A Beautiful Mind?

              “Gentlemen meet John Nash, that mysterious West Virginia genius”  is our introduction to Nash at the beginning of A Beautiful Mind. Throughout the movie A Beautiful Mind, only John Nash the genius is revealed, not exposing the more mysterious John Nash the person. A Beautiful Mind is the story of a brilliant mathematician, John Nash, who is afflicted with schizophrenia. He experiences delusions of increasingly alarming grandeur and danger in which he becomes completely absorbed. He then eventually realizes they are imaginary and struggles to regains control of the tattered remains of his life. With no job and no credit, he picks up the pieces of his life and works to build up his career again, going on to win the Nobel Prize for his work in game theory. Schizophrenia, the degenerative disease Nash is afflicted with comes from the Greek word for “split mind”. This does not mean that schizophrenics have multiple personalities, but that they are in a disordered or confused mental state. Ron Howard, the director of A Beautiful Mind, chooses to inaccurately emphasize characteristics of his schizophrenia and character subtlety and concentrate on the intellectual portion of his mind that win the audience’s compassion, instead of others which he chooses to ignore so viewers will think of Nash as a tragic genius rather than the disturbed individual he really is. 

Howard chooses only characteristics of schizophrenia that would help gain the most sympathy from viewers. The most prominent include confusion, disorganized thoughts, and emotional isolation. Nash’s distressed condition evokes compassion from the audience. Nash starts off as a young man trying to “matter”, trying to make a name for himself in the

Another characteristic often emphasized throughout the movie is Nash being a social outcast. People would sympathize with the odd man out, always being made fun of by others. Though as George Hinman, a classmate of Nash’s, recalls about the other students’ attitude towards Nash, “You do what you can to make his life miserable”, this shocking attitude is mostly based on Nash’s attitude to others, rather than other people’s jealousy or cruelty. Nash’s constant insults caused many of those around him to resent him, and his only companions were those who respected his intellect over his character. In the movie Howard shows Nash occasionally hanging out with some other students, even though they make some mean jokes or comments about him. In reality Nash actively avoided social contact with most of the student population, going to the extreme of locking himself in his room. A crazed hermit as the central character is not as attractive to critics as an unfortunate genius outcast. 

Many of Nash’s unique and defining traits were ignored in order to fit into the director’s idea of a tragic genius. As Scott from the New York Times wrote, “The movie… simplifies and distorts the complex and fascinating life presented in the book”. Many key aspects of his schizophrenia were altered to be either more typical or to fit in with the story plot. Most importantly was the setting in which Nash developed his schizophrenia. Howard chose the beginning of graduate school for Nash to exhibit symptoms.  Nash was about twenty-four at this time, the typical time that most schizophrenics develop the disease. The late teen years and earlier twenties are a time of great emotional changes and may cause schizophrenia to occur. Nash was socially underdeveloped and therefore that is probably why he did not develop the disease until much later, about the time he turned thirty . Instead of having Nash develop schizophrenia with an established life with no background information, Howard chooses to start schizophrenia at the start of his intellectual life. Ron Howard also changes the symptoms Nash exhibited to make the events in the movie agree with each other. In the movie Nash formulates his equilibrium theory after receiving motivation from Charles. This is used to show a connection between his genius and his schizophrenia that is later emphasized. When Nash is put on medication, he is upset that he cannot work on math problems because of the medicine. These scenes are both contradictory to the fact that “schizophrenia affects a person’s ability to think straight”. Schizophrenics are supposed to have disorganized thoughts, and the real Nash did as well. He stopped working on math and started studying astrology and numerology, both sciences frowned down upon by most of the respectable scientific community. As well as having distinctive symptoms, he also has a unique recovery. As Sylvia Nasar writes in her book, “A spontaneous recovery from schizophrenia is so rare, particularly after so long and so severe a case as Nash experienced”. Nash’s recovery was portrayed in opposite manners as well. Ron Howard chose to have Nash slowly disconnected from his delusions. Once he realizes they are not real, he ignores them but never does seem to rid himself of them. The movie version of Nash is more typical in his schizophrenia, as a slow full recovery is normally what occurs. In real life Nash does not gradually shed his madness, but suddenly snaps out of his trance. This occurs in so few patients afflicted by schizophrenia that psychiatrists often question the original diagnosis. While the movie Nash is a textbook case of schizophrenia, the real Nash seems to defy all set rules of schizophrenia while still having the same disease.

Focusing principally on the brilliance of Nash’s intellectual mind, Howard ignores the diseased portion including his troublesome character and morals. As Tom Sells says in his review, “many feel the film has been 'Hollywoodized' or altered in such a way as to make light of darker details.” In particular these darker details include his alleged Anti-Semitism, illegitimate child, divorce, and twisted behavior. Nash was often snobbish at being “a non-Jew in a definitely Jewish atmosphere”. Nash was referring to the academic atmosphere, but also refers to the social atmosphere when he tells a fellow mathematician he looks “too Jewish” and also sent letters to him addressed to “Jewboy”. Depicting Nash as anti-Semitic would no doubt outraged and offend the audience. Nash also had a child with Eleanor Stier. He considers marrying her, but decides she is beneath him, both socially and intellectually. Because of this, he decides to marry Alicia, a physics student, instead. Nash marrying for social importance rather than love, and virtually abandoning his illegitimate son shows him as unloving, and so Howard deletes it to fit into the image of a kinder Nash. In the movie of his life, Nash stays married to Alicia during his illness. However in reality, Nash and Alicia divorced in 1962 not remarrying until thirty-eight years later, after he won the Nobel. Alicia divorced him because of fears he might become violent around their child. If the movie had shown Nash as all alone without support, it wouldn’t be so touching to watch Alicia devote herself to helping her husband. However Nash was not the quiet, shy genius as portrayed in the movie, but was a man with an unusually cruel sense of humor. Nash is depicted as a shy quiet person, while he was in fact boisterous and unruly. He often plays mean tricks such as giving excruciating painful electrical shocks to someone who touched his hands , or attempting to convince his younger sister to sit in a chair he had wired to a car battery. All these are childish ways of getting back at enemies magnified by his superior intellect. Nash is portrayed in the film as being much more emotionally mature than his fellow classmen, but he is known for his childish behavior while he is at MIT. Nash is not the sensible, calm man that Howard suggests but a troublemaker. Most of these events occur prior to the opening of the film but are edited out for better reasons other than the timeframe. Though these events happen in his younger years, and therefore could be dismissed as simply intelligent childish pranks, he continued with these dangerous tricks until they reached a lethal stage later on in college. He often thought about what “a grand joke [it would be] if he put live snakes in the chairs of some of the mathematicians”. His pranks almost escalated to being deadly when he filled the top of a lamp with water before unscrewing the bulb, causing whoever who attempted to fix the light to receive and almost certainly lethal electrical shock. These actions show someone with a twisted and sick sense of reality, and would cause naturally disgust among the audience. Nash had deeper psychological problems, as he later confesses that he “enjoyed torturing animals”. Torturing animals in youth is often associated with killers, not something viewers would enjoy seeing exemplified. Because of these connections to seriously disturbed people, Howard instead illustrates Nash as a kinder, more caring soul in order to be more appealing to viewers.

Ron Howard chose appeal over truth when using his dramatic license in creating the movie version “inspired” by Nash’s life. As Akiva Goldman, A Beautiful Mind’s screenwriter, is quoted as saying, “I wanted to evoke the grander beats of John’s life by truth but not by the way of facts.” It is surprising that you can call something truthful when you refuse to use facts as your basis. Because of Goldman’s refusal to use facts Nash’s uniquely colorful and interesting life is blurred over so as to only receive the general overview. It is supposedly a rule that “Movies would rather uplift than disturb”. Tom Sells from the Oregon Herald reinforces this point, “In my mind, to have included these details would have changed the complexion of the entire picture, making Nash less sympathetic to movie audiences.”  Ron Howard’s choice to fabricate events in Nash’s life while suppressing others deprives audience members of the truth behind what really makes up John Nash’s beautiful mind.