Warning: Spoilers ahead for Netflix’s Ratched season 1. Ever since Sarah Paulson’s Nurse Ratched came into our lives, we couldn’t help but wonder if Ratched on Netflix was based on a true story. But before we dive into what’s fact and fiction from Ryan Murphy’s new horror series, let’s explain what Ratched is about.
Ratched, which premiered on Netflix on September 18, stars Sarah Paulson as Nurse Mildred Ratched, a nurse who starts a job at an asylum in Northern California in 1947. From the first episode, viewers can feel that there’s something off about Nurse Ratched. For one, she’s desperate to work at the asylum and blackmails one of the nurses already there to leave her job, so she can be hired. It isn’t until later in the series that we learn that Ratched’s adopted brother—Edmund Tolleson, a man accused of murdering several priests—is a prisoner at the hospital, which is why she wanted a job there so badly. Over the course of the series, Ratched plots Edmund’s escape through a series of behind-the-scenes chess moves that leads to her becoming the head of the hospital. The viewer also learn that Edmund and Ratched were abused as orphans, which explains their monstrous behavior as adults. In the end, however, Edmund turns on Ratched when he learns that she plotted to kill him when she realized there was nothing that could be done to free him.
So that’s the run down on Ratched. Now back to our previous questions: Is Ratched on Netflix based on a true story and is Nurse Ratched or the hospital real? Read on to find out.
Image: Courtesy of Netflix.
Is Ratched based on a true story?
Sorry to disappoint. But Ratched on Netflix is not based on a true story. The series is, however, based on Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Jack Nicholson in 1975. The series serves as the origin story for Nurse Ratched, who is referred to in the book as the Big Nurse. In the book, which takes place about 20 years after the events of Ratched, Nurse Ratched is the head nurse of the asylum who exercises her tyrannical reign on any patients who disobey her. At the end of the book, Nurse Ratched is almost choked to death by one of the patients. Though she survives and has the patient lobotomized, the attack leaves her without the ability to speak—and thus, she’s unable to intimidate her patients.
Though Ratched isn’t based on a true story, there is still a real-life inspiration for Nurse Ratched. In an interview with The New York Times in 2001, Kesey said that he based Nurse Ratched from a nurse he worked with at a psychiatric ward before he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the interview, Kesey revealed that he ran into the nurse who inspired Nurse Ratched at an aquarium in Newport, Oregon, after the release of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. ‘‘Do you remember me, ‘Nurse Ratched?'” Kesey said the IRL Nurse Ratched asked him when they crossed paths.
Image: Courtesy of Berkley Publishers.
But what about the asylum where Nurse Ratched works? Well, that was inspired by a real place too. In The New York Times interview, Kesey revealed that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was inspired by two part-time jobs he had while he was graduate student at Stanford University. The first job was as a night-shift orderly at a psychiatric ward, while the other was as a subject for a medical research project testing LSD and other drugs, which he said allowed him to see from the perspective of his patients.
Kesey died in 2001, long before Ratched premiered on Netflix. So it’s hard to say if any of the dangerous aspects of Nurse Ratched (the murders, the killer brother, etc.) are based on real life. Though we don’t know for sure, we suspect that those parts were fictionalized by Ryan Murphy, a.k.a. the mind behind FX’s American Horror Story franchise.
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