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Sarah Paulson stars as Nurse Ratched in Ryan Murphy's bizarre prequel Netflix drama Ratched.
Sarah Paulson stars as Nurse Ratched in Ryan Murphy’s bizarre prequel Netflix drama Ratched. (Photo: Netflix)

Pop CultureSeptember 18, 2020

Review: Ratched is a hateful piece of misogynist garbage

Sarah Paulson stars as Nurse Ratched in Ryan Murphy's bizarre prequel Netflix drama Ratched.
Sarah Paulson stars as Nurse Ratched in Ryan Murphy’s bizarre prequel Netflix drama Ratched. (Photo: Netflix)

Netflix drama Ratched aims to rehabilitate the villain from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but would do better in the electric chair.

Nurse Ratched is, quite rightly, one of the most famous movie villains of all time. The source of all of McMurphy’s despair and angst in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, written by Ken Kesey in the 50s but more famously adapted by Milos Forman in the 70s, she’s a one-woman representation of everything that’s wrong with the system, man. She’s also, by the author’s own admission, a hugely sexist creation. 

In the novel, Ratched is the very embodiment of everything that Kesey thinks is wrong with society: she’s rigid, she’s unfair, and she’s… a she. Louise Fletcher, in her famous turn in the film, did everything she could to strip out the sexism inherent in the script by playing Ratched as professional rather than cruel, but the core remains. It’s a fool’s errand to try to rehabilitate that character into something human and three-dimensional. But, for some reason, that’s what Netflix drama Ratched tries to do.

Ratched tries to Maleficent its way out of the cage that Kesey wrote for the nurse: it gives her a backstory. It’s a generally accepted principle that if we understand why bad people do the things they do we’ll empathise with them, or at the very least sympathise with them. In aid of that, the show aims to give us all the dimensions of Ratched before we saw her in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and throws us back to post-war America, to the character finding work at her first mental hospital, for reasons that become immediately, thuddingly, apparent. 

Sarah Paulson stars as Nurse Ratched in Ryan Murphy's bizarre prequel Netflix drama Ratched.
Ah, yes. That iconic Nurse Ratched outfit. (Photo: Netflix)

Or at least that’s what I’m sure the creators, gilded charlatan Ryan Murphy and newcomer Evan Romansky, think their show is doing. The final product (already renewed for a second season, bewilderingly) is more like fanfiction written by someone who skimmed a high school essay on One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. It reimagines Ratched not as the embodiment of a corrupt system, but as a woman with a dark past who will do absolutely anything, up to and including murder, to get what she wants. The writers throw every cliche in the bag at the character – struggles with sexuality, a murderer’s row of fetishes, an eye-rolling omniscience – to lead us to an understanding of the character we saw behind the glass screen in that film nearly 50 years ago. Not only do we not understand that character, we barely understand the one onscreen. 

Once you take away the fanfiction trappings and all the bizarre homages/ripoffs of classic films (Cape Fear, Silence of the Lambs Written on the Wind), Ratched is business as usual for Murphy. It’s a colourful, expensive-looking show that puts overqualified actors in the same room together, hands them scripts that are more fit for a shredder than a performer, and expects the great reviews to roll in. Murphy had a resurgence with the success of American Horror Story, which turned to schlock after a few seasons, and then another with American Crime Story, which, in fairness, seems to be legitimately great. But Ratched, the second show of his lucrative Netflix deal, is his worst output yet. And yes, that includes The Politician.

My mood while watching this show.

Ryan Murphy’s work is easy to watch because you can turn your brain off. The acting is loud, the sets are gorgeous, and every time you get bored, there’s another ludicrous plot twist to lure you in. It’s a gamble that’s clearly worked for him, but it fails the television auteur badly here. His most obvious folly is his reliance on those great, loud actors. Murphy regular Sarah Paulson plays Ratched and is on paper a great choice for the role: she’s incredibly versatile, able to play off her soft affect to great results, most memorably in 12 Years a Slave. But the Ratched the show has corralled her into playing makes no sense. She’s stuck having to do a Louise Fletcher impression (surely the only time that’s ever been called for) when the show is actually asking her to play an all-knowing, manipulative femme fatale with, ironically for the character, a penchant for tearing down the system around her. It’s an impossible task and while she’s fun to watch in the moment, she never manages to actually make sense of anything.

The rest of the cast, who don’t have the burden of carrying the show on their discreetly placed shoulderpads, generally fare better. Judy Davis, who has been a one-woman abattoir for most of her career, is surprisingly subdued here as Nurse Bucket, Ratched’s superior at the hospital. Cynthia Nixon taps into the same level of pathos she brought to Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion, and single-handedly crafts the only emotional arc the show has onto its terminable eight episodes. Everybody else is a right old mixed bag though, from Finn Wittrock’s dead-eyed serial killer through to Sophie Okonedo’s take on a patient with dissociative identity disorder that would’ve been considered offensive when the source text was first written. Murphy owes them all apologies for what he’s given them, but I guess a pay cheque will have to suffice.

Ratched can’t get past the idea at its core: it’s a man’s misogynist fantasy. The problem is that Murphy and Romansky’s reimagination is no less misogynistic – it just comes from a different angle. Rather than being a thin metaphor for societal oppression, this Ratched is a collection of tired tropes and hacky cliches that add up to something even more hollow: yet another villain with backstory that tries to wave away every ludicrous thing we see. The problem isn’t necessarily that Murphy and Romansky don’t understand Nurse Ratched, there’s not a lot to get. The problem is they don’t even seem to understand the character they’re putting in front of us, and worse, don’t seem to care. Beautiful gowns, though.

You can watch Ratched on Netflix now.

Harry from Farmer Wants a Wife
Farmer Harry wants a wife, but does Farmer Harry need a wife? (Image: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureSeptember 18, 2020

Farmer Wants a Wife’s Harry on his search for love: ‘I’ve never been so exhausted’

Harry from Farmer Wants a Wife
Farmer Harry wants a wife, but does Farmer Harry need a wife? (Image: Tina Tiller)

Tara Ward chats to Farmer Harry, one of the Australian bachelors looking for love on reality series The Farmer Wants a Wife. 

All Farmer Harry wants is a woman as reliable as his John Deere tractor, and Farmer Wants a Wife might be the answer to his farmy prayers. A chaotic mix of The Bachelor and Country Calendar, FWAW is the Australian reality series that matches lonely men of the land with single women looking for love. It’s the show where city and country collide, where hopes are high and hearts are open, and where the dry season is the perfect time to find “a bloody girl”. 

We’re two episodes deep into the current season of FWAW, and already Farmer Harry is arguably the most memorable of the five bachelors. He’s a man of few words, an uncomplicated bloke who seems more comfortable in a paddock of sheep than a field of single women. His dogs are named Doug and Shirley, he cooks a mean lamb roast and, best of all, he keeps his motorbike in his living room. It’s hard to know what to make of the bike situation. We never saw that on McLeod’s Daughters.

“It’s me pride and joy, so it should be treated like that,” Farmer Harry says of his beloved bike, one of the first things he shows wannabe wife Madison when she arrives on the farm. It’s the love triangle we never expected, but I’m here for it, even if there is a valid explanation. “Out here we get lots of red dust, and it gets into everything. The best place to put the bike is in the living room,” Harry tells me. 

Harry (far right) and the other farmers looking towards the camera in the hopes of finding a wife

It makes more sense than volunteering to go on a reality show you’ve never seen before, but that’s how Farmer Harry rolls. Despite not having watched a single episode of FWAW, Harry agreed to go on the show after his “best mate’s missus” signed him up. “She got me at a weak moment on a Sunday arvo, I think I was a bit hungover at the time,” he says. “I thought I wouldn’t have a chance, so I said, why not. You’ve gotta get out of your comfort zone every now and then.”

We’ve all made questionable decisions thanks to a pounding headache and a tongue that feels like carpet, but few of them involved inviting a bunch of lovesick strangers back to your farm to stay. The show wasted no time throwing Harry into their silo of single soulmates. “We submitted my application on the Sunday, had a phone call on the Monday, and a film crew here to do a bloody pilot on the Wednesday,” he says. 

FWAW doesn’t muck around, and only a few hours after meeting eight eligible women in episode one, Harry had to invite four of them back to his farm near Goolgowi (population 400). Over the coming weeks, Harry will send three women home, leaving him with one lucky lady to farm with forever. It’s like the time on McLeod’s Daughters when Claire had to choose which sheep to send to the stock sales, but with real people and real emotions. That episode was tense, but this is next level.

HEY I JUST MET YOU, AND THIS IS CRAZY, BUT HERE’S MY NUMBER, PLEASE COME AND LIVE ON MY FARM

McLeod’s Daughters taught us a lot about Australian farming, mostly that a good farmer knows a) to hide their stolen gems in the cellar and b) how to not drive off a cliff. Harry, however, reckons positivity is the most important quality in a farmer’s wife. “You go out and slug it along all day, you come home wrecked, you don’t want the negativity around,” he says. “It’s not always rosy out here. We have droughts and fires and all the bad things that come with farming, and you need someone that’s on your side.” 

Positivity also comes in handy when you’re a farmer suffering a romance drought one minute, then sharing your home with four women the next. Harry discovered that dating lots of people at once wasn’t everything it’s cracked up to be, especially for someone not used to expressing his emotions. “I’ve never been so exhausted,” he says. “I’ve worked some pretty hard days on the farm, but talking to people, women especially, about your feelings all the time – it definitely takes it out of you.”

Five people sit at table and eat
For dinner tonight: feelings

Next week we’ll see how full-on FWAW can be, when the five farmers and their potential brides meet up for a dinner party. No spoilers, but Harry’s about to get drenched in a downpour of feelings again. “You can expect a fair bit of drama here and there on my farm,” Harry says of what lies ahead. “A lot of things didn’t go to plan, lots of things came out that probably weren’t the best thing. It was all the experience, in one.” 

FWAW is all about the happy ending, but we’ll need to wait and see if Harry finds a partner who will love his dining room motorbike as much as he does. In the meantime, what do Harry’s mates down the pub reckon about his fast burn around the reality TV racetrack? “You know, they’ve probably got a lifetime of shit to hang on me, but they’re pretty proud,” he says. “I’ve definitely got no regrets. It was a lot of fun.”

Farmer Wants a Wife screens on TVNZ 2 on Mondays at 8.45pm and on TVNZ OnDemand.