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"A Beautiful Mind": Take Two Trifluoperazines before Bedtime and Call Me in the Morning
Summary: A scholarly view of the use of schizophrenia to manipulate the audience's point of view in the film "A Beautiful Mind," starring Russell Crowe. The audience at first accompanies mathematician John Nash on his various adventures, but later discovers along with Nash that his experiences are not real, thus breaking the sense of trust and fellowship between Nash and the audience. Finally, as Nash has a relapse and returns to his adventures, the audience sees his experiences with an objective perspective, enabling them to draw their own conclusions about the horrors of schizophrenia.
Perspective, when used correctly, can be the defining element of a story. Stories, and especially films, often rely on characters to guide the audience through the plot. When the perspective of a character is twisted and manipulated, the emotions and presumptions of the audience are twisted as well. In the Ron Howard film, A Beautiful Mind, the two perspectives of mathematician John Nash, one psychotic, the other authentic, are used to direct the assumptions of the audience. This is an effective way of using perspective to convey the reality of schizophrenia, because the audience can know only what it is told, and when information is made up, left out, or altered by the delusional schizophrenic John Nash, his two perspectives are the only ones the audience have to rely on to tell the story.
The first half of the film is, of course, almost entirely an illusion of...
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This section contains 912 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) |
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