Case Studies of Film Adaptation
text: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey, 1962)
Analyzing the translation of Kesey's novel effectively illustrates the difficulties of adapting a work written in a first person point of view.
Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is narrated from the perspective of a six-foot-eight mentally ill American Indian named Chief Bromden. It is ironic that Chief provides the tells the story, since he is mute for most of the events he is describing. His experiences have driven him to feign deafness, to cut off communication with the world. Because Chief Bromden guides the novel, his symbol laden hallucinations are prominent. One powerful recurring image is the Combine, a bureaucratic mechanism under whose auspices Big Nurse squelches the patients' vitality and individuality.
Unlike Hitchcock's decision in Rear Window to undertake the challenge of portraying Jeffries' first person perspective, Forman eliminates Chief Bromden's hallucinatory perspective in the film. The nature of the medium necessitates this change, since the camera cannot express his altered vision in the figurative discourse that Kesey uses.
Forman completely elminates the Combine and most of Chief's other hallucinations, replacing them with a more objective perspective of the camera recording action on the ward. Instead of burdening the audience with maintaining sympathy for the truly sick patients on the ward, the film emphasizes McMurphy. Forman eases viewers into the trauma of life on a mental ward by allying them with McMurphy; the audience learns as he learns, oftentimes beholding images of his facial expressions and reactions to the other characters.
The camera does not express a direct connection with McMurphy's perspective in the same way that Hitchcock does with Jeffries in Rear Window, but there is an implied relationship between the way he experiences the action and the audience's viewpoint. As McMurphy's role thrives, however, the complexity of Chief's chracter suffers in the film. Since Chief rarely speaks, he communicates only through his presence.
SECONDARY SOURCES:
Internet
Movie Database Site
Barry H. Leeds, "One Flew, Two Followed:
Stage and Screen Adaptations of Cuckoo's Nest," Take Two: Adapting
the Contemporary American Novel to Film, ed. Barbara Tepa Lupack (Bowling Green, OH:
BGSU Popular Press, 1994) 36-50.
Leeds' article provides apt analysis of the changes made in
the film and offers the additional benefit of criticizing a stage adaptation of the novel
alongside the film version. Immediate references to the different challenges
involved in translating a novel to film and translating a novel to the stage contributes
to the discussion of adapting drama.
Part of Northern Virginia Community College's Dogwood Project.
This page is copyright © 2000, Bridget Robin Pool.
Last Modified Monday, January 29, 2001