How exactly is nurse Ratched bad?

It's interesting to see how easily manipulated so many are by this movie. It certainly tries to portray Ratched as bad, but in reality she was doing her job. She couldn't allow such disorder in a mental hospital and the thought that McMurphy could so easily help Billy is just laughable.

A lot of people criticize the film by suggesting that Nurse Ratched "isn't that bad" or that "she was only doing her job." I felt the same the first time I saw it. This reveals an aspect of the film's brilliance: Ratched's malevolence is so subtle that the filmmakers allow the possibility for complete misinterpretation. Yes, from an administrative point of view, she seemingly does a good job, she's authoritarian without being sadistic, and she cares for the residents as long as they follow the rules. Yet she is absolutely demonic as a robotized arm of a dehumanizing system. She maintains the residents in a state of oblivion and marginalization; they are deprived of their dignity because the system sees them as subhuman.

The filmmakers and Fletcher make Nurse Ratched a more effective antagonist by showing restraint. Compare this to Faye Dunaway's over-the-top portrayal of Joan Crawford in "Mommie Dearest." Ratched isn't such an obvious sadist, yet she uses the rules to tyrannize the men and reduce them to an almost infantile state of dependency and subservience.

McMurphy, despite his obvious flaws, is the protagonist. Although he's impulsive and has a weakness for women, which got him into prison in the first place, he has a spirit of freedom & life. His problem is that he needs to learn a bit of wisdom; then he can walk in his liberty without causing unnecessary harm to himself or others.

Nurse Ratched, on the other hand, represents legal-ism, which is an authoritarian spirit obsessed with rules. This is seen when Ratched refuses to allow the ward to watch the ball game on a technicality. When McMurphy then PRETENDS to view it and works the guys up into euphoria, Ratched reacts with sourpuss disapproval. That's because legalism is the opposite of the spirit of freedom, life and joy. Legalism is all about putting on appearances and enforcing the LETTER of the law. The problem with this is that "appearances" are not about reality and, worse, "the letter kills."

She was "bad" in the same way that the modern incarnation of the Democratic Party is bad. Her priority was making patients dependent on her, not on steering them into becoming self-sufficient human beings with healthy self esteem outside the institution. Milos Forman made it very clear that he considered the mental institution directly analogous to the oppressive communism in Czechoslovakia from which he escaped.

Mentally ill people were treat as subhumans. Ratched had simply adopted this attitude because it was entrenched in the system that she worked for. Mcmurphy was not mentally ill himself and did not understand that the guys there were really sick. He did not understand mental illness because he never had it, so he viewed the system as overly authoritarian when certain aspects of it were necessary (not all of it) for a severely mentally ill person.