Nurse Ratched

"The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine."

- Nurse Ratched

Nurse Mildred Ratched is the primary antagonist of the book and movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. She is the head nurse at the mental institution that she works. She is often considered one as of the greatest female villains in movie history, rivalling others popular characters such as Wicked Witch of the West, Alex Forrest, Phyllis Dietrichson and Mrs Danvers. She was named the fifth greatest villain in movie history by The American Film Institute.

Ratched is often considered among the most hated characters in movie history.

Role in the Story
In the book and movie, Nurse Mildred Ratched rules her ward with a supposedly caring iron fist. She wields supreme power over administration over medication, meaning how much they get and when, but she also controls food, toiletries, and water, and if anyone displeases her, she can and will revoke these rights. She often orders the more sane patients with mental disorders go to 'therapy' sessions with her every day. There they sit around in a circle and answer any question she asks them, usually ones that are incredibly uncomfortable for them. This ploy allows her to humiliate them into staying in order and not fighting back. One particular patient, the poor, stuttering, and suicidal Billy Bibbit, has been terrified into submission, making him her virtual, unwilling, slave.

However, her totalitarian rule over the ward began to slip with the arrival of not-so nuts patient, Randle McMurphy. He undermines her ridiculous rules and insists that the other patients on the ward to start acting the way they want to and stop bowing down to her. She naturally does everything she can to stop him, starting with threats and minor punishments, then leading to electro-shock therapy. None of these, however, are good enough to stop him, really only fueling his rebellious attitude.

Then, one night, McMurphy pulls the biggest blow against Ratched as he can muster. He lets the other ward people out of their rooms and gives them their cigarettes and alcohol back. Then he sneaks in two prostitute girlfriends of his and asks one of them to sleep with Billy. The next morning, when Ratched arrives, she finds her normally neat and orderly ward a mess, patients asleep on the ground, glasses of alcohol of all varieties strewn about on the floor. She orders her guards to clean up and get the patients to their rooms when another nurse discovers Billy and the woman asleep in a bed.

When confronted by the appalled Nurse Ratched, Billy not only acts defiant, but he no longer stutters, apparently free at last from her psychological grip. However, this changes back when Nurse Ratched threatens to tell Billy's mother -- whom he is more afraid of than he is of Ratched -- if he doesn't get back in line. Billy rapidly reverts to his meek, stuttering former self as a horrified and disgusted Randle looks on; shortly after, when left alone with one of the nurses, Billy kills himself. Panicking, Nurse Ratched tries to corral her patients back into their routines and attempts to distance herself from the suicide; Randle, in a fit of rage, assaults and begins strangling her, but he is beaten into submission by her guards.

Nurse Ratched is last seen wearing a neck brace and virtually unable to speak -- with her voice gone, so is her tyrannical control of the inmates, whom she now seems to serve rather than command. Unfortunately, by this time, Ratched has given Randle a frontal lobotomy, so as to keep him from acting up ever again (Randle was smothered by a fellow inmate soon after as a mercy killing).

Personality
She is a cruel, sadistic, passive-aggressive tyrant in the institution she works in. She displays traits of borderline personality disorder with sadistic obsessive-compulsive personality disorder traits (Which interestingly would put someone like her in a mental hospital.) She is helped by three black men and her fellow nurses. She plans everything that happens down to the second and whenever somebody challenges that, such as the new man on the ward, Randle 'Mac' McMurphy, she loses her cool. When things don't go the head nurse's way, she will just say no and exert her authority over the ward inmates who have no control over her and her security guards/henchmen.

Significance
Nurse Ratched as a whole embodies how power can corrupt, even in an institution of healing. In a more literal sense, she represents the abysmal manner in which such institutions were once run (and sometimes still are).

Trivia

 * Louise Fletcher (the actress of Ratched) has stated in recent years that she can no longer watch her performance as she feels the character's cruelty is "inhumane".


 * She could be considered similar to Samuel Norton of The Shawshank Redemption, both are sadistic, corrupt power abusers who use their authority to manipulate others.