Following this path, McMurphy positions himself as the rebel, a revolutionary against the oppressive reality of psychiatric hospitals, which, it should be remembered, would soon be legally abolished in favor of deinstitutionalization, aimed at reducing dependence on closed hospital facilities and promoting patients’ integration into the community.

For the identification process to be complete, given these premises, McMurphy must embody the figure of the trickster, a deceiver or jester, an archetype that appears in many cultural and mythological traditions and is closely linked to the concept of the joker in popular culture. The trickster is a complex character who challenges social conventions, breaks rules, and destabilizes the established order, often with a purpose beyond mere chaos: he can also lead to transformation, reveal hidden truths, and drive change.

Where does McMurphy fail? Where does he disappoint us because we realize he is not truly a trickster? The first time is when he takes the group on a clandestine fishing boat trip—and doesn’t escape, doesn’t try to flee.

The second time is after attacking Nurse Ratched. The two prostitutes McMurphy had brought for the nighttime party have escaped through the window and call him from the street. The hospital attendants have intervened, McMurphy will certainly be punished, he stares at the open window and… doesn’t run.

If we retrace the story backward, we notice other details. For example, Nurse Ratched and her young assistant sitting in front of the group of patients, composed like schoolgirls, dressed in white with skirts above the knee revealing legs covered by immaculate white stockings: why did McMurphy, a rapist, never try to put his hands there?

At this point, the viewer’s narrative empathy truly kicks in.

McMurphy is not there to show us how a charismatic joker—whose charisma is amplified by Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-winning performance—will subvert the system. McMurphy doesn’t escape because outside, in the free world, he is a misfit and would end up in jail. He cannot manage outside, and the psychiatric hospital, despite everything, represents a safe zone, a refuge, an anesthetic against the difficulties of living in society—and this is precisely its function: a place to confine those who diverge.

Throughout the story, McMurphy discovers that many patients in the hospital are not forced to stay; they are free to return to the outside world but choose not to. At first, he doesn’t understand them and mocks them, but then, when faced with the open window, he doesn’t escape. He believes he is smarter than the others, that he has outwitted the system to avoid jail, but it turns out that the psychiatric hospital is precisely the place where the system prefers to put people like him: away from others, sedated, under control, and out of the game.

On this point, Michel Foucault, in History of Madness in the Classical Age, illustrates how psychiatric hospitals are not simply places of care but instruments of social control and discipline. His critique profoundly influenced movements for the deinstitutionalization of psychiatry, such as the Basaglia Law in Italy, which led to the closure of asylums.

At this stage, the viewer’s identification definitively abandons McMurphy as a figure to embrace the concept he represents: freedom—the right to freedom, in this case expressed as the right to be oneself, unique, and, by being unique, different and nonconformist.

When Chief Bromden realizes that McMurphy has been lobotomized, he grants him the only escape now possible: death. He lifts the heavy water hydrant (which McMurphy had previously tried in vain to lift, symbolizing that escape was impossible for him) and hurls it through a window, thereby managing to flee.