sadistically drives guilt-ridden rung Billy to suicide, McMurphy tacks and almost strangles the urse, and the authorities wheel in off to the theatre to have part [his brain cut out.

He returns to the ward as a tetable, reduced to the level of e most hopeless inmates. ¡ Although the effects of various ychiatric treatments are caricatred in the film, its underlying eme is all to real.

OBJECTS The treatment of mental tients as objects to be used at the in of their overseers has been alighted in a number of cases of al nursts beating up patients • most recent one involving tne person of a consultant afte ke action by hospital workers * polid be wrong to see these dcuts as the outcome of indiveccentricities. They result a system which only sees the cially Ill as unproductive, as a his on society.

Evea more insidious is the use of tachiatrio techniques. both as ethods of punishment (as can In Germany it was suggested that the reason for Virike Meinhot's terrorist activities lay not in the contradictions of contemporary German society, but in the possibility that she might have a brain tumour.

The barbaric proposal to submit her to brain surgery was only prevented' by a nationwide outcry, While the mental and physical torture she endured continued until it drove her to her death.

"ILLNESS"

The idea persists, however, that those who cannot or will not adapt to society and those who consciously reject it as destructive must be suffering from some form of organic mental illness.

The film attempts to show that it is socicty which creates the misfits andthen punishes them for their weaknesses.

But what has captured the imagination of (especially) the American public is the vision of McMurphy fighting the system, seeing its contradictions and yet unable to break away from ultimately bringing about his own destruction.

The obvious parallel is with the dissidents of the 1960s, who challenged social institutions then but find themselves in 1976 part of that system, lobotomized by the consumer society, "democracy" and the American way of life.

It is at this generation too, that the Hollywood-style cop-out ending is aimed. Having illustrated all-tooconvincingly that "you can't beat the system" , the script-writers attempt to clear away the heavy pessimistic atmosphere.

SUBSTITUTE

They try to direct the audience's feelings away from reality, "back to nature" , human nature, ecology, black, red, yellow and women's liberation - to the whole bag of campaigns in America which substitute for revolutionary politics and attempt to block any development of revolutionary consciousness.

Thus the film's final assertion is that you can't beat the system, but maybe you can individually clean up your own piece of it a little bit, and maybe that will make everything alright.

If such a philosophy justifięs four Oscars. and international acclaim then it is time for a new generation of politically conscious film makers to challenge Hollywood with alternative. Workers Cowley Assembly OUTI