As someone who was familiar with Ken Kesey’s work and legacy, I was fairly surprised when I finally watched the 1976 Oscar winning film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s. Even having read the novel first and then viewing the filmed adaptation, the stark contrast of emotions, style, and cultural and sociopolitical meaning is incredibly jarring. It is common for stories to be dumbed down for the sake of potential Hollywood success. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is certainly no exception to this trend.

The novelwas such an interesting story to read because of The Chief’s narration and perspective. The revolutionary form in which Kesey wrote Cuckoo’s Nest is what made the book such a success when it came out in 1962, up through the film’s release in 1975 and continues to be an American classic. The story had to be stripped of many of the artistic and literary elements, in Hollywood fashion for the wider audience in order to make money. Without these changes the movie would not have been as successful because it made it more "universal"--meaning that those changes made the movie more white. From a cinematic and cultural stand point, the film would have been not only more interesting but also more meaningful and impactful if they had tried to capture some of these nonlinear parts.

Kesey’s nonlinear portions of the book, during Chief’s inner monologues had the jarring effect of surrealism.

"Whatever it was went haywire in the mechanism, they’ve just about got it fixed again. The clean, calculated arcade movement is coming back: six-thirty out of bed, seven into the mess hall, eight the puzzles come out for the Chronics and the cards for the Acutes…in the Nurse’s Station I can see the white hands of the Big Nurse Float over the controls." (Kesey, 155).

This book would not necessarily be critically considered surrealism but with the rise of Kesey’s drug use, it is very possible that those sections of the book were written with some surrealist intent.

Having read the book without seeing the film, a viewer would be interested to see how these nonlinear elements of the book were going to translate onto screen. They would also be disappointed that these elements of the book were pretty much completely omitted from the film. Of course this huge change in the adaptation was dependent on another huge thematic element that was also disregarded in the film. Changing the protagonist from The Chief to McMurphy for the screen transformed the story to an almost unrecognizable point.

The book had many social messages and themes in it that the movie totally lacked. The other dependent on these transformations from book to film is the almost total erasure of The Chief’s background story about his tribe and his father and the government. This storyline showed how victims of systematic oppression are affected, through the Native American lens, specifically, The Chief. Similar to the total erasure of Native and Indigenous People in American History.

America has a tradition of stealing Indigenous Peoples land, capturing whole races and enslaving them, pillaging, raping and killing anyone different than the Western European White status quo. Another part of this American tradition is to then completely hide all of those horrid moments from our own history. The American history that is taught in our education systems are falsifying and glorifying these aggressive, murderous, racist, sexist and heartless governmental acts.

In this country we teach in textbooks and institutions that America was discovered by Christopher Columbus. All though most adults know the truth is that Columbus showed up here and manipulatively befriended the Native People before having troops capture, enslave and kill the Native people. Some people fortunately find themselves in a classroom with a teacher or professor that wants to make sure that people have correct knowledge and understanding of how this country was really “founded.” For the rest of the country, you are taught about Thanksgiving and a loving friendship between pilgrims and Native Americans and sometime in high school, college or somewhere down the line will be corrected by someone and learn the truth.

The main source of documentation of the “early Indies” besides Columbus’ own writing, is Bartolome de las Casas, who was a young priest who assisted in the expedition of Cuba. He is quoted in Howard Zinn’s popular 1980 non-fiction book A People’s History of the United States, speaking of the treatment that the Native People received from Columbus and the rest of the Spaniards, he wrote:

"Endless testimonies...prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives.... But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then.... The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians...."

Howard Zinn, the American historian and political scientist said it best when he named the website for his book "History Is A Weapon." What are we really teaching our youth, and in that way the future leaders? These history lessons are lies made by the Powers That Be—generations of white heterosexual cis-male suppressors. They have used history as a weapon to systematically create this world of hatred, out of fear of the unknown. It is a weapon that has marginalized so many cultures and races.

Kesey, as the author purposefully chose Chief Bromden to be the protagonist of the novel—although some do argue a case for McMurphy. The reason Kesey chose to follow the narration of the Chief was for the purpose of teaching the age old American legacy of destroying sacred Native land or taking it for our own. Similar to Columbus and his Spaniard army, the local government in Oregon, stole Chief’s family’s land and left them to shit and god knows what else. This systematic oppression is what lands Chief in the Ward for some ten odd years. In a blog post titled “Indian Consciousness in Ken Kesey’s ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’” the author states the following,

"In Bromden’s personal growth—from impotent mental patient to self-possessed escapee, from a prisoner in the ward to the nomad in the wilderness—Kesey seems to suggest that a return to the natural state of the Indian is a means of escape from the alienation of modern industrial culture. But the answer is not so clear. Bromden never fully reconciles his fractured sense of self, and Kesey leaves the Chief’s narrative inconclusive, implying that, though the struggle to return to the natural state is noble, such a return is impossible."

That is to say, this is going to keep being a perpetual cycle of systematic oppression if we do not put a stop to it.

Education is one of the answers to this issue. Knowledge is the cure to ignorance. Not only do we need to drastically change what is being taught at our institutions, but also the information being given to the public through mainstream media and entertainment. While many novels and films can be made for pure entertainment, more than often the movie or book that one reads have a larger, more important sociopolitical statement that the piece is trying to make—masked in entertainment. Gaining knowledge is actually fun, so why not create art, no matter the meaning, with a relevant lesson of life, the world, whatever it may be.

This is where the filmed adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest failed. Ken Kesey wrote this novel as a reflection of his time Kesey wrote this novel as a reflection of his time working at a mental ward, where he was inspired by individuals who served as character models for the novel. Kesey also wrote Cuckoo’s Nest to shed light on what is really happening behind the walls of Wards like the one he was familiar with, and the fictional ward in the novel. Kesey was at the center of the psychedelic movement, with his Merry Pranksters following close behind. Upon Kesey’s death in 2001, a New York Time’s article quoted the author from an interview during his famous 1960s psychedelic bus tour “Further.”

'''The sense of communication in this country has damn near atrophied,' Mr. Kesey told an interviewer from Publishers Weekly after the bus arrived in New York City. 'But we found as we went along it got easier to make contact with people. If people could just understand it is possible to be different without being a threat.'"

They were on a journey to elusively find and tell the ugly and beautiful truths of the world.

As the protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s creative non-fiction editorial novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid, much of Kesey and the Prankster’s journey, speeches, and mission is documented. Reading Cuckoo’s Nest and Electric-Koolaid could even be advertised as a supplemental pair. The latter giving the editorial report and the other giving you a fictionalized version of experimental drugs as treatment for ill and mentally ill patients and the effects on those patients. The two novels give a well-rounded frame-work to each other.

Similar to the filmed adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, which took out about 90% of the trial that was in the novel. Both novels made an important stance and statement on societal intolerance but each respective filmed adaptations totally lacked that sociopolitical substance. Not to mention any viewers who had not read the novel, must have had a very different interpretation of the ending of the film.