1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on the 1962 novel by Ken Kesey, can be read allegorically in its depiction of the struggle of rebel Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) against the arbitrary restrictions imposed by the humorless Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher) on the hopeless inmates of an insane asylum, the institution microcosmically standing for a dysfunctionally inhibited America as countercultural martyr McMurphy breaks its rules and disrupts the stodginess of the WASP establishment personified by Ratched. The less serious and less successful 1989 film The Dream Team, written by Jon Connolly and David Loucka and directed by Howard Zieff, presents a revision of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest concept for the eighties, expanding the scope of the subtext to geopolitics in the process.

The Dream Team opens with an elderly, very ethnic-looking accordionist (Bill Goffi) singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, the film’s first indication that the titular dream, though American in exoteric setting, will be Zionist in content. Whereas an unfeeling harshness dictates the daily routine of the inmates in the first film, the mental patients in the American microcosm of The Dream Team benefit from the care of the compassionate Dr. Jeffrey Weitzman (Dennis Boutsikaris), Jewish ascendancy having introduced a new sensitivity and openness into the nation’s life. Dr. Weitzman, unlike Mildred Ratched, has confidence in his patients’ capacity for individual growth and rehabilitation, and as a sign of his optimism has taken his “team” of maniacs off their medications, deeming the phase of their countercultural processing complete. Weitzman’s name calls to mind Chaim Weizmann, chemist, Zionist leader, and first president of the state of Israel, a significance confirmed when Dr. Weitzman, after witnessing a man’s murder, disappears from a gas station on 48th Street in New York City – the Jewish state having been established in 1948 in the midst of the oil-rich Middle East – and is further enhanced by the detail that “Dr. Weitzman doesn’t have any family” – an allusion to the purported annihilation of six million Jews during the Second World War. “Father, forgive us, for we have sinned. We parked our car in a forbidden zone,” one character apostrophizes, ostensibly referring to the gas station on 48th Street, but possibly also referring to the Zionist project’s hostile geographic context.

Catastrophe befalls the doctor after he successfully lobbies to take his unit of convalescent “lab rats” off the premises of the Cedarbrook asylum in Trenton on a field trip to attend a Yankees game. In opposing his skeptical colleagues at the institution – the isolationists – Weitzman is making the case for overseas adventurism, deeming his therapy group of “four major league psychotics”, as The Dream Team’s trailer dubs them, sufficiently advanced in their treatment for a mission abroad, the eighties more generally witnessing a rehabilitation of triumphalist military themes in American cinema. The quartet represents a set of useful types for the neoconservative agenda: Henry Sikorsky (Christopher Lloyd, whose presence in the cast alludes to his earlier role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) is an inveterate rule-follower infatuated with authority; Albert Ianuzzi (Stephen Furst) is a TV-watching boob and patriotic sports fan who only communicates in parroted inanities like “Now, a word from our sponsor” and “Nobody does it like Sara Lee”; Jack McDermott (Peter Boyle) is a Jesus freak with messianic delusions; and William Caufield (Michael Keaton), whose name links him with J.D. Salinger’s countercultural antihero Holden Caulfield, is a pseudo-rebel with a violent temper and a tendency to falsify his past. Dr. Weitzman, observing William’s enjoyment of Henry Fonda’s omnipresent-avenger speech in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), deems his patient “one of the last of the great idealists”. Turning on the radio in the van as he drives them to the stadium, Dr. Weitzman plies his patients with “Hit the Road Jack”, the Ray Charles song reinforcing Weitzman’s subtextual insistence that the period of post-Vietnam pessimism has drawn to a close, the Zionist’s injunction to America now being: “don’t you come back [i.e., retreat from the global arena] no more”. “We’re a team,” Weitzman insists, reassuring the obsessive-compulsive Henry, “You’re gonna find out that chaos is okay.”

Significantly, the game that occasions the group’s field trip is baseball, “America’s pastime” and a sport appropriately imbued with Judeo-Masonic symbolism. Played on a field in the shape of a diamond like the one defined by the Masonic square and compass and involving multiple iterations of the sacred numbers three and nine, baseball was partly popularized in the United States by Theosophist Abner Doubleday and Freemasons including Alexander Cartwright [1]. “The whole point of this game […] is to return home,” contributes religious scholar Paul Nathanson:

The highest achievement is a “home run”. That is, the expert player hits the ball, leaves “home plate”, runs past a series of bases (each of which represents a kind of trial, or test), and returns to “home plate”. No matter how secular and trivial, this pattern corresponds to others that are deeply rooted in American culture. The biblical paradigm of exile and return comes to mind here. The symbolic parallel is so obvious, in fact, that it is usually unnoticed. […]

It is also understood, moreover, as a microcosmic passage of the immortal soul from eternity (or Eden), through the vicissitudes of time (that is, the life cycle), to eternity (which is either Eden or the heavenly Jerusalem). [2]

“That baseball became most popular in America during periods of foreign war lends even more symbolic gravity to the notion of coming Home. It might be said that baseball is the perpetual drumbeat keeping time through American history,” suggests Abe Stein in The Atlantic before adding that “Home is an altar. It is protected. It is defended. It is cleaned. Home plate represents the sacred amidst the profane” and also permitting himself to muse: “We’re left wondering, whose home does Home represent?” [3].

Subtly enhancing the strangeness of The Dream Team is William Caufield’s thematic connection to Holden Caulfield, protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye – a book that Joseph Atwill has convincingly argued is imbued with Masonic symbolism. Holden cherishes a baseball glove that had belonged to his deceased brother, and both characters break windows in outbursts of frustration. The words “Fuck you”, in the form of graffiti or uttered insult, haunt both The Catcher in the Rye and The Dream Team, as well. More sinisterly, Atwill notes that “among the assassins purportedly in possession of Catcher in the Rye were three of the most famous in history,” elaborating:

Mark David Chapman, after he had shot and killed John Lennon, calmly opened his copy of Catcher in the Rye and proceeded to read it before being apprehended. John Hinckley was also carrying the book while attempting to kill Ronald Reagan. It is alleged that Lee Harvey Oswald had a copy in his apartment and that it was one of his favorite books, though this is disputed.

The strange cluster of individuals in possession of the book at the time they assassinated a famous person have led some to speculate that the book is somehow a trigger for “mind controlled” subjects, as was the case for the assassin who was depicted in the book and film The Manchurian Candidate. [4]

“It’s a conspiracy,” a police officer mocks William while fingerprinting him. “Is this the one,” another officer taunts, “with the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald?” “I’m really sorry,” William tells Dr. Weitzman after throwing a chair into a window, going on to evoke the spectral background presence of sixties weirdness: “I just flashed back to ‘Nam.” Ken Kesey, whose work distantly inspires The Dream Team, participated in the CIA’s MKULTRA program and was a key agent of the counterculture, contributing yet another faint echo of oddness. Compulsive liar William also boasts of being in possession of “classified” information.

Multiple details in the screenplay hint at the relevance of The Dream Team to world events, such as a television broadcast that juxtaposes news of foreign unrest with a report on the four fugitive mental patients, who roam New York in a series of misadventures in search of their doctor, whom two corrupt policemen intend to murder. “Where did you go to take that piss,” Albert is quizzed: “Moscow?” In an earlier scene, William patronizes a ping-pong opponent: “If you ever work up a serve to go with that backhand, it’s gonna be a dark day in Peking, babe.” Indicating the specifically martial nature of the story’s geopolitical subtext is a scene in which the four patients visit a military surplus store. “This is probably the nicest Army-Navy store I’ve ever been in,” William jives, “and I’ve been in every branch of the service, so I know what I’m talkin’ about, right?” “Yeah, your friends look like they’ve seen a little action, too,” says the proprietor (Jack Duffy). Acknowledging the neoconservative agenda of the group’s mission to rescue Dr. Weitzman, William explains, “we’re a special combat unit with the United States Marine Corps and we’ve been tracking some Libyan terrorists. In fact, I think we’ve got ‘em trailed to a bagel shop around the corner.” The outcome of their Israeli-dictated adventure will finally bring, as TV-programmed Albert will find himself deluded, “Another win for the Yanks!”

Weitzman’s rival psychiatrists, at the film’s conclusion, have switched places with the mental patients, who set out on another spree as their former WASP captors and detractors, Dr. Verboven (MacIntyre Dixon) and Dr. Talmer (Jack Gilpin), are confined as lunatics through a piece of trickery. Heading into the new, post-Cold War order, Dr. Weitzman appears to have sold his newly confident patients on field trips as a way of life, with a series of Arab League games looming not too distant.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Hadley, Noel Joshua. “The Sacred Geometry of Baseball: A Masonic Ritual”. The Unexpected Cosmology (November 10, 2020): https://archive.is/yk1KV

[2] Nathanson, Paul. Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991, p. 330.

[3] Stein, Abe. “How Home Plate Lives Up to Its Name”. The Atlantic (March 31, 2014): https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/how-home-plate-lives-up-to-its-name/359824/

[4] Atwill, Joseph. “The Freemason in the Rye”. Postflaviana (March 4, 2015): https://postflaviana.org/freemason-rye/