Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
¶ … Beautiful Mind" -- a Film
John Forbes Nash, Jr., an American Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, is such a notable individual that he is the subject of a book, a PBS documentary and a film. The film A Beautiful Mind (Crowe, et al. 2006) eliminates aspects of Nash's life and rewrites other aspects revealed in the book and documentary, possibly to make Nash a more sympathetic character for the audience. However, the film remains true to a consistent theme: in an individual's quest for satisfaction through self-fulfillment, the abnormal can also be the extraordinary.
The book and PBS documentary tell John Forbes Nash, Jr.'s story "from the outside looking in," immediately noting his abnormality in that he is a paranoid schizophrenic. The film takes a different approach, "from the inside looking out," so we experience the world as Nash experiences it and do not realize until half-way through the film that he is mentally ill and delusional. We meet the college roommate, Charlie, his daughter, Marcee, and a mysterious person named William Parcher, who wants Nash to crack a top-secret code. Seeing the world through Nash's eyes, we accept all these people as real; however, about half-way through the film, we realize that Nash is imagining these people and much of his world: a little girl runs through a group of birds but none of the birds is disturbed or flies away, which makes the audience...
In this way, the film gives the audience a strong, disturbing taste of Nash's abnormality because we are repeatedly fooled just as Nash is fooled, and then realize that we have all been fooled. As the film's Dr. Rosen states, "There is nothing scarier than finding out that the people you know have not died or gone away, but were never even there to begin with" (Crowe, et al. 2006), and we have that scary experience along with Nash.
Though Nash is clearly abnormal, he is also clearly an ambitious genius. The book and documentary take some time to show that developing ambition and exceptional intellect. The film is far more direct and lays out both the ambition and the genius early on: as an exceptional mathematical student at Princeton and…
Works Cited
A Beautiful Mind. Directed by Ron Howard. Performed by Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris and Paul Bettany. 2006.
Schizophrenia: A Beautiful Mind Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by both positive and negative symptoms. Positive symptoms may include hallucinations, delusions, and irrational beliefs. Negative symptoms may include a lack of affect, social withdrawal, and depression (“Schizophrenia,” 2016). Dissociative identity disorder is a highly controversial diagnosis which involves individuals dissociating or separating aspects of themselves into different personalities (Gillig, 2009). Unlike schizophrenia, however, the individual is not delusional, and is
Beautiful Mind by Silvia Nasar: The Real Story Of Schizophrenia For anyone who has seen the film A Beautiful Mind John Nash comes across as a man troubled by schizophrenia, yet able to achieve success in his life. While his illness does cause him significant problems, he is still able to achieve greatness via his game theory, to manage a long-lasting relationship where his wife loves him unconditionally, to achieve social
Beautiful Mind Ron Howard's 2001 film A Beautiful Mind caused as much controversy over its treatment of mental illness as it did over its winning the Academy Award for best picture. Based on Sylvia Nassar's book of the same name, A Beautiful Mind chronicles the life of a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who suffered from schizophrenia, one of the most little-understood mental diseases. While the film may not have deserved the
He also has hallucinations about being followed by a federal agent, in keeping with his academic world where the government seeks on the one hand to employ mathematicians and scientists and on the other hand mistrusts them. Many of the encounters he has in his mind with this agent and others have the aura of a detective movie, showing that Nash is replaying films he has seen and that
Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard [...] John Nash's personal adaptation to his life. What human needs did he have difficulty in satisfying? How did his personal solutions to his problems explain both his genius and mental illness? Describe his role as a scientist and moral philosopher. John Nash's extraordinary life surmounted odds that many would find insurmountable. This is a testament to both his mental illness and the
Beautiful Mind The movie brought the reality of schizophrenia closer to personal experience, not only because the film is adapted from the true story of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a Mathematics genius. It is also because the sight-and-sound properties of the cinema have that distinct capability of connecting the audience to the innermost chamber of the characters' personalities and vicariously revealing their frank thoughts and feelings. One could almost feel