Social Control In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

In the film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, there are four characteristics of a controlled environment. These include; status hierarchy, depersonalization, adjustment, and institution. Viewers can see these ideas through different scenes and situations in the movie. The overall movie stems from institutionalization, because it is set in a psychiatric hospital, which keeps the patients there confined to a strict environment and schedule. Doctors and nurses look at small traits or changes as something significant, whereas in the real world that small trait would appear as a norm and be overlooked.

There are many levels authority in the hospital, which models status hierarchy. Doctors and nurses are ultimately the ones that all the patients

This is because they do not know how to survive out in the realms of a normal environment, they need that control and dictatorship of someone over their lives. Also, when Nurse Ratched places Billy in a room alone he kills himself. He was placed alone for minutes and could not handle it, he became institutionalized and could not survive on his own. Many of the men in the facility need to be told what to do and how to live. They have become so accustomed to orders that when they leave, they cannot survive because they have become so adapted to their controlled lives in the hospital.

Overall, social control contributes many roles in the film. Each character displays at least one characteristic or trait of social control. They eventually all become institutionalized and undergo some major personal changes, whether good or bad. The hospital keeps a very set day for all of them, and throughout the building there is status hierarchy. They must all adjust to their lives there, and for some they cannot survive outside of that environment. Many of them lose themselves and become depersonalized and institutionalized, not being able to ever live a normal life outside of that type of