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Essay / Overview of the film, A Beautiful Mind
Table of ContentsFilm AnalysisPersonal OpinionConclusion Film AnalysisA Beautiful Mind is a biographical drama directed by Ron Howard in 2001. Critics received it positively and some time later, psychologists started using it. for educational purposes. The film is based on a true story. It depicts the life of John Nash, a prominent paranoid schizophrenic mathematician. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The main character is truly a genius, but unfortunately, that doesn't mean he can't suffer from mental illness .He suffers from schizophrenia and suffers from some of the symptoms characteristic of such a diagnosis, namely paranoid ideas, hallucinations, delusional thoughts and distorted perception of reality. This disorder has a great impact on John's daily life, on his relationships with friends and family as well as on his work. Schizophrenia is a very serious and incurable mental illness. It affects many people and does not depend on race, economic group or age. People who suffer from it have disorganized minds, behavior, and speech. They usually see, feel or hear things that are not real. In most cases, the symptoms of schizophrenia appear around the age of 20 or earlier, but in the film they appear when Nash is 30 years old. John Nash's main problem is his lack of ability to distinguish what is real and what is not. Anyway, he solved the problem very carefully and accurately. The film itself is a good depiction of a mental disorder and that is why it is suitable for researching different psychological concepts and topics. Interestingly, A Beautiful Mind not only tells the story of a schizophrenic, but also describes the effect of this disorder on the family, how it causes the breakdown of reputation and the ability to combine schizophrenia and genius. To understand the main idea of the film and the peculiarities of this case of schizophrenia, you need to familiarize yourself with the plot of the film. At the beginning of the film, John is a typical Princeton University student. He shares his room with another student Charles who quickly becomes his good friend. John is presented as an unsociable person; he skips classes and likes to “hang out” with numbers rather than with other people. He doesn't know how to communicate with women and they find him brutal and rude. As a student, John Nash began working on his game theory, which would later become the most important of all his works. After graduating, Nash began working as a professor of calculus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He thinks his lessons are useless but the students love them and listen very attentively to everything he explains. Once he gives his students a difficult task to complete and later one of the students, Alicia, comes to his office to discuss it and present her solution. Eventually, the young people fell in love and got married. They seem to have a happy family, live calmly, but at some point everything changes. Nash's world turns upside down after he visits Charles, his friend who works at Princeton. After meeting a friend and his niece, John meets a man in black who works for the Department of Defense. The latter entrusts John with the task of decoding the messages from the Soviets implanted in numerous newspapers and magazines. This man also says that he must work in secret and therefore must submit his reports to an anonymous mailbox. John follows all instructions but he understandsthat it is not right and that it can have a negative impact on his life. Exhausted by everything that is happening to him, John becomes paranoid and his wife realizes this. Alicia doesn't know what to do. She wonders what is the cause of her husband's strange actions. She calls a psychiatric hospital and asks for help. The doctors take Nash to the hospital to try to explain to him that he is sick and needs treatment. Nash thinks all these men are Soviet agents and doesn't believe them until Alicia shows him all the documents considered "top secret." So John faces the truth and understands that all his work for the government was just a hallucination. He accepts the truth as it is and lets himself be helped by psychiatrists. After much painful shock therapy, Nash leaves the hospital and begins living at home, where he must take special antipsychotic medications. These pills suppress his feelings and emotions and one day he stops taking them. Before long, his delusions return. He does everything the agent tells him and continues to decode the secret messages. Once Alicia finds out that Nash has restarted his "work for the government" and tries to reassure him again about its nonexistence, but the schizophrenic's behavior makes her leave the house and run away. John sees Charles and his niece and at that precise moment, he understands that they are just delusions since they have always been the same age. This episode is the climax of the film which marks the beginning of John's struggle with himself and harsh reality. Nash realizes that the best outcome is to ignore the delusions and live an ordinary life. He thanks them all for the memories and asks not to bother him anymore. Nash begins working with library students and completes his work on game theory. He is allowed to teach again. One day, a man comes to Nash and informs him that he is going to receive the Noble Prize for his game theory. Their conversation is the most moving moment of the film, as the professor's colleagues pay tribute to him by offering him their pens. Eventually, he won the Nobel Prize and gave a moving speech to the audience and his wife, who managed to stay with him despite all the ups and downs of life. Speaking of John's relationships with others and his influence on them, I can say that throughout the film he is shown as a socially withdrawn and awkward person. He communicates with his friends and Alicia but apart from them, he sees and hears his friend Charles, his niece and the Ministry of Defense agent, who are not real. Nevertheless, they are very vivid and real to the main character and definitely influence his life and behavior. When he loses his reputation, the students become afraid of him and cannot accept him and his genius. To people, John Nash is just a crazy man diagnosed with schizophrenia. The film A Beautiful Mind depicts the integration of a sick person into society and shows how to cope with mental illness. John's delusions are very complex in character. As for me, they symbolize certain hidden traits of his character as well as his intentions. Charles is a symbol of John's desire to communicate, but he seems completely unsociable. The character of Charles' niece tells of her innocence and desire to learn new information about the world. Finally, William Parcher is a symbol of John's adventurism and his desire to apply his "beautiful mind" to practice. In describing the problem, one cannot help but describe the effect of John's illness on his wife Alicia. She's definitely hurt by it more than anyone else. She suffers great emotional stress and feels helpless, as there is nothing she can do to cope with John's schizophrenia. This evidence from the film..