Movie: One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest - Admission/Application Essay Example

The main character he played in “One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest” was as Randle P. McMurphy, who somehow got entangled in a mental hospital when he was sent there for an evaluation. This film won all five major Academy Awards (best film, best actor, best actress, best director and best screenplay), quite an unprecedented feat, considering the last film to win all five major awards was back in 1934, “It Happened One Night” but beyond the good script and even better acting from its actors, the film raised a number of ethical and moral questions.

The movie audiences who saw this film came away questioning their own moral judgments in the way the medical profession is treating its most vulnerable patients, the mentally ill. It was this kind of subject matter that was usually not discussed openly before the film was shown, but it managed to bring it out to the open and let people became aware of the abuses committed by a medical profession gone awry. My definition of mental ailment is a condition where a person does not conform to socially-accepted conventions, beliefs and actuations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the darker sides of the mental health profession and its defects. Discussion Mr. McMurphy was in the mental institution supposedly for a mental evaluation of his fitness to be working in a prison chain gang. He had faked his mental illness to avoid the hard physical labor in the camp. However, his intentions were misplaced since he was not to be released back to the prison unless there is authorization from the hospital authorities. This is a major development for him, because he could not just as easily revert back to his former status as chain gang prisoner anymore, even if he wants to.

In other words, he is stuck in the mental institution as one of its forced or involuntary patients, unlike some other patients who could decide anytime to go back to the outside world, being committed on a voluntary basis at the mental hospital. His rebellious attitude made him a marked man although it can be said that he was a spirited person who does not want to conform to the rules, but this is hardly a crime. People want to be independent and Mr. McMurphy more so, he deliberately disobeyed the rules just perhaps to spite the hospital administration, especially the chief nurse.

Ever since he arrived at the hospital, he broke some rules to impose his own will on the others and on himself, to the detriment of overall discipline. The other patients followed his antics and so the authorities had a harder time maintaining order at the institution. What Mr. McMurphy did not particularly like at all was that patients were treated as morons but a good majority of the patients were intelligent enough to discern what was going on. Constant questioning of the hospital rules got him into trouble although being a maverick can hardly be considered a crime in itself.

To put it more bluntly, he was a non-conformist and deemed to be a dangerous man. McMurphy resented the way the chief nurse treated all the other patients, in which they are humiliated and oppressed by a series of senseless rules just for the sake of the hospital administration having a semblance of order and discipline. In end, McMurphy