A Beautiful Mind

5 Pages 1178 Words

Einstein, Hemmingway, Van Gough. These are some of the most gifted and talented minds ever to grace the earth. Were they normal? No, in fact they were far from. Each had weaknesses of his own. Einstein was known to be a little crazy. Hemmingway enjoyed throwing one back every now and again. And Van Gough was deeply depressed for years. So can these men still be geniuses despite their conditions? If so, than was the great John Nash brilliant as well or simply insane? In Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, John Nash is depicted as a brilliant outlandish mathematician. His bizarre behavior and gifted strategies for solving equations led him to a path of success and achievement, however several people found him to be quite unorthodox. Their curiosities became suspicions that ultimately led to the conclusion of his paranoid schizophrenia. His paranoid thoughts of conspiracy and war were all just images in his mind. So does this make him crazy? Does this affect his credibility as a genius? Or on the contrary, does this boost his credibility? If insanity, alcoholism, and depression can’t prohibit people from being brilliant, why should schizophrenia be any different? By having such detailed characters as simply a figment of his imagination, does this make Nash delusional or even more brilliant?
Throughout the film, Nash’s ability to separate fantasy from reality becomes more and more challenging. His delusions of conspiracy against him develop into something more than he could handle. After his admittance into the mental hospital, he learns that everything he’s believed in over the past 10 years was not dead or gone, but in fact never existed. Nash remains locked up with the thoughts and fears that everyone is after him, even his own wife. At one point, she reveals to him that these people he believes to be real are nothing more than images in his mind. Following weeks of medication and intensive shock therapy John begins to str...