'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' Relation to Foucault's Argument

The movie, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, is a film that relates to Foucault’s analysis of discipline and punishment. Foucault’s argument is that power works in a disciplinary way in current society. The movie can relate to this because the institution that the movie took place in was ran using Foucault’s disciplinary technique. There are many scenes from the film that give an analysis of Foucault’s argument. Foucault believes that people have the power to punish the docile bodies that they produce.

Foucault argues in “The Carceral” that, “The least act of disobedience is punished and the best way of avoiding serious offences is to punish the most minor offences very severely…” (Foucault 1977: 294). In the movie, they used this technique. The Nurses and other people of authority in the film express this technique is because when the patients would act in a wrongful manner they would forcefully grab them and isolate them from the rest of the patients. Throughout that process there may have been some smacking. Also, in the scene where Cheswick continuously yelled about his cigarettes, it lead to himself, The Chief, and McMurphy to receive the electric shock therapy.

The electric shock therapy is a little harsh. The patients, besides McMurphy of course, didn’t think that the punishments were abusive in any way. Since they punished severely for such minor offences, they made the punishments normalized. Foucault would say that the patients are “docile bodies”. They were made docile by people who were “technicians of behavior”, “engineers of conduct”, and “orthopaedists of individuality”. These people were the nurses, doctors, and supervisors. In “The Carceral”, Foucault describes these people to have the task to, “…p...

... middle of paper ...

...eded to be punished so they could remain docile. The film gave many scenes that helped to understand Foucault’s arguments that were expressed in Seidman’s reading and in Foucault’s reading, “The Carceral”. Foucault’s argument that power works in a disciplinary way in current society was greatly analyzed in this film because it used a psychiatric ward that had nurses, and other people of authority, who had the power to punish. Having the power to punish and having produced docile bodies are techniques that Foucault would describe as using the, “disciplinary technique”, that is talked about in his, “The Carceral”, chapter of the book, “Discipline and Punish”.

References

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Random House Inc. New York, NY

Seidman, S. (2012). Contested Knowledge Social Theory Today (5th ed.). New York: Wiley.