Glass in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Object: Glass

Crucial plot moments involving glass:

• The sliding glass doors of the nurse station generally only open up when the patients come there to receive and swallow their mandatory pills
• McMurphy bangs on the glass to get Nurse Ratched's attention when she refused to recognize Chief Bromden's vote to watch the baseball game
• McMurphy breaks the glass of the nurse station to retrieve a carton of cigarettes 
• Chief Bromden ends up breaking one of the ward's big glass windows when he escapes 
• Billy breaks a glass jar and uses a piece of it to kill himself
• The guys improv watching the baseball game on the reflective glass of the television screen 

Glass is transparent, reflective, and fragile.  Glass promotes a special kind of division, enabling parties on both sides to see through it even though it is solid--glass makes for a non-threating sense of division, a naturalized division.

The second half of this clip, wherein McMurphy begs Nurse Ratched to change the patients' schedule so they can watch the World Series, shows three important functions/qualities of glass in the film.

1) The sliding glass windows of the nurse station: transparent division

(the glass allows the patients to see the nurses as they talk to them, but the glass also allows the nurses to ignore the patients--as if, by the material fact of the closed glass, the patients imposing upon them: the glass serves as a justification mechanism for the nurses' right to selective attention: one can ignore the patients' direct request behind closed class ('I'm a nurse in a nurses station--I'm busy right now' ) in almost the same instance as monitoring the patients without consent/request (I'm a nurse in a nurses station--I'm watching you for your own good')

2) The gated glass windows of the ward walls: barred vision

(the view of the outside is always barred...$...patients are barred/split between their life in the ward and the inaccessible window to the world beyond the ward...some of the "vegetable" patients spend the entire time on screen gazing at these gated windows) 

3) The reflective glass of the television screen: play and illusion

(the blank screen becomes a means for the patients to project their own image onto a shared performative space, the television, which is also associated with the world beyond the ward...their performance in the scene creates an illusion for them of the possibilities of living their lives outside of the ward)