It can’t be a coincidence that one of the most famous and revered actors of his generation made a name for himself playing three different versions of the same character in less than five years. What was the audience – and critics – at the time responding to that such a character resonated so well?
In 1970, Jack Nicholson began his ascent to international stardom with the release of Five Easy Pieces, a character study of a man, Robert Eroica Dupea, who seemingly had everything in life, looks, charisma, a good family, musical talent, and intelligence, but who amounted to little more than a drifter, unable to commit to anything and anyone, unable to fit in anywhere. The film opens with Bobby working on an oil rig somewhere in the California desert, dirty and exhausted, a visual representation of a place with nowhere to go and no reason to go there. We follow him back to his apartment after work, a small, rundown shack located south of nowhere itself. He finds his attractive, inexplicably devoted girlfriend Rayette getting ready for a shift as a waitress at some diner or truck stop, but he would prefer she please him instead, cajoling her into skipping work to entertain him. Immediately, it’s obvious that he treats her poorly even as he wants her company for a time, refusing to say that he loves her or even discuss the subject, only willing to do things on his terms, what and when he wants to do them. In his mind, she exists entirely for his pleasure, a toy to use as he desires with no care for her feelings beyond how they impact her willingness to be his plaything. When she’s upset after he mocked her mercilessly for her bowling skills, spending his time eyeing up the girls in a nearby lane, he’ll spend a little time comforting her so she’ll accompany him to the next party, but nothing more. Not surprisingly, Bobby is also a cheat, a drinker, and a gambler desperate for any kind of pleasure he can find outside of Rayette as well, no matter its impact on her, as though life for him was simply defined by his need to find some sort of temporary distraction from himself. Throughout the first third of the film, the only thing to suggest there might be something deeper to the man is when he’s stuck in a traffic jam, notices an old piano on the moving truck in front, and decides to stage an impromptu concert. Later, his friend Elton, who was driving the car at the time, informs him that Rayette is pregnant and that Bobby needs to step up to support the child, but he wants no part of it, will not consider the idea in any fashion, outright berating his friend by calling him a “cracker,” “It’s ridiculous. I’m sittin’ here listening to some cracker asshole lives in a trailer park compare his life to mine. Keep on tellin’ me about the good life, Elton, because it makes me puke.” Thus, the audience isn’t shocked when he ultimately abandons Rayette in the final shot, hopping in a stranger’s truck without a so much as a word.
The film offers no explanation for why Bobby is the way he is, why he’s a misfit when he shouldn’t be, considering all the positive qualities he’s been blessed with. He cannot explain it himself, either. In fact, he says only two things in the entire running time that help put his manifest deficiencies into context. First, he tells his brother’s fiancée, Catherine, who is obviously trying to seduce and does indeed seduce (while Rayette is holed up alone in a motel for weeks), that he has no feelings. He does this even as he has ostensibly come to visit his ailing father, who has been effectively paralyzed by a massive stroke, making it unclear whether he is even aware of the world around him, and be with his estranged family. Bobby, however, isn’t interested in spending time with his father or the rest of his family, almost immediately pursuing Catherine instead. At some point, she asks him to play something for her on the piano. Reluctantly, he plays a beautiful piece that moves her to tears, but he maintains he was completely unmoved himself, empty inside, dismissing the entire episode with “I picked the easiest piece that I could think of. I first played it when I was 8-years-old, and I played it better then.” Later, Bobby explains that he runs from any and all conflict, that when the going gets tough, he gets going because things turn bad when he doesn’t. As he put it to a father that might not even be able to hear him in their only scene together, apparently the only sort of person he can speak to, “I don’t know if you’d be particularly interested in hearing anything about me. My life, I mean… Most of it doesn’t add up to much that I could relate as a way of life that you’d approve of… I’d like to be able to tell you why, but I don’t really… I mean, I move around a lot because things tend to get bad when I stay. And I’m looking… for auspicious beginnings, I guess… I’m trying to, you know, imagine your half of this conversation… My feeling is that, if you could talk, we probably wouldn’t be talking. That’s pretty much how it got to be before… I left… Are you all right? I don’t know what to say.” Otherwise, Catherine describes it this way when she tells him she cannot be with him. “You’re a strange person, Robert. I mean, what will you come to? If a person has no love for himself, no respect for himself, no love of his friends, family, work, something – how can he ask for love in return? I mean, why should he ask for it?”
Three years later, Mr. Nicholson portrayed a character that can be described as both the same and completely different. This time around, the film was The Last Detail and the character was a Navy man, Billy “Bad Ass” Buddusky, charged with escorting a prisoner to military jail to serve an eight year sentence for stealing $40. Billy has more heart than Bobby, a man with feelings that might be suppressed more often than expressed, but capable of real emotion nonetheless. Therefore, it’s not a surprise that he develops a certain affection for the prisoner, Larry Meadows, as they travel by bus and train through Washington, DC, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston onward to the prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Meadows is a simple man, what we used to call “slow,” born to a poor family, only eighteen years old, a virgin who has never had a beer, lacking experience in the world, facing the loss of eight years of his life for a minor episode that became politicized because it involved a favored charity of the base commander’s wife. Buddusky and his fellow lifer in the Navy, Richard “Mule” Mulhall, proceed to change that in short order, getting him drunk, brawling with marines, and ultimately, an encounter with a prostitute, exposing him to the world as best they know how, which is admittedly, a rather limited amount. Early in the film, Buddusky insists that Meadows secretly wants to go to prison because he can’t handle having control over his life and would prefer someone make all his decisions for him. After all, this a man that won’t so much as send back a burger even though it wasn’t prepared as he asked, or defend himself from seemingly anyone or anything. Buddusky initially exclaims, “Fuck help, fuck fair! Fuck injustice! Don’t you ever just wanna fuckin’ whomp and stomp on someone, bite off their ear, just to do it? I mean just to do it, just to get it out of your system,” but he begins to feel otherwise after Meadows starts displaying some initiative and enjoying life, including actually sending back another burger and simple things like ice skating in Rockefeller Center.
There is nothing he or Mule can do about Meadows’ fate, however, and so they end the film as they began, returning to the Navy where they will continue until they retire, as if nothing at all has happened. Why Buddusky has consigned himself to a subsistence as a Navy petty officer remains one the film’s chief mysteries, akin to why Bobby is the way he is. While it’s clear he didn’t have the advantages of his counterpart’s upbringing in an upper class home, he is the same in the sense of being obviously more intelligent, more charming, more street smart, more almost everything compared to everyone else in the film. He is bold and daring in his own way, unafraid to take the sort of risks a drifter might like hustling strangers in a dart game, or intentionally picking a fight with the aforementioned marines. He is even somewhat racially conscious, more so than many in the era. When a bartender insults Mule, who is black, claiming he’s forced to serve his kind by law even if he doesn’t like it, Buddusky pulls a gun on the man and defends his comrade, but the same as the hole in Bobby’s character, the only insight we have into why Buddusky is a misfit, beyond his penchant for drinking, gambling, and womanizing, is how he describes why his only marriage failed, an event that occurred before the start of the film. “Dottie Brown… She had great tits,” he tells Mule, “and wore angora sweaters all the time. She wanted me to go to trade school and become a TV repairman. Driving around in all that smog and shit, fixing TVs out of the back of a VW bus. I just couldn’t do it.” This might not be the life many would want for themselves, fair enough, but it’s also altogether clear that his life in the Navy isn’t exactly high-heeled, nor is he exactly thrilled with it, continually complaining about his superiors and the “chicken shit” details he’s assigned. He continues there, however, seemingly because he knows nothing else, and perhaps he’s more like Meadows than he would like to believe, unable to handle the vagaries of fate.
Two years later, Mr. Nicholson would play the most famous incarnation of this character, Randle Patrick McMurphy in the Academy Award winning classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In this telling, McMurphy has been confined to a mental institution after a stint in prison for the statutory rape of a 15 year old girl a decade earlier, though the details are scarce. He tells the story this way, “She was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don’t think it’s crazy at all and I don’t think you do either. No man alive could resist that, and that’s why I got into jail to begin with. And now they’re telling me I’m crazy over here because I don’t sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don’t make a bit of sense to me. If that’s what being crazy is, then I’m senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that’s it.” We also know that he was originally sentenced to a forced labor camp in Oregon for the crime, but unable or unwilling to do hard time, he pretends to be insane because he believes the psych ward offers an easier option with more freedoms. His master plan backfires, however, when he learns that he’s at the mercy of the ward’s staff, who are not constrained to his original sentence and could, in principle, keep him there for life. Like Billy and Buddusky before him, McMurphy possesses obvious gifts the other, truly insane patients do not, even beyond their mental illness. There is another difference as well. Most of these patients are there voluntarily and can leave any time, but refuse to do so while McMurphy, Chief, and Tabor are the only ones confined against their will. As McMurphy describes them, “Jesus, I mean, you guys do nothing but complain about how you can’t stand it in this place here and you don’t have the guts just to walk out? What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin’? Well you’re not! You’re not! You’re no crazier than the average asshole out walkin’ around on the streets and that’s it.” Similar to Buddusky, McMurphy is also trouble maker and a rabble rouser, who says of himself, “Well, as near as I can figure out, it’s ‘cause I, uh, fight and fuck too much,” encouraging the other patients to experience life the same way the earlier character did Meadows, sneaking them out of the ward to meet his girlfriend Candy and taking them fishing. He has something of a heart as well, developing real affection for Chief in particular along with a disdain for the infamous Nurse Ratched, who obviously views McMurphy as a significant threat to her authority. Even after he was punished for leaving the grounds, he organizes something of a party for the inmates, admittedly as a cover for his escape, bringing in women and booze, but when everyone gets drunk rather than actually escape, the escapade ultimately leads to his undoing. Nurse Ratched takes her anger out on the poor, fearful stutterer Billy, who, similar to Meadows, fights back for the first time in his life only to end up committing suicide after she threatens to tell his mother. McMurphy is enraged when the Nurse tries to pretend everything is normal and attempts to strangle her. He is lobotomized as a result, and Chief kills him in an act of compassion.
Obviously, it cannot be a coincidence that one of the most famous and revered actors of his generation made a name for himself playing three different versions of the same character in less than five years. What was the audience – and critics – at the time responding to that such a character resonated so well? Critics generally refer to the period as the “New Hollywood Era” with Five Easy Pieces serving as something of a vanguard. Following the end of the censorship codes and the decline of public interest in musicals and spectacle films, Hollywood turned to darker fare, beginning with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, where criminality was glorified, violence stylized, and humor added, but even then these three films represent something of a departure in both theme and character. Unlike Bonnie and Clyde in real life and in cinema, Mr. Nicholson’s three characters do not seem to enjoy their outsider existence or revel in it. Instead, they are the way they are, but objectively, they shouldn’t be and are clearly disappointed in that fact. They should, reasonably speaking, be productive members of society, holding real jobs, married, and with children, satisfied somehow, and yet they are incapable of fitting in. Why? We cannot, of course, say for sure, but a few possibilities present themselves. All three of these films were conceived against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and general American disillusionment with power and authority. The films do not tackle the war directly, but a firm belief in American righteousness at the end of the Cold War had given way to a general cultural malaise, making us unsure of where we fit in both in the world and within ourselves. Figuratively, these characters represent this lack of confidence and resulting listlessness, the isolation and lack of belonging.
We can find evidence of this in the films themselves. In Five Easy Pieces, Bobby and Rayette encounter a pair of hitchhikers along the way who have responded to the cultural malaise by embracing an odd outlook on life. They’re headed to Alaska simply because it’s “cleaner,” but they don’t want anyone to know about it because “soon they’ll all go there and it won’t be so clean.” When Bobby asks how they know it’s clean, “I saw a picture of it. Alaska’s very clean. It appeared to look very white to me. Don’t you think?” The character, Palm Apodaca, is obsessed with an odd form of cleanliness overall, “those signs everywhere. They should be erased! All those signs selling you crap and more crap and more crap. And I – I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t even want to talk about it.” She imagines a car running on steam power, “A car that you could ride around in and not cause a stink. But do you know they will not even let us have it? Can you believe it? Why? Man! He likes to create a stink! I mean, I’ve seen filth that you wouldn’t believe. Ugh! What a stink! I don’t even want to talk about it.” In The Last Detail, Buddusky, Mule, and Meadows encounter a new age cult, the Nichiren Shoshu, that embraces a ritual chant as a means to achieve their wishes. The cult leader notes, “Welcome to a Nichiren Shoshu discussion meeting! Tonight throughout the city there are actually – there are hundreds of meetings like this going on, where people are learning about Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and Gohonzon!” Meadows wonders, “If you’re Catholic, do you think it’s, uh, sacrilegious to chant?” Buddusky asks, “Did it get you laid?” “No,” Meadows replies, a little confused. “Then, Meadows, what the fuck do you want to go on chanting for?” Buddusky grouses, while Mule offers, “Chant your ass off, kid. But any pussy you get in this world, you gonna have to pay for, one way or another.” These elements are perhaps less overt in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but the combination of characters who choose to hide from the world because it’s easier, like Buddusky claimed of Meadows, and the strange psychiatric treatments in general including shock therapy serve the same purpose. There is the overall sense that Mr. Nicholson isn’t the only character who doesn’t fit in. Everyone is searching for something in a world where they’ve lost hope they’ll find it.
To some extent, this is the nature of the human condition. We are all of us looking for something we won’t find in this life or clinging to something we can take only on faith; all Bobby’s who are better at auspicious beginnings than endings. At the same time, there is an inherent tragedy to our restlessness, wanting what we don’t have. This isn’t the tragedy of the Ancient Greeks or William Shakespeare where leaders are undone by flaws unique to them, from greed to pride to madness. It’s a far more personal one that can be experienced by almost anyone, perhaps members of your family like my own father in many ways. I would suggest that Mr. Nicholson made this real for the modern age, crafting three tragic characters if only because they couldn’t get out of their own way.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 