Nurse Ratched was the horror of Cuckoo’s Nest

Nurse Ratched was the horror of Cuckoo’s Nest, which is code for you have to be of a certain age to remember Jack (Nicholson) as the sane but complicated madman McMurphy, who was a cult figure from the time the book was written in 1962 until 1975 when the amazing movie became a household name.

The point is that madness was a popular state of mind from the beatniks to the hippies because you had old adults telling young adults that if they didn’t conform then society would find a way of bringing them into line. Shock therapy was the ultimate threat.

I wasn’t around yet, but the thought of two huge electrodes being attached to your head, and causing a mega current to run through your brain, was certainly enough to get you off whatever hysteria you felt about the mainstream. It was only artists who were exempt on condition that they kept in their lane. It’s always been like that.

Ironically, the way we know about such things now is through art. In other words, the only way we can understand what antisocial young people were like in those days is by watching movies like Rebel Without a Cause and reading Allen Ginsburg’s epic poem Howl.

The way we can understand the same uncooperative revolution in art is by looking at artists like Cy Twombly and Jackson Pollock, but if they emerged today I fear they would be totally ignored. Yet they remain our fathers in the pursuit of some artistic purpose, namely the fight to free our minds so our asses could follow. By freeing the mind I mean freeing the line.

That’s my short list of beatnik art, I could go on and on, about how Lee Krasner was upstaged by her drunken husband but it’s also undermining to say that female partners are only victims when they are brilliant and rebellious, themselves.

Love is like a time machine, sometimes you arrive in the future and you just want to go back to the past. Art lets you go there but not always in the ways you want it.