A Beautiful Mind, published in 1998, is Sylvia Nasar's biography of American mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. (1928-2015). It is better known for its 2002 Ron Howard-directed movie adaptation with the same title, starring Russell Crowe as Nash and which won the Academy Award for best picture that year. Yet the movie diverges in major ways from the book that took me aback. In both versions we are presented with the life story of a brilliant, accomplished academic whose young adult life was turn upside-down...as well as that of his loved ones...when he became afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia. The film version, however, takes great liberties with Nasar's account, weaving its own imaginary tale about John Nash suffering from visual hallucinations (which he didn't) and imaginary friends and foes (again, he didn't). According to the book, in the late 1950s Nash began to have grandiose delusions of his role in the world with conspiracy theories abounding...in today's dumbass world that would have got him elected president but back then it just got him committed...and released...and committed...and released. Ron Howard's movie makes the story of Nash's life very compact and simple, omitting the Noble Prize-winning mathematician's earlier affair and love child, for which he denied financial support. It also omitted the fact that even following his mental breakdown he continued to produce mathematical works, many of which Nasar bravely attempted to describe for us nonmathematical readers: in the film you'd think that all he did of significance was that prize-winning paper on economic equilibrium. The book and the film each sought to sell a narrative about the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr., but even though the print version was obviously closer to the truth about him, by its very structure and nature it was still far from what really happened. A life is lived one minute, one hour...one day at a time and attempts to make a narrative tale out of it that conforms to traditional storytelling patterns is bound to distort it. Although I found the movie version to be much more suspenseful, endearing and entertaining (I even bought the DVD), it's a bit unsettling to see how far it diverged from the true life of this extraordinary and flawed human being after reading Sylvia Nasar's excellent account. If you saw the film...or didn't, for that matter...A Beautiful Mind will be a great ride through history...not only of one special individual's life, but also of the social and historical context in which he lived. Sadly, in 2015 both John Nash and his wife Alicia perished in an auto crash in Newark after returning from Norway, where he had been honored with an academic prize...he was 86...
I got two significant take-aways from the book and film. One is that it's not prudent to automatically accept the truth and accuracy of a work's narrative and characterizations, just because the author or producer claims it to be nonfiction or based on real events: the very nature of the story structure with the presentation of a moral theme and the aim to be interesting is bound to twist it. Two is that I think almost all of us, like Nash, believe in nonsensical, irrational...and sometimes farfetched ideas but that for "healthy" people they understand the extreme nature of those beliefs and thereby tend to avoid communicating them to others...unlike Nash, whose narcissistic sense of self-importance precluded this. But if within society certain wacky ideas seem to become more mainstream then an explosion can ensue with masses of the population expressing adherence to them...do you know what I'm talking about?
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