Inhospitable

Ratched, and other Bad Nurses of Pop Culture

The nurse in the title of Charles Graeber’s book , “The Good Nurse,” refers to Amy Loughren, the woman who risked her life exposing a rather bad nurse, Charles Cullen, and his nefarious deeds. He admitted to killing 29 patients in his career but that number might actually be in the hundreds. Graeber was our guest on Episode 6 of Bad Elizabeth about another bad nurse, Elizabeth “Bethe” Wettlaufer. You should listen, it is pretty good:

Although there are many great nurses out there and most of them overworked, pop culture is obsessed with the “Bad Nurse” motif. We like the bad versions of people, so we can judge them and feel better about ourselves while secretly thinking, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” Bravo’s very popular “Real Housewives” franchise could easily be called “Bad Housewives” because none of them do any laundry or vacuum and they tend to throw things, at walls and at each other.

Jennifer & Danielle get into a Pushing & Drink Throwing Fight at Teresa’s Party! (S14, E8)

Gregory Maguire’s 1995 best-selling novel, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” is a reimagining of Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” telling the story of Elphaba Thropp, the bad one. “Wicked” became a smash on Broadway and later, an eleven hour movie which won tons of Oscars. The sequel, which comes out over Thanksgiving, is sure to be a hit. It also presents an opportunity for a family outing where people can spend three hours together, not fighting.

Aspiring and talented witch Elphaba Thropp was not always bad but goes bad after a series of betrayals. The story harkens back to when she and Glinda “The Good Witch” Upland, were roommates at Shiz University in the land of Oz, where they studied magic. Roommates can be deceptive. I didn’t find out that my freshman roommate at college was the granddaughter of a very famous Hollywood actor and director until second semester, when I saw his memoir on her desk, with the inscription, “To my darling granddaughter” on the first page. I thought she was just another hippy chick. Of course, we never talked about it. The actor Tommy Lee Jones and former Vice President Al Gore were roommates at Harvard for all four years back in the sixties. I am not sure which one of them is bad. But I know which one of them sold out. You can find Tommy Lee Jones’s face in vending machines, hocking Boss Coffee in Japan.

I would happily do the same thing, given the opportunity.

But back to the nurses! Everyone seems to know the character of Nurse Ratched, from the 1975 film, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” based on the novel by Ken Kesey. Louise Fletcher won an Academy Award for playing the character who cruelly manipulated and controlled the men committed to a psychiatric ward, Jack Nicholson’s loudmouth character, Randle McMurphy, in particular. He was there faking mental illness because he didn’t want to be sentenced to a labor farm for past assaults. It turned out to be the wrong decision.

Fletcher gave one of the best Oscar speeches of all time, saying, “I loved being hated by you,” and thanked her parents in sign language, as they were both born deaf. Notice how the other nominees look so unhappy as their names are read out. I didn’t know Carol Kane could look so serious. Ann Margaret looks like she is ready to hit someone.

There was a 2020 Ryan Murphy TV mini series called, “Ratched,” starring Murphy’s chronic muse, Sarah Paulson.

This was a prequel to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” telling the story of Mildred Ratched’s life before she worked in the psych ward, bringing pop culture’s worst nurse to the small screen.

This series really mines Kesey’s book for evil, which Kesey said was based on his experience working in an Oregon mental hospital. The fact that it was an Oregon mental hospital seems even more daunting, because you imagine it rains a lot there. When it comes for my time to be committed to the psych ward, I would prefer Florida. It rains there as well but at least there are palm trees.

I am not sure if Mildred Ratched is pop culture’s worst nurse. That could be Kathy Bates’s character, Annie Wilkes, in the movie “Misery.”

This film, too, is based on a book. Stephen King’s 1987 novel, published under his alias, Richard Bachman, became a feature film just a few years later. The film stars James Caan as Paul Sheldon, a best selling author of an historical romance series, which he is quite sick of writing. Bates’s Annie is his biggest fan. Their paths cross in a small snowy Colorado town when a drunk Paul gets into a car accident and Annie, a retired nurse, happens to be there to rescue him. She takes the seriously injured Paul not to the hospital but into her home where she tends to him and quickly gets him addicted to pain killers. When Annie finds Paul’s manuscript for his latest book in the series and discovers that her favorite character is being killed off, things go badly pretty quickly. It is a hard film to watch but Bates’s biggest regret was that director Rob Reiner toned down the violence a bit. For example, in the book, Annie amputates Paul’s foot. In the movie, she just breaks his ankle. In the book, she runs someone over with a lawnmower. The movie left that scene out. Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her role as a treacherous nurse as well.

Perhaps we are seeing a pattern here. Edie Falco won an Emmy for her role on Showtimes’ “Nurse Jackie,” where she plays the title character.

Jackie is not altogether bad. In fact, she has a heart of gold when she is with patients. But she steals drugs from the hospital pharmacy and cheats on her husband with the hospital pharmacist to ensure that this party continues, so to speak. But she is mostly fun, whereas the other two are certainly not.

Luckily, there are many REAL good nurses currently and in history. Florence Nightengale, the founder of modern nursing, Dorothea Dix, who advocated for the mentally ill, and Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Red Cross, remind us of the importance of the job. In the words of the late Swedish diplomat and economist, Dag Hammarskjold, “Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.” Appreciate our nurses and by God, do not piss them off.