A Female Look at the Antagonist: Why You Should Watch ‘Sister Ratched’

In Ken Kesey’s novel, Sister Ratched is portrayed as a beautiful but cold and inhuman tyrant who controls her patients through humiliation and manipulation. It controls patient access to benefits and privileges. Ratched follows the principle of “might for might’s sake”, gaining nothing from his tyranny but a sense of superiority. In the book – and later in the 1975 film – Sister Ratched is the main antagonist. She calls for discipline as Randle McMurphy leads them to freedom. Now, it’s hard to remember that he ended up in a psychiatric clinic, pretending to be sick, so as not to end up in prison.

By the way, among the crimes with which Randle was charged were not only gambling and beating, but also assaulting a minor. But now we remember him as a free-spirited, desperate guy, opposed by an insensitive doll with scarlet lips and huge breasts.

Evan Romansky, Ryan Murphy, Michael Douglas, and a truly stellar cast (all of whom we know well from American Horror Story) decided to tell the audience their side of the story.

The series is set in 1947. Somewhere in sunny California, a guy with a bandit’s visor named Edmund Tolleson (Finn Wittrock) breaks into a priest’s house and brutally kills almost everyone. He was quickly arrested by the police. According to the law, the court must make sure that the offender is sane, and for this he is sent for a psychiatric examination. A little later, the nurse Mildred Ratched (Sarah Paulson) arrives in the small town of Lucia, populated by less than a thousand inhabitants. The only attraction in town is a luxury mental hospital, where the killer is placed and where, in fact, Mildred is on the way.

The creators moved away from the dark realism of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” with its dull color palette. They didn’t tap into the nightmare theme of real hospitals with their filthy, smelly rooms, humiliating, painful procedures, and utter desperation. Instead, we see something completely unexpected – a hospital that most closely resembles a five-star hotel on the coast.

Although the team found a decent hotel – a stately old resort – getting there was too difficult, so they had to create all the sets themselves. Becker admits it was the biggest set she had to erect.

The color scheme of the series deserves a separate material. She is a real feast for the eyes. The retro chic of the 1940s with its trapeze skirts and wide high-waisted pants, hourglass silhouette, gloves and hats… The famous New Look fashion show by Christian Dior took place the same year.

“Costume is always hugely important in any show, but especially in the Ryan Murphy show,” explain costume designers Lou Eyrich and Rebecca Guzzi, who also worked with Murphy on American Horror Story. The designer duo shared that they were inspired by fashion magazines of those years, and also studied medical catalogs, nursing school yearbooks, hospital booklets. Murphy insisted that as little as possible be borrowed from the original film.

The producer wanted the nurses’ uniforms not to be white, nothing to do with the starched dresses of the staff in Flight over a Cuckoo’s Nest. Therefore, the designers developed a special color, blue-green, in turquoise. Nurses at Lucia Hospital wear four-layer silk gowns with matching buttons and belt buckles.

The color green dominates, its different shades are used to convey different moods. Guzzi claims that this color symbolizes “violence, lust, hatred, greed and evil”.

Mildred’s costumes aren’t just her way of interacting with the world, they’re a means of manipulation. With the help of bright and festive outfits, she convinces, consoles, controls others, pursuing her own goals. Murphy insisted that Mildred never wear rouge, which does not appear on the show at all except for Mildred’s bloodstains and lipstick.

Curiously, the hospital being presented more like a rehabilitation center than a place of confinement, all the patients remain there dressed, except when they are taken for interventions.

The setting was conducive to savoring the horrors of punitive psychiatry – Ryan Murphy excels at dealing with the paranoid frenzy of prison establishments, as he has already proven to us in his work on the Asylum season. Despite this, this particular subject is not so much in the series. Several times we will be shown how patients who have no disease are tortured – and these several times are worthy of a separate nightmare – but that is all. Those familiar with Murphy’s work, probably already primed for dismemberment, torture, and violence, not that they weren’t on the show at all, but the focus has shifted.

A subject that has recently come up much less frequently in modern cinema is the subject of the death penalty, euthanasia and euthanasia, the coup de gras. Agree, these are three subjects united by a common denominator. Death. What can serve as an excuse for murder: revenge? desire to soothe someone’s agony? punishment for another murder? These are all complex philosophical questions that viewers will have to ponder while watching.

Cynthia Nixon, in one of her interviews, describes one of the main themes of the series as follows: “How did Mildred Ratched become a monster?

“It wouldn’t be very interesting if we went back two decades and saw the same Mildred Ratched as in the movies,” agrees Sarah Paulson. It’s boring, nobody wants to watch it. I think it’s interesting to see someone become someone else. In the first season, we learn a lot about Mildred’s past, about her terrible childhood, which I think says a lot about her character and dictates her behavior.

Murphy is a master of clever mystification, he forces us to change our attitude towards the characters abruptly and without compromise. Is Sister Ratched Worth Watching? Certainly! And not just to admire the costumes and the unparalleled acting of the actors, but to answer ourselves the questions that the director offers us.

Photo: Legion-Media, Kinopoisk