A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind (DreamWorks LLC and Universal, 2001)

Through eyes that read the book first

Heroes are often, as mythologist Joseph Campbell has emphasized, people who undertake a journey, face great odds, and live to tell about it. Shamans are often featured in myths, but they are usually individuals who are obligated to serve society. They have a different kind of glory. They often must accept lower standards than the rest of the group, just to be accepted, since the demands placed upon them are dire. Should they fail, they can be mocked, ridiculed, driven into exile, treated like clowns, and even killed.
Mythologists tend to look backwards in time and evaluate legends from different places and contexts. Rarely do they look at the mid-twentieth century for good source material since it is still too close to us for objectivity. If a generation is limited to thirty years, then the end of World War II (presumably 1945) occurred less than two generations ago. There was a romantic movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the West that was marked by a strong re-emerging interest in myths that had been long forgotten. This increased in the years preceding the world wars, and mythology was indeed blamed for the racial movements of the time, including the rise of the Third Reich. Animators like George Lucas and Walt Disney used animation in a radical new answer to the broadening interest in myth.

Enter Dr. John Nash, the subject of the book “A Beautiful Mind” by Sylvia Nasar and the movie by the same name. The movie is a stark piece of revisionist fancy that should by no means assume the title of the book, because there is so little factual or structural similarity between the two. When one imagines the Cold War, the icons that come to mind are most often the Dr. Strangelovian characters of cinema, yet it is rarely realized how soon the fifties followed the forties, or what a scary time the fifties were for a lot of people. Indeed, for a great many people, the Great War was still continuing in its manifold forms, only magnified and more dreadful, more sinister. It is still too close in time to speak of the war without giving offense or causing tears for some.
The losses and catastrophes were so great that the whole period has remained a black cancer in the story of humanity, and it would seem that scientists were anything but heroes here. So, the American cinema paraded them throughout the fifties and created a particular mythos that seemed to diminish all previous attempts at fantasy fiction. The parents and grandparents of the baby-boomers needed piсatas to lighten the horror behind the faзade of optimism, and for this there would be many willing participants, many freaks and Boo Radleys and not a few geniuses to haul from their dormitories and laboratories and burn in the public square. After all, haven’t all geniuses throughout history had bizarre personalities, except perhaps Albert Einstein?
Dr. Nash is a mathematic genius and he knows it. He is severe with just about every man he meets and is practically begged by the world’s premiere center for mathematical research; the Princeton Mathematics Department, to join them. He enters the world scene right after an estimated 40 million people (1/5 of the total war casualties of the 20th century) were erased off the face of the earth within the space of five years, in a war termed “The War of Doctors,” since half of Germany’s doctors were members of the Nazi party. Nash is invited to research for pay with Einstein and some of the brightest mathematicians in the world. So elite is this small group of academics that assignments are rarely given and largely unnecessary (just to satisfy the administration), –grades are immaterial, a pointless contrivance. Dr. Nash even takes the opportunity to lecture Einstein for two hours on a radical new approach to quantum physics. Einstein is impressed by his ideas but tells him he has a lot more to learn about physics. Where is all this in the movie? It is left out.

Nash soon gets hired at the RAND Corporation, located in Santa Monica, California. The movie, however, somehow mistakes this for the Pentagon. RAND is the most paranoid and bizarre entity humankind has ever invented, and Sylvia Nasar elucidates this perfectly in the book. She informs the reader that von Neumann, the Hungarian genius and fixture at RAND, was the direct inspiration for Kubrick’s character Dr. Strangelove. Von Neumann and Nash indeed butt heads throughout their careers, if the book is to be believed, but this clash-of-the-titans is missing from the movie entirely. Wouldn’t that have been entertaining?

In fact, there is so much missing from the movie that the movie and the biographical novel seem like two totally different stories, with two entirely different Doctors Nash. Reading Nasar’s passages, it is hard to fathom that such an institute as RAND ever existed. The brightest of the academic elite–Von Neumann, Kahn, Oppenheimer, among many others, were being paid to develop good approximations of what the very Apocalypse might be like. The two most dangerous technologies had just been discovered; nuclear physics and genetics, and hallucinogenic experiments were just being devised by organizations such as the CIA. Amidst this incredibly intelligent, committed, intensely competitive and paranoid environment, Nash develops excellent theories, is highly regarded in an intellectual and professional way, gets married and does pretty well for himself. All this is left out of the movie. But he becomes schizophrenic (a recent term, as in 20th century, from the domain of speculative psychiatry) in the course of a month or two, with no discernable cause and scantly reliable psychological speculation, and this point is in the movie, at the expense, it would seem, of all other relevant points of interest.

The movie has a scene in which Dr. Nash is refused a faculty position at Princeton, yet the book never mentions such a rejection of any kind. Rather, everyone is interested in his work–they want him to come work for them despite his oddities and competitiveness, despite his ill, comical reputation! Indeed, he is given the high esteem that the movie claims he was denied. This is why he is allowed, despite his bizarre behavior and periodic stays in psychiatric hotels, to become a tragicomical fixture at Princeton for about thirty years following his first diagnosis. They tolerate him out of respect, in the same way that some of the 400,000 American “psychiatric casualties” may have been tolerated if they were lucky enough.

What good can be said of Nash? He’s not too popular — he’s living in dorms with a motley crew who would by today’s standards not even be classified as nerds-proper. These are brainy young men of great intelligence and significant scholastic achievements living in cramped all-male dorms in identical garb, and they release tension by playing pranks that often devolve into physical conflicts. Nash has no time for baloney in this intellectually intense and demanding environment, in an extreme sense, and no tolerance of ignorance or even small talk. He ignores questions and the people asking them if they seem irrelevant. His harshness tends to fuel the group and urge them on. He is rude and dismisses idle talk. He has a flat affect. People speak ill of his personality, but he meets two or three people who become friends in a deep intellectual and emotional way. Despite these intense friendships, Nash is barely cohabitating with an odd assortment of geniuses of eccentric taste and temperament, many of whom are more culturally sophisticated than he is. Nash, the simpleton, has never seen Europe though he has a fondness for French culture. He is, after all, from a small town in the Appalachians where independence and self-reliance were cultivated in order to overcome the depression. He claims to have good genes, in keeping with the trend of his generation, which was generally overly concerned with heredity.
Ultimately, Nash is a salaried employee with top security clearance at the most intensely private and most important department within the United States Government. The movie makes this out to be Nash’s delusion, which is a smack in the face to both Dr. Nash and Sylvia Nasar, his biographer. Nash is working at such an agency at this time–it is no figment of his imagination! After all, Nash will succeed in making “game theory” a field all it’s own, and later win the Nobel Prize for his economic revelations, one of which enables the multi-billion dollar FCC bandwidth industry to develop.

Game theory is prided on being able to predict all possible outcomes of competitive situations. It is an effort at solving the problem of 20th century warfare, if it can even be called warfare anymore. Not only this, but Nash is using the word “hackers” in the fifties, long before it became a buzzword. He coined the term, yet the movie somehow misconstrues this as “hack!” Nash must have shuddered in the audience. Dr. Nash has feelings of being tremendously powerful or divine, not unlike Oppenheimer or Einstein or other pioneers in nuclear physics did. In literary circles, J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, who has been judged by numerous polls to be the “Author of the Century,” believed he was rediscovering ancient worlds via linguistics, perhaps like a medium, to the lasting disdain of the literary intelligentsia.
Tolkien can be likened to Nash in so far as they were both great specialists and geniuses venturing far beyond the normal domains of their respective fields. Yet when the motion picture industry tries to popularize these greats, it doesn’t even get the simple and remedial facts straight. Both the reality of Nash’s life and the ornate fiction of Tolkien become blurred and obscured in the process, the corpus of their genius drawn from their solitary resting places and abused.
Nash conveys his frantic political concerns to others in disturbing ways, such as by writing letters to world leaders about starting a new global government. The very nature of his profession is, however, primarily to concern itself with the question of world government! Nuclear power must be managed, allocated. It is the highest stratum of both the emerging, chic school of political science, as well as of higher mathematics and game theory in particular. Nash is an avid fan of science fiction, which is also just emerging in full bloom in the early fifties. These are scary times, and writers like Rod Serling and H.P. Lovecraft provide a direly needed distraction. The whole world is reeling from the discovery of the atom bomb, scrambling to adapt. It could be surmised that Nash had an impetus to succeed that was so unbearable and drastic that he could not bear reality anymore, but this is a rather scatalogical viewpoint. Nash was under pressure from not just himself, most severely, but from humanity itself. Primitive notions of reality ceased to be relevant. Everything was new, for what remained of the world of just a generation ago?

The book never mentions an imaginary roommate and child, but these fictitious inventions somehow become the centerpiece of the motion picture, pointless and bizarre. Nor does the book ever describe any blackboard scene at the Pentagon where Nash must glare for hours to decipher a Soviet code from a batch of numbers. It didn’t happen. It is put there to entertain in place of what should be the historical narrator’s integrity. It is largess from the cutting room. I don’t doubt that he could do such a feat if it was placed upon him–his genius is indeed at that awesome level of functionality, as was von Neumann’s.

Perhaps the creators of the movie had other sources, but it is more likely that they improvised due to pressures from above, to meet the bottom line, to dumb it down. Most of the letters Nash wrote to people during his schizophrenic episodes concerned the formation of a secret society, numerology, and prophesy, etc. These topics are much more common place and accepted today than at his time in American culture. The creation of an imaginary roommate and murderous federal agent don’t just diminish the truth, they obscure it. These bland fixtures try to make the story entertaining and the humor is lost. Sadly, if they had at least insisted on being half-faithful to the accuracies of the book, the humor and honesty would have shown through by default! Ironically, humor and honesty are two qualities the movie sorely lacks. In the book, the feds are the ones Nash works for day-in and day-out. Any deviation from normal behavior causes severe suspicions, and any number of agencies could have very well been targeting Dr. Nash for any number of economic or military reasons. Nazis were likely scrambling for nuclear intelligence.

The book states that Nash’s wife calls the medical authorities first, who then proceed to place him in even more bizarre surroundings, in an institution. This is a major turning point in his life. The insanity of his environment seems to at last creep into him, through his pores. In the book, it is difficult to draw a line between the insanity of his personality and of the world in general. The movie, however, tends to stack the odds against him, to put all the coins on one side of the scale. Now it is not the world that is insane; it is he that is deemed insane by the world he has been serving. One instant, he’s on the faculty of an agency with the paramount mission to save the human race from disaster by foreseeing all possible situations and outcomes…in total secrecy. The next, he’s in McLean Hospital, the abode of Sylvia Plath, sitting with Robert Lowell, who did most of the talking, according to Plath.

Hollywood’s strange relationship with psychiatry seems to have almost backfired here, or somehow reversed its flow. The insulin-treatments are realistic, (perhaps a first), but something just doesn‘t click. The book gets the irony of the sequence of Dr. Nash’s major life events across to the reader in a palatable comic twist that reveals the hilarity of not necessarily Dr. Nash himself, but of his environment as well, in a kind way, without mockery. Dr. Nash’s world consists of not one, but two insane environments (RAND and the asylums) that affect him powerfully and tragically, and comically too, within the space of one lifetime. Nasar illustrates this in her book, but the movie does not convey this at all, which is a tragedy for the Nobel-winning mathematician.

If I was the director (Ron Howard), I would say to everyone “OK people, we have to get this across for the movie to be successful. I don’t care if the props suck, or if the acting isn‘t there, lets focus on the environment. This is the fifties. Lets respect the role his environment played, without disrespecting Dr. Nash’s character or ridiculing him, because this film will become nihilistic if we don’t acknowledge the insanity of his world along with the positive contributions and self-sacrifice the real Dr. Nash has made for his country and for humankind as well.”

Instead, the movie proclaims his insanity, no holds barred. It doesn’t even attempt to get across the supreme power of psychiatry during the time period, (the “Golden Age of psychiatry”) or even the zeitgeist of his work environment. There is no feeling of being in the fifties. There are no scenes of the RAND Institute. There is no social twitchiness. No funny or unexpected juxtapositions, no before and after. Instead, the integrity of the narration itself is attacked in a way that dulls the film’s impetus. Can it be that stories of insanity no longer grab the viewer’s attention span, and the makers of the movie were anxiously anticipating this, cutting and revising and inventing falsehoods? It would appear so. Regardless, the movie ends up being so far removed from the biographical that one can only wonder what the makers’ intent really was…

I don’t know if Campbell ever heard of Dr. Nash, but if he did, he would probably describe him as a hero and shaman who went beyond the normal domain of human consciousness and wound up in a schism that tore him apart. Or the great mythologist might declare that the would-be shaman was reduced and driven into exile, or that a man can be a warrior or a shaman, but not both. I can only speculate if Campbell would venture to say that the sphinx has been defeated or the wizard was reduced to a clown, or… the lion pretends to be dead.
At the very least, the institution of psychiatry should not be honored for seeking to destroy an asset to the American people. It should be made clear that an individual was destroyed, a man was broken, and the group suffered as a result. Princeton canonizes him to this day, as does the Nobel Institute. So should the motion picture industry, if it has any compunction to honor those who have fallen in combat or been wounded in heavy action during times of need.

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About Indiana Jones Films

Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford, was first introduced in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in 1936. He is portrayed as an adventurous throwback to the 1930s film serial treasure hunters, with an alter ego of Doctor Jones, a respected archaeologist at a New England college. In this first adventure, he is pitted against the Nazis, traveling the world to prevent them from recovering the Ark of the Covenant (see also Biblical archaeology). The Nazis are led by Indy’s arch rival, a French archaeologist named Belloq.

The 1984 prequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, set in 1935, took the character into a more horror-oriented story, skipping his legitimate teaching job and globe trotting, and taking place almost entirely in India. This time, Jones attempts to recover children from a bloodthirsty cult.

The third film, 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, set in 1938, returned to the formula of the original, reintroducing characters such as Sallah and Marcus Brody, a scene from Professor Jones’ classroom, the globe trotting element of multiple locations, and the return of the infamous Nazi mystics, this time trying to find the Holy Grail. The film’s introduction, set in 1912, provided some back story to the character’s fear of snakes, the scar on his chin (from the bullwhip incident in the lion car of a train) and his trademark fedora. The title is ironically fitting as, although Lucas intended at the time to do five films, this ended up being his “last crusade” for over 18 years, until Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

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