A Beautiful Mind

From the opening scene through to the closing credits; John Nash is the epitome of ‘the misunderstood genius.’ Anything but outgoing, John Nash is an uptight and anxious man with anything but an open mind when it comes to his relationship with other characters in the biopic. His only true friends are his hallucinations and the young woman Alicia who later becomes his wife. While their relationship is on tenterhooks for the latter part of the film she continued to hope that it was not only feasible but likely that Nash would recover and become once again the man she married. She looks for his conformation in this when she states that, “she needed to believe that something extraordinary was possible.”

Everything about John Nash is peculiar, his dialogue, his actions and his belief that he is the only true original. The manner in which he tries to formulate his ‘original idea’ is one of the key components in the early stage of the biopic. It reveals his true character as he watches a woman get mugged and chases pigeons around in the hope of extracting an algorithm to define their movement. When he finally comes up with the ‘original idea’ he has being trying to devise for years in the hope of becoming someone that “Matters,” he relates it to the best way in which to get laid. Yet at the same time shows no emotion or seems to have any concern for the welfare of others. This is epitomised when Nash confesses that his first grade teacher told him “he was born with two helpings of brain but only half a helping of heart.” This shows the viewer that being eccentric is nothing new to Nash who has, in fact been outlandish all of his life.

The foregrounded characteristics of John Nash in the opening scene are that of awkwardness, his distrusting nature and his lack of interaction with other characters especially other scholars and professors. He is portrayed as a loner, with his unusual mannerisms and scepticism for other people and his odd habit of not eating in the...