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A Beautiful Mind
The John Nash of Nasar's biography, while less likable, is far more fascinating and multidimensional than his cinematic counterpart; he is a draft dodger, a vicious prankster (one practical joke of Nash's involved filling a light fixture with water, which could have electrocuted a hapless victim when he turned on the light), and an arrogant braggart.
Hollywood has whitewashed much from Nash's life; besides working to dodge the Korean War draft out of fears that it would hurt his career, Nash fathered an illegitimate son whom he refused to help care for, despite the fact that his own circumstances were far better than those of the child's mother. The woman he married, Alicia Larde, is portrayed in the film as the one and only love of Nash's life; no mention is made of their 1963 divorce. (Nearly forty years later, the couple remarried.) To read Nasar's biography is to discover fascinating episodes like Nash's stint in Europe, when he attempted several times to renounce his American citizenship and obtain political asylum, and his encounters with fellow patient and Pulitzer prizewinning poet Robert Lowell in a Massachusetts mental hospital.
The book is as absorbing a history lesson as it is a story; Nasar sets Nash's life beautifully in the context of his time. Nash's bisexuality, for example, was much more of an issue then than it would be now; while today many areas have laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation, in 1954 not only was it legal for employers to dismiss a homosexual employee, but any evidence of homosexuality was sufficient grounds to deprive a government employee of security clearance. Later, the reader learns of many once-credited treatments for mental illness, like insulin injections (thought to deprive the brain of sugar and thus kill off defective brain cells), colonic irrigation, and even "fever therapy," given by inoculating patients with malaria or typhoid. Nasar's description of the politics by which Nobel prizes are awarded, a process purposely shrouded in mystery by the various committees involved, is a particularly fascinating read. Her inclusion of these and other details paints a rich historical picture that's a pleasure to read.
The one thing missing from A Beautiful Mind is, of course, the voice of John Nash himself. Where possible, Nasar plucked quotes from his writings and the recollections of friends and colleagues, but Nash himself maintained, as he put it to a New York Times reporter, "a position of Swiss neutrality" toward his biographer. Throughout the extraordinary story of Nash's life -- his rapid rise to fame, his loves, his illness, his disappearance for decades from the academic community, and his recognition at last as a Nobel laureate, one wants to ask him, "What were you thinking?" Unfortunately, it's a question Nasar was unable to answer.
One true merit of the movie, so highly altered from Nash's real story (and, considered apart from the facts, it is both moving and interesting), is that it will undoubtedly inspire many to pick up Nasar's beautifully written biography. It's time to meet the real John Nash.
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My girlfriend's father is an economics professor, and was excited to see him speak this year. It seems, however, that he is a shadow of what he once was.
Apparently, his presentation was not terribly insightful. And when asked by an audience member about some of his famous work, he responded that he "doesn't remember any of that anymore."
The entire event was very awkward for everyone in attendance. Here is a man who made some brilliant discoveries in his heyday that are very useful in game theory and economics. People come to hear him speak and it only displays how his mind has gone-- he can't even relive the old glory.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
It's quite unfortunate that it happened. So many times people's works are not judged by the content, but by who wrote it. Perhaps it's too much effort to actually peruse the work and digest the content, so people rely on arguing ad hominem on its worthiness.
It's refreshing though that he actually did earn the Nobel Prize that he deserved.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
Ron Howard has said from the very beginning of the project that the film was not a mirror of the book. He didn't make it that way for a reason. Now, his reasoning may not be good, but I think this case of book-to-film is different than most. He did not hide out somewhere pretending to make the film based on the book, he was very public about the inentions and the process.
After two weeks of reading praise in the reviews, I finally went to see the movie. I must say I didn't like it, possibly because it hits too close to home.
Watching Nash's life suddenly reveal itself as an empty shell, a madman's delusion, was too painful. It creeped me out so much that I lost interest in the rest of the film and the recovery to normal life that he made. I guess I became afraid of what it would be like to lose control of your mind in this manner, a very disturbing perspective.
Needless to say, beyond the amount forced upon me by the movie, I could not sympathize with the character much because of the pride and prejudice and contempt and even, I would say, malice in his competitiveness (while he had it), that he touts.
To summarize, I felt sorry for him, but even more repulsed by him, and thus by the movie.
As for his portrayal as a mathematician, it had both parts that I liked and those that I didn't. There wasn't much specifics to it though, predictably.
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There was an interview with Sylvia Nasar on NPR yesterday (I think it was Fresh Air, meaning it should be online right now), and she seems to approve of the movie. As she puts it - when you write about a while person's life, you have to pick facets. When you compress it into a book, you have to pick and choose what to focus on. In the movie, they only had two hours, and chose to focus on the relationship Nash and his wife had. She also adds that she was at their second wedding last June (John Nash is 74 and very much alive), and that the wedding was merely a reaffirmation of a relationship that has always been a marriage. She said (and I'm badly quoting from memory: "John [Nash] called it a 'retraction of a mistake'. Something you would expect a mathematician to say". Apparantly they have been together these 40 years, with all the ups and downs that a long relationship with serious stress would be expected to have.
It's important to remember that the focus of the movie needs to be tighter (less room to explore), but that the book *also* has to focus on certain aspects, and that it should not be taken as a 'more factual' account - in the HBO 'behind the scenes' piece "Inside A Beautiful Mind", they interview Crowe, but in the background of a few scenes, you can see an elderly couple in two chairs watching from near the director and camera - I wonder if that was Nash and his wife?
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
While others like Andrew Sullivan probably disagree, I think his bisexuality was intentionally kept out the film because the producers of the movie did not want to associate bi/homosexuality with mental illness.
Brian Ellenberger
I am an academic economist and saw Nash give two lectures a couple of years ago. The one talk was not bad, he was trying to pick up where he left off but didn't realize that some of his "new" ideas had already been developed by others while he was "absent." The second talk was pretty nutty, although not entirely out of the range of the nutty ideas you sometimes see in economic seminars.
Here is one example of what he missed out on while he was mad. He had figured out that computers are now useful for numerical solutions to equations that would have been very difficult to characterize. However, his model had some greek letters in it and he thought that a computer could not ("of course") print out letters of a non-latin alphabet -- he was thinking of a simple typewriter style printer.
John Nash never received a Nobel Prize. The only "real" Nobel prizes are the ones in chemistry, peace, literature, physics, and medicine/physiology. Those were the ones established by Alfred Nobel in his will, and first awarded in 1901. The Nobel prize for Economics was established about 70 years later, in 1968. The Bank of Sweden created a foundation to award, "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". It was basically a marketting ploy to celebrate it's 300th anniversary. :)
While the selection process is done similarly (the Economics award is done by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, which also awards the prizes for chemistry and physics), the awards are quite distinct. Some physicians will complain bitterly if one mentions the Nobel Prize in Economics, since economics is not a "real" science.
Disclaimer: I read the book a couple of years ago, so much of this is from memory.
Irony: People who discover the book because of the movie tend to be more critical of the movie.
I thoroughly enjoyed both the book and the movie. Sure I was aware of things that got left out, but as we all know from for example LOTR, when movies are made from books choices have to be made. I really appreciate the way them movie chose to emphasize the importance of relationships in Nash's li fe, as troublesome as they may have been at times.
Nash's bisexuality: The book shows this ambiguously, not as a well-developed preference. It reflects Nash's narcissism more than anything else.
Nash's divorce: Although they did separate for a short time after the divorce, they lived together for 25 years before getting remarried. When they were remarried last summer, Nash referred to the event as a retraction of the divorce, like a journal would retract a publication error.
Terry Gross interviewed Sylvia Nasar on last night's Fresh Air (Real Audio). She was strongly supportive of the choices made while writing the screenplay. She suggested that if more emphasis had been put on Nash's sexuality or political views, it would have detracted from the more important stuff, ie, Nash's lifelong relationship with Alicia and his descent into schizophrenia.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
I just have to add a plug here for Prisoners' Dilemma which is a combination von Neumann bio and mathematical exploration of his game-theoretic ideas. There are many other people mentioned in the book, from both Princeton and RAND, who further exemplify the non-correlation between being a genius and being an asshole.
I think this "eccentric genius" meme is one of the ugliest to infect the computer community. People see the luminaries of the field acting in eccentric ways, and imitate the style while possessing none of the substance. If you don't know what I mean, look around. You're in the right forum to see that very phenomenon in action. I'll save my rant for somewhere else.
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Some spoilers follow, but not many.
I am paraphrasing here what Philip K. Dick said about the movie from memory:
I have just seen the rough cut of Blade Runner. It is terrific! It has nothing to do with the book. What my book will become is a futuristic alien shoot-em-up. This is just as well, because my book would have made a terrible movie. It is full of Deckard's introspection and wondering about humanity. But a book is something to be read, and a movie is an experience that moves.
IMO, the book is excellent. I came to reading Dick as a result of seeing Blade Runner. The book isn't much like the movie. There is Deckard, and there are Replicants (called Andys in the book), and Deckard kills them, and there's a Rachel who's a borderline, and both book and movie approach the question of what is humanity, though from complementary directions. The main plot set of the book (A post-apocalyptic world, Mercerism, the ethic of taking care of animals and artificial animals as fakes, Sydney's catalogue with the E for extinct species, the attempt by the Andys who control the media to discredit Mercerism, the schism between the thought processes of the Andys who cannot understand empathy and cannot take part in polycephalic fusion, the Ezekiel-like tomb world) is almost completely absent from the movie, except for some bits about manufactured animals. Also absent are many subplots (the phantom police agency, the concept of fake fakes, Deckard's wife and the Penfield mood organ, and the [shudder] scene with the spider). Nevertheless, the book is excellent if you don't expect it to be like the movie.