Oscar Actors: Fletcher, Louise in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

In most American movies, career women are ridiculed and condemned as grotesque, “unfeeling monsters.”

This dehumanization is illustrated by Louise Fletcher's Oscar role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as Big Nurse Ratched, a tyrannical nurse in charge of a mental ward. A severe, humorless woman, Nurse Ratched represents an oppressive establishment whose major goal is to tame patients–all of whom are men–using various methods of controls, including electroshock treatment and lobotomy. Endowed with a bureaucratic personality, Nurse Ratched is rigid, adhering strictly and blindly to the rules.

Nurse Ratched is sympathetic to her patients only when it promotes her interests and her authority; she drives one of her young patients (Oscarnominated Brad Dourif), a motherfixated kid, into suicide by consciously playing on his guilt complex. The Nurse's character is not written or played on the same realistic level as her male patients. She is an abstract symbol of sexual inhibition and repressive authority.