Nurses in Films

In the 1970s, nurses in films tended to be either sex objects or harridans engendering fear, in both cases rather than caring professionals. This division also generally reflected an age difference as well, with the sex-object nurses being young and beautiful, and with older nurses presented as overbearing and unattractive. This division was and continues to be most evident in comedies, though it also seeps into more serious dramas which include nurses as well. Certainly, there are exceptions, but the fact that this has been a more apparent choice is shown in complaints by professionals that "negative stereotypes of shallow or seductive female nurses continue to be reinforced in movies and on television" (Forgacs, 1996). This sex-object nurse has a long history, appearing in the late 1950s in comedies like Operation Petticoat (1959) and emerging in even more blatant fashion in a series of nurse movies for Roger Corman beginning with The Student Nurses (1970). The alternative image of the nurse as avenging angel was most forcefully presented in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), and would be given a new and horrible life in the film Misery in 1990.

The character of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nestderives from Big Nurse in the novel and the play version of the same story. McMurphy is the hero who comes up against this character. He is the free spirit who points the way for everyone else. Women are presented as cardboard characters, sexual objects o

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tionships suffer as a result (Davison and Neale, 1994, 269-270). Annie Wilkes is seen as obsessive-compulsive in the way everything has to be just so, from the books she reads to the way her house is kept. She has a variety of knick-knacks everywhere, and each must be in its proper place. She wants every element in life to be in its proper place, and she becomes incensed when it is not so. She expects the Misery books to be part of her life always, and her reaction to the news that this will no longer be so is violent and shows how dependent her personality is upon the imposed order of these novels. Her captive is expected to live up to all her idealized images of him as a writer, as a human being, and as a patient, and any deviation from the norm she sets is met with violent confrontation. Presumably she was also disappointed in the reality of the patients she killed--they failed to live up to her expectations of them as patients and did not do as well in treatment as required, so to restore order she killed them. When she encourages her captive to write, she is obsessive about providing him with precisely the tools needed, from a typewriter to the proper paper and pencils. She is also obsessive in assuring herself that e

Category: Film - N