Forgiving Forman: Coming to Terms With THE Movie Nearly 50 Years later

 I recently re-watched the 1975 movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, directed by Miloš Forman,  and based on the 1962 novel by Ken Kesey.

First off, the book is superb, beautifully written and with a dreamlike quality. Definitely worth a careful read. A great classic of American literature.

Now to the movie, one scene from which has done such tremendous harm to ECT and patients over the last five decades. I watched the movie again last week and could not help thinking it is a true masterpiece.

Amazing performances, beautifully directed, very poignant and compelling. Remove the ECT scene and the history of problems for us melts away.

And here is a trailer from Youtube that does not contain THE scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXrcDonY-B8

Here is my new experience of the film and its relation to ECT: the ECT scene is so stylized and old fashioned, and the psychiatrist is so stereotypically evil and arrogant, that there is no reason to see the scene as other than a fictional set piece, with no relation to anything in real-world modern psychiatry.

So, let's never show the scene or a still photo of it again, but let's enjoy the masterwork of a movie (and book), a coming to terms that (for me) has taken a very long time.