Truth in Filmmaking: Removing the Ugliness from A Beautiful Mind
Truth in Filmmaking: Removing the Ugliness from A Beautiful Mind
PHILIP PATTERSON
OklahomaChristianUniversity
In 1950, at the age of 22, mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. revolutionized game theory. Since the 1920s, game theorists had attempted to explain how “players,” whether friends in a poker game, nations in a strategic alliance or animals in the evolutionary cycle, make choices to contribute to an optimal result. Nash improved game theory to predict the behavior of multiple rational players in games when they hold complete knowledge of the other players’ preferences and abilities.
Nash’s theory of the “equilibrium point” in game theory has been described as the economics equivalent of Newton’s theory of gravitation or Darwin’s theory of natural selection—not only revolutionary but also so simple and necessary as to be inevitable in its discovery (Nasar 1998, 98). Today, its uses range from economics to biology to international diplomacy. It was most recently used in creating the bidding format for the successful $7 billion auction of the electronic spectrum by the U.S. government in 1994 to cooperating and competing communications conglomerates after the ill-conceived auctions of two other nations had failed.
More than 40 years later, Nash’s contribution would be recognized by the RoyalSwedishAcademy of Sciences with the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. But the most interesting part of this story is the fact that Nash, hailed by a cover story in Forbes magazine in 1958 as one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the nation, had spent most of the ensuing years in the deep clutches of schizophrenia. Furthermore, against all odds and after decades of cruel and unenlightened medical treatment, he had experienced a spontaneous, if tenuous, recovery.A Hollywood movie was inevitable.
The film, A Beautiful Mind, starred Russell Crowe as Nash and Jennifer Connelly (who won an Oscar) as his wife, Alicia. It was directed by Ron Howard. The film heralded the life of the brash young genius from Bluefield, West Virginia, who changed economic theory forever after taking a single undergraduate class in economics from Princeton. After following Nash from his college years to his appointment to the mathematics faculty at MIT, the movie depicts his quick downward spiral into schizophrenia in a series of scenes where he interacts with an imaginary government agent. The agent instructs him to look for codes and sequences embedded by America’s enemies in ordinary newspapers and magazines.
Nash’s colleagues report a similar story. According to his biographer, his first case of erratic behavior seems to have come when he laid a New York Times on the table and told his colleagues that the story in the upper lefthand corner had a coded message in it from alien beings that only he could decipher. Within months, he had been taken out of the classroom, been forcibly hospitalized in a mental institution and had angrily denounced his professorship at MIT. A Beautiful Mind chronicles his descent into mental illness, his tortured marriage, his problems at MIT and his eventual partial recovery from schizophrenia. It ends with the 66-year-old Nash accepting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm.
Left out of the script, however, are several of the most troubling details of Nash’s life that were included in detail in A Beautiful Mind, the book by Sylvia Nasar (1998) that was the basis of the movie. While the film was vivid in its depiction of Nash as a schizophrenic, a malady suffered by approximately 1 percent of the population, it was silent about his arrest on a complaint of indecent exposure and his fathering of a child out of wedlock.
In August 1954, Nash was working during the summer for RAND, a government contractor, when he was apprehended in a police “sting” operation aimed at stopping homosexual activities in public bathrooms near the Santa Monica beaches. Caught in the grip of Cold War fears that homosexuals (as his employers now assumed Nash to be) were more susceptible to blackmail by America’s enemies, RAND had no choice but to let Nash go. Nash never expressed embarrassment to his employers, explaining to them that his 2 A.M. walk in PalisadesPark had been part of an “experiment.” He further produced a photo of a woman and boy, saying that she was the woman he was to marry and the boy was their son. That much was true.
As a young professor at MIT, Nash had met a nurse named Eleanor Stier while in the hospital for a procedure to remove varicose veins. At 29, Stier was five years older than Nash and considerably less educated. Her accent and grammar revealed her hardscrabble upbringing in Jamaica Plain, a lower-class, blue-collar portion of Boston. In her book, Nasar compares their differences to those of Professor Higgins and Eliza Dolittle of My Fair Lady. Stier became pregnant in November 1953. Nash claimed to be pleased with the prospect of being a father. But by the time the baby arrived in June 1954—three months before Nash’s arrest when he showed the baby’s picture—he had made it clear that he was not interested in marrying someone not his intellectual equal. Nor did Nash allow his name to be put on the baby’s birth certificate.
Ironically, years later Nash would suggest to his grown son at age 44 that he should change his name to Nash. John David Stier refused. Although Nash visited the baby frequently, he never helped financially, and eventually Eleanor was forced to put John David in foster care. Even then, the affair between Nash and Eleanor continued, with surreal visits to whatever foster home or orphanage John David was in on Sundays.
During this period in their relationship, Nash had an affair with an MIT undergraduate, Alicia Esther Larde, who eventually became his wife. Eleanor and Alicia’s chance meeting at Nash’s apartment signaled the end of his relationship with the mother of his illegitimate son. Nash chose the beautiful, young and intelligent Alicia over Eleanor, a move his biographer called “a part of Nash’s genius to choose a woman who would prove so essential to his survival” (Nasar, p. 199), a sort of game theory move with real-life consequences.
The frankness of the script of A Beautiful Mind about the mental illness of John Forbes Nash Jr. is matched by the paucity of information about the arrest, the illegitimate son and the complicated relationships that could have made the subject even more complex to the discriminating viewer.
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