While Ryan Murphy does so love to make his shows centered around icons of pop culture, his latest series, Ratched, the supposed origin story of how Nurse Ratched from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came to be such a sadistic, well, bitch, is more like a free-standing soap opera. One that is in keeping with Murphy’s melodramatic and satirical style, but that, nonetheless, has little bearing on the book or film (released in 1975). In 1962, when the novel was released, the first major discussions about the notion of deinstitutionalization were being had and Kesey’s narrative seemed like as good a push as any in that direction. Having himself worked as an orderly in a mental institution in Menlo Park, California, Kesey based the character of Ratched on the head nurse there. Where the movie version keeps the location in Oregon, it is perhaps because Kesey initially “saw” Ratched in California that the show takes place there. It was instead the film that gave Ratched her first name: Mildred.
When played with Sarah Paulson’s brand of over the topness intermixed with faux attempts at “subtlety,” Louise Fletcher’s portrayal gets completely lost–one dare say bastardized. To try to believe that this is supposed to be the woman we saw in Miloš Forman’s (not to mention screenwriters Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman’s) rendering is, to use understatement, quite a stretch. Apart from the 1940s hairstyle Ratched never saw fit to update (a testament to her being trapped in the past and the methodologies thereof), there is no resemblance, least of all in what is supposed to be a correlative background. On a side note, her horn-like hairstyle was an intentionally mentioned characteristic as a means to evoke the image of devil horns, for Ratched truly was a demonic force representing the corruption of institutional facilities, mental and otherwise. While it is true that Kesey left enough of a blank slate for anyone to come along and fill in the gaps about what might have been Ratched’s own abusive past (for anyone who is as abusive must surely have been abused themselves, n’est-ce pas? It’s the grand circle of psychological life), let us say that Murphy perhaps got too creative. Took a character name and not much else about that character for the purposes of making it his own brand of stylized camp.
This isn’t to say the show isn’t watchable in its own right, particularly for those who enjoy seeing California wielded as a paradisiacal milieu with a sinister underbelly–a contrast that easily deceives those who enter its fold without realizing before it’s too late that the hypnotic effects of amorality have taken hold. Something about the sunshine belies the aphorism, “Everything is permitted.” And that certainly goes double for Ratched, whom we’re introduced to after a group of priests are brutally murdered by Edmund Tolleson (Finn Wittrock, of the American Horror Story fam). Thus, it can only be appropriately poetic that the first line of the pilot episode is, “Lord, have mercy on us.” Incidentally, Ratched likes to think of herself as an “angel of mercy” starting from the time she was “helping” soldiers “overcome” their pain during the war. For yes, Ratched got her start in the Philippines in the midst of WWII. So it can only be helpful that the director of the Lucia State Hospital where she wants to work is himself Filipino. Not that it would matter for her to make that connect, for Ratched can ingratiate herself into any situation through strategic manipulation.
Introduced to us at around the seven-minute mark at a gas station, Ratched is initially some semblance of what you would expect her younger self to be like: judgmental and passive aggressive, with an overt attention to cleanliness (next to godliness, after all) that she seems to think justifies her clipped tone to men like the gas station attendant she tells, “Clearly your tumescence has distracted you, sir. I recall asking for today’s local paper.” Indeed, the motif of “the castrating woman” is very much in place here as it was in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and who better than a gay man to get that cliche across? For their view of women is so often tinged with the perspective of caricature (ergo the very existence of drag queens).
To drive home the point of Ratched’s inherent contempt for men, Murphy renders her a repressed lesbian. Perhaps that’s an assumption that could be made in Murphy taking his liberties with the character, yet it also somehow feels like a cheap way to make a point about her nature. Because Murphy also seems to have tunnel vision of late with regard to California in the 40s (see: Hollywood)–and the exploration of what taboo relationships might have been like if people were less afraid to parade them–it’s as though he wants to insert this element in for his own jollies rather than for the purposes of exploring an authentic character. It also pushes the plotline forward in the soap operatic method he seeks in terms of Ratched cultivating a relationship with Governor Wilburn’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) campaign manager and press secretary, Gwendolyn Briggs (Cynthia Nixon). Naturally, she’s doing it for her own specific ends, but it turns out the means are rather pleasing to her despite her best efforts to suppress any real feelings she might have for Gwendolyn.
It doesn’t help matters that there are various women conspiring against her “success,” including the head nurse at Lucia, Betsy Bucket (Judy Davis, somehow looking better than ever) and the woman who runs the roadside motel Ratched is staying at, Louise (Amanda Plummer). And let’s not forget the involvement of eccentric rich woman Lenore Osgood (Sharon Stone), who also thrusts herself into Ratched’s life when the “good” nurse informs her she can serve as a conduit to her purpose of eliminating Dr. Hanover (Jon Jon Briones), the head of the hospital who eventually becomes fatally consumed with treating a multiple personality disorder case named Charlotte Wells (Sophie Okonedo, arguably giving the best performance of the show).
In this regard, there are flashes of Ratched trying to say something meaningful about the mental health care industry and its more barbaric days of operation, particularly in the earlier episodes wielding the lobotomy and hydrotherapy methods as viable “advances” in treatment. Mentioning Dr. Hanover’s previous use of LSD with patients, however, seems a little too avant-garde, for it wasn’t really until the late 50s and early 60s that it started to be “a thing” in terms of “mind control” (per the CIA’s view of it). But Murphy, again, is a big believer in making his audiences engage in the age-old practice of suspending disbelief. What’s more, he also appears to be banking on the fact that few people of the Murphy-viewing faction have read or seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Which is why it seems worth noting that the present generation has so little familiarity with her character anyway, considering the warning “not to be confused with ratchet” on Wikipedia–would anyone aware of Cuckoo really be capable of confusing it with that?
Whatever Murphy and his go-to writers for the show, including Jennifer Salt, Evan Romansky and Ian Brennan, have in mind for the inevitable second season, it’s best to approach the entire thing as a loose interpretation of some version of Ratched plucked from a Spanish telenovela rather than an actual “origin story” of legitimate cachet. In fact, one wonders what Ken Kesey would think of this so-called “interpretation.” Then again, he was a pretty open dude. And so then, should you be when watching this series, at least in terms of regarding it as its own separate narrative from the real Nurse Ratched’s.
