One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is about Randle McMurphy, a criminal convicted of statutory rape of a fifteen-year-old girl who is sent to a mental institution for evaluation instead of serving his sentence at a prison farm. Through out the movie McMurphy fights against his ward supervisor Nurse Ratchet and seeks to free his fellow ward patients from Nurse Ratchet’s grip. While the other patients able to leave the institution whenever they wish, they have become submissive to Nurse Ratchet from a series of humiliating group therapy exercises, medical treatments that do more harm than good, and strict and dull daily routines, causing them to live in fear of Nurse Ratchet rather than bettering themselves so that they can return to society. McMurphy takes himself up as the leader of the ward patients and shows them that they are people and not insane and to resist Nurse Ratchet. The ward can be seen as a micro society, with norms, cultures, groups, and common sociological interactions that exist in societies.
One of the most important elements of the ward are the norms that exist in the ward. Norms are broken down into three different types: folkways, mores, and laws. These take the form of various rules that differ in severity. Folkways, or put simply etiquette, can be seen in from patients being reprimanded by guards or Nurse Ratchet such as when patients shout with excitement from Murphy’s imitation of an announcer of the world series ball game. Mores, or serious norms, are generally seen broken as McMurphy begins to befriend his fellow patients such as Cheswick’s outburst over Nurse Ratchet rationing the ward’s cigarettes. The laws are represented by the general rules and good behavior the patients must follow, lest they face punishments such as McMurphy, the Chief, and Cheswick’s ECT after fighting with the orderlies.
Within the structure of the ward we see conflict between the Cultural Goals and the Institutional Norms of the ward. Cultural goals are simply...