The Mortality of Identity (or, How to Lose Yourself in Ten Days)

Although “ten” may be an unfair estimation, in this instance. A quick note: this post discusses significant plot points in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975).

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Milos Forman's film adaptation of the Ken Kesey novel of the same name, is largely a movie about human identity. The text I found most pertinent to the film was John Locke's essay, Of Identity and Diversity. In it, he outlines some basic qualifications for identity retention over an extended period of time, breaking everything down into three categories: substance, organism, and person. For a substance, its identity consists only of matter, or the specific arrangement of atoms and elements. For living organisms, whose chemical composition changes over time, identity lies in the life of that system; if it stops living, its identity is changed, and it is reduced to a substance. Man is the term Locke uses for the part of human beings comparable to an organism – a highly relevant concept to keep in mind for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The final category, person, is most central to Locke's philosophical exploration. When regarding the human as a rational, thinking thing (like Descartes, among others), identity rests entirely in consciousness, and the continuous link of memory. I am the same as my childhood self because my consciousness, and the memories tied to it, are also the same. Thomas Reid rightly points out significant weaknesses in Locke's logic here, for anyone who is interested.

Before discussing the ways in which the film engages with the destruction – or for you ruthless optimists out there, the transformation – of identity, I'd like to briefly examine the human mind's ability to manipulate its perception of reality. In Cuckoo's Nest, Randall Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) is plucked from prison, suspected of some kind of mental derangement (see: five arrests for assault and one incident of statutory rape). As he begins to settle into the hospital, he encourages impossible actions, namely tearing a heavy sink from the floor, throwing it through a window, and heading for Canada. It's awfully reminiscent of Steinbeck's American Dream. Nonetheless, such ambitious fantasizing certainly aligns with Descartes's Second Meditation. If all you can know for certain is your thoughts, or your existence based upon the fact that those thoughts exist, then the world around you is in constant flux; thus, it is open for manipulation. A mental institution seems to be the perfect setting for an overhaul of your perception of the surrounding “reality.”

Though I strongly believe McMurphy's narrative depicts a triumph of the human consciousness (more on that later), it also reveals the mortality of identity. Throughout the film, both the material and the spiritual substance of the mind – terminology courtesy of Hume – are poked and prodded. For material poking, electroshock therapy is used, bringing about bodily revulsions. For spiritual prodding, group therapy is employed. Chief Bromden (Will Sampson), when reflecting on a past patient, says the hospital staff “worked on him” until he was so drastically altered that he was no longer himself. To borrow Locke's terms, the person was new, but the man was the same. The same fate was reserved for McMurphy, whose frontal lobotomy completely changed his personal identity. His body – that is, he as a man and an organism – remained the same. This makes the closing scene, when Chief discovers the horror that the surgeons have committed, especially tragic, as he is confronted with the shell of a friend who is no longer conscious of his past. 

There is no doubt that the personal identity McMurphy once had is now gone, but was it replaced with a new one? Locke (like Descartes and other philosophers before him) defines a person as a “thinking thing,” but could the same be said for post-lobotomy McMurphy? It seems he is lower on the intellectual totem pole than the wondrous parrot that Locke mentions, so has he been officially demoted from Person to Man? Given that supposition, what do we make of Chief smothering him to death? Could it be termed murder? If McMurphy is a mere organism without the capacity to think, is killing him no different than uprooting a plant or putting a wounded animal out of its misery? Perhaps it requires a different set of terms, but perhaps not. It seems, at the close of the film, that nothing of McMurphy’s identity remains. Chief killing him is no more than separating the material substance from the Life that it has clung to through all its years of existence.

Of course, Milos Forman does not roll the credits immediately after the image of McMurphy’s lifeless corpse. Cuckoo's Nest continues on for a few moments more, allowing the hospital patients’ former delusions to win out in the end. The sink is torn out, the window is shattered, and Chief heads off into the sunrise, presumably toward Canada to live off "the fatta the lan." McMurphy’s unrealistic imaginings become a reality, and the allegedly impossible tasks are completed. If it were not for the human consciousness of the characters that began entertaining such fantasies, such an ending could not be won.