Cuckoo’s Connections

by Mr. Quale on April 30, 2008

One flew east, and one flew west. . .I wanted to post links to some articles that I have either mentioned, or articles that we have read as a class that relate in some way to our study of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Today’s personal technologies, particularly the cellphone and the digital video recorder, have not provoked similar worries. They are marvels of individual choice, convenience and innovation; they represent the democratization of the power of the machine . . . In a rebuke to Marx, we have not become the alienated slaves of the machine; we have made the machines more like us and in the process toppled decades of criticism about the dangerous and potentially enervating effects of our technologies.

Or have we?

But it was not his favorite production, he added. That designation he reserved for a production he saw 15 years ago at a Sacramento high school, staged so that an elaborate display of grinding cogs and gears appeared in silhouette between scenes to illustrate the play’s sinister ”Combine,” a metaphor for society’s grinding machinery.

”I gave that one the A,” he said.

Leave a Comment

Previous post: Guest Poet: Dan Thomas-Glass

Next post: Cuckoo’s Nest Documentary Films