For this review paper I am going to analyze the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind based on the real-life story of John Nash. John Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia. The setting of the film took place in Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1950 and in the Massachusetts Institute of technology in Cambridge from 1951 to 1959. A Beautiful Mind illustrates many of the topics relating to psychological disorders. The main character of the film is John Nash played by actor Russell Crowe. Nash is a brilliant mathematician who suffers from symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. His symptoms include paranoid delusions, grandiosity, and disturbed perceptions. The disease disrupts his social relationships, his studies, and his work. The more stressful his life becomes the more his mind is not able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Alongside Nash is his wife Alicia Nash who was at one time a student of his. Parcher is the Defense Department agent who has been imagined by John Nash. And lastly, Charles, who was Nash's college roommate, but in reality he was just another figment of Nash's imagination.
Nash's first hallucination is in his college dorm room when his drunken roommate Charles appears. Charles always pushed Nash to focus on the many other aspects of life rather than just studying. In the movie, Charles Persuaded Nash to go to the local watering hole and grab a beer. Strangely enough, that is when he was able to finally relax his mind. Ultimately, that is what led to him achieving his ultimate goal of coming up with an "original idea". This led to his future at M.I.T. In his new position at M.I.T., Nash is given a class to teach in addition to his personal research. Eventually Nash finds himself as a highly respected code breaker and does confidential work for the Pentagon and Wheeler Defense Laboratories. Around the same time he finds the love of his life in the class he teaches. Although his stressful job interferes with this relationship, Nash and Alicia decide to stay together. Just as the relationship between Nash and Alicia progresses, so do his disease and delusions. His second hallucination in this movie is a man who he refers to as Big Brother, also known as William Parcher. He first sees Parcher out of the corner of his eye on one of his trips to the Pentagon. It is at that point that Parcher approaches Nash about a confidential job in which his lack of personal connection would be an advantage. In my opinion, this is just a way of the brain subconsciously rationalizing the fact that Nash was so disconnected from his peers. The job involves cracking codes that are supposed to lead to information about a conspiracy involving the Soviet Union bombing the U.S. Nash's work with Parcher brings him further into the delusions and causes his reality to completely disintegrate. Nash goes as far as to drop off packages to a fake government mailbox. He starts to feel like he is being followed everywhere he goes. HE goes as far as to believe that everyone wearing a red tie is a communist and they are establishing their own government. This causes Nash to become so stressed that he brings back the delusions of Parcher and his young niece in order to help him cope. Nash's new wife Alicia realizes her husband's condition one night when he comes home a mess and completely loses it when she turns on the lights in their apartment, screaming that the Russians will find them. Nash loses it on stage in the middle of a presentation at a math convention, and a psychiatrist sedates him and brings him to a mental institution. There he is diagnosed as schizophrenic and undergoes extensive shock therapy five times a week for ten weeks and is prescribed medication that helped rid him of his hallucinations. Unfortunately his medication disrupts his relationship with his wife almost as much as his delusions did in the first place. For example, he couldn't respond to his wife in bed, he
