By Bob Katz

What happens when the rebel archetype outlives its ideals—and finds new, troubling champions.

Jack Nicholson in a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Photo: United Artists

Until recently, I’d not watched the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which, in addition to winning Oscars for best picture, director, and actors (male and female), was widely praised for capturing the anti-establishment zeitgeist of the tumultuous Vietnam–Woodstock–Watergate era.

Why had I bypassed the film? Probably because, having read the Ken Kesey novel on which it’s based, I figured I already knew its essential elements.

I knew the story was set in the insular world of a gloomy state mental hospital.

I knew the patients were docile, downtrodden shadows of the independent men they once were.

I knew the hospital was run by the domineering Nurse Ratched, a rigid, humorless control freak.

I knew that upon the arrival of the hospital’s newest patient, a cunning, free-spirited brawler named Randle McMurphy, the drama would build to a harrowing showdown.

What I could not have foreseen, and am still having trouble grasping, is how the very themes that won Cuckoo’s Nest near-mythical status as an essential expression of 1960s anti-authoritarianism—trumpeting individualism over bureaucracy, liberation over subjugation, innovation over regimentation—could be hijacked so successfully by the pro-authoritarian MAGA right that, by 2026, the script would get completely flipped.

It was as if blustery McMurphy had passed the torch, while no one was looking, to his rightful heir, Herr Trump.

And Nurse Ratched? Check your program notes. That role is now being performed by the EPA, FDA, FTC, CDC, OSHA, and more.

How’d it happen? How did the counterculture’s noisy rejection of The Establishment get repurposed as deregulation for dummies? How did Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out give way to Drill Baby Drill?

Revisiting Cuckoo’s Nest may shed some light.

Ever since its original release, Cuckoo’s Nest has been enthusiastically touted as a trenchant parable of its era. “It’s a film about rebellion,” gushed Empire Magazine in reviewing the 50th anniversary remastered version, “made amid one of the most rebellious periods in Hollywood history.”

“McMurphy succeeds,” proclaimed critic Roger Ebert in a 2003 review on his website RogerEbert.com, “. . . because he represents that cleansing spirit that comes along now and again to renew us.”

And the movie’s significance as a worthy metaphor was not limited to American perspectives. “The film’s anti-establishment meaning transcended geographies,” wrote Luiza Świerzawska in The Independent, with reference to the movie’s impact on audiences in Poland during the Soviet occupation. “What ensues is a brilliant take on oppressive systems and their reliance on fear as a tool to keep everyone in check.”

Well, that was then.

If the movie is indeed a parable, then I’m afraid the way our radically altered political landscape has reassigned the roles of hero and villain may also be a parable—a troubling one at that.

McMurphy’s no Joe Hill. Or Che Guevara. Or Norma Rae. He’s a charismatic rascal with a talent for disruption and the audacity to give it a shot. Building a better society? Not his thing.

McMurphy does attempt to foment an insurrection and, yes, his objective is to free the miserably oppressed inmates from Ratched’s iron grip. Right on, as far as that goes.

Yet the hospital privileges that McMurphy strenuously rallies fellow patients to demand—fewer rules, permission to gamble for hard cash, access to women and liquor—are precisely the privileges he seeks for himself.

Impudent rogue stumbling upon a cause that serves his private agenda, then channeling his considerable energies into becoming leader of that cause.

Sound familiar?

Viewing the film in the context of the Trump era, what leaps out is how the core character traits of that cinematic icon of stubborn defiance, Rebel Without a Cause, can be outfitted so easily to appear high-minded, inspiring, noble, even heroic.

One rebel yell is as good as another, it seems, so long as production values are state-of-the-art, so long as the riled-up dude with the steely squint looks the part. Fun-loving bad boys shucking off the chains imposed by a repressive society threatened by their rapscallion ways is a good old story for a good old reason: audiences aren’t confused about who to root for.

Neither, sadly, are voters.

The devious genius of the political right has been to preserve the box office glamour of the brash rebel hero—the swagger, the stare, the hair—while redirecting outrage best aimed at unscrupulous enemies of the people (repressive autocrats like Ratched) onto legitimate defenders of the public interest (government regulatory agencies).

Quite the trick, you have to admit.

But viewer beware!

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the movie (available on digital platforms), should now come with a red-flag warning label: Trump-era atrocities may spoil your ability to find amusement in an organized assault on governance and the rule of law.

Enjoyment of that storyline was a luxury of an earlier age.

Bob Katz is the author of the novels Waiting for Al Gore and Third and Long, winner of the 2011 Independent Book Publishers Association fiction award, and the nonfiction titles Elaine’s Circle and The Whistleblower. BobKatz.info