This piece was written during the summer of 2011.
In the 11th hour of the so-called "debt ceiling crisis," I settled onto the lawn of the National Mall for a screening of Miloš Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), a film which I've seen many times but never in such a thought-provoking setting.
Every summer in D.C. an enormous screen is erected on the Mall, and crowds gather with picnic baskets and blankets on the west side to take in old classics. The architecture of the screening provides the spectator with an imposing image behind the screen -- the Capitol building looms in the background -- lest we forget who's running the show.
The film itself and the conditions of my viewing it mirror one another in their display of how power shapes its subjects through consent, and buy-in, rather than coercion.
Forman's film, based on the novel by Ken Kesey, stars Jack Nicholson as the charismatic rogue whom we meet upon his arrival to an insane asylum. We learn that he had been in prison but that he convinced the prison warden to transfer him to a mental institution, perhaps to get out of his work detail. He passes an entrance interview and is admitted to the asylum, where he meets the residents of the ward, half of whom are vegetative and the other half more-or-less functional.
The inmates of the asylum hearken back to Michel Foucault's observations in Madness and Civilization (1964), in which the author traces a history of how civilizations have isolated their undesirables. Madness, Foucault would say, became codified only in the 18th century, when formal institutions were established to control those deemed mad by society. Here they are subjected to a hierarchy of power, between the warden, nurses, and security, who restrain the inmates and reinforce their otherness.
As the film develops we learn that all of the non-comatose inmates of the asylum are self-committed. These men exhibit the self-repression common in modern societies, which use a combination of coercion and consent to wield power over their populace. Drawing on Foucault again, it is knowledge that exercises power over the inmates. They have incarcerated themselves, voluntarily. Society has ostracized these men and their behavior, causing them to self-imprison, self-diagnose, and inculcate their inferiority. In Antonio Gramsci's world, these men would experience the soft power of education, culture, and civil society by indoctrinating the ideals and keeping themselves in check, although within society. Forman's inmates, however, have so consumed the messages of power in their society that they have decided they cannot follow such rules, they cannot be trusted to obey Order, or Law. Thus, they take it into their own hands and have themselves put away.
Discipline functions through coercion and consent. Formal and legal frameworks prevent many of us from shooting one another, because we fear the consequences of our actions (some would argue morality prevents us as well, but I won't get into that). However education, religion, and the media exercise power over us differently, sowing seemingly innocuous seeds that take root as thoughts and one day sprout into beliefs and actions. These cultural and discursive expressions of power, I would argue, are preventive and placatory. They are the types of power that seek to keep our desires in check, that induce us to support the status quo, that prevent us from imbibing in the Weird.
The asylum is such an interesting place because it reenacts political society on a microcosmic scale. There is the despot, Nurse Ratched; her henchmen, the other nurses and security; and the subjects, the inmates of the ward. Within the asylum the inmates attempt to establish their own rudimentary democracy when Nicholson tries to get the World Series on the ward's television. Nurse Ratched, who initially approves of the democratic polling of the other inmates, breaks the social compact by disrespecting the late vote of Chief. She administers Law here, and no matter how arbitrary, her rule is absolute.
The under-educated lack self-policing skills, lack the opportunity to buy in through consent, and end up facing the consequences of coercion in prison and execution.
In many ways, then, we can view Cuckoo as an allegory. Many of the men are self-educated to the point of regulating their own actions. Thus they confine themselves in the film to the asylum. Foucault would also say that the asylum-industrial complex now holds sway.
The other men of the ward -- the 8 "crazies" who stare ou the window, glide around the ward dancing, or mutter to themselves the day long. These inmates are those stashed away for public good, not personal desire. The line between the will to incarcerate oneself, to limit the varieties of experience in submission to Order, to the mechanisms of Power, that is the dilemma of live, at least so far as I have lived it. That is why I am sitting here, in the corridor of might, taking in an old movie in the summer night.
Pedro Noguera, Paolo Friere, A.G., M.F. - education, il popolo, incarceration, consent, POWER.
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