One flew over the cuckoo's nest

One flew east, one flew west

One flew over the cuckoo's nest

Above appears the epigram to Ken Kesey's novel from 1962. I first became aware of this book at the end of 1971, when I read Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-aid acid test". My Picador edition of the book was published in 1973, and indeed I remember reading it once on Hampstead Heath one Sunday afternoon in the early part of that year whilst waiting for my then girlfriend to arrive (I have no recollection why I was in London that Sunday afternoon).

The novel might have stayed esoteric had it not been adapted as a film starring Jack Nicholson a few years later. I remember seeing the film three times, which in those days was a privilege afforded to few films. One time I even sneaked a cassette recorder into the Golders Green cinema in order to record the opening music. The film also made a great impression on the Israeli public: 'Cuckoos nest' was written on the wall of more than one building on my first kibbutz. I also bought the book in its Hebrew translation but never managed to get more than a few pages into the text.

Why suddenly all these recollections? Because tomorrow night, our cable tv provider will be showing the film, probably for the first time in thirty years. Every February, in the weeks leading up to the Oscar ceremonies, the provider always screens both classic and new films, and this is a prime opportunity for me to record films that I have always wanted.

I'll probably have more to write about the film after seeing it, but in the mean time, I will quote a little Tom Wolfe: From the point of view of craft, Chief Broom was his [Kesey's] great inspiration. If he had told the story through McMurphy's eyes, he would have had to end up with the big bruiser delivering a lot of homilies about his down-home theory of mental therapy. Instead, he told the story through the Indian. This way he could present a schizophrenic state the way the schizophrenic himself, Chief Broom, feels it and at the same time report the McMurphy method more subtlely.

Of course, the film couldn't tell the story through Chief Broom's eyes: most of the action is focused on McMurphy. As a result, the viewer misses out on Broom's schizophrenic fogs. I remember that the audience in the cinema cheered when Broom spoke his first words, after having played deaf and dumb throughout the story. I wonder how many guessed that the Indian was only pretending about being deaf and dumb.