At the beginning of the film, the character John Nash arrives as a new student at Princeton University. He is introduced to his imaginary roommate Charles, who would later become his best friend, as well as a group of male students who hang out together. The first part of the film establishes Nash's intellectual stamina, and just as significantly, his outspoken social deficiency: in his own words, "People don't like me much, and I don't like them." On a couple of occasions this group, with Nash, spends time in a bar trying to meet women, and Nash himself is unsuccessful, but the experience is what ultimately inspires his fruitful work in the concept of governing dynamics. A scene also occurs in which Charles throws Nash's desk through a window, from where it falls to a spectacular destruction on the ground. During the entire first part of the film, neither the audience nor Nash knows that his roommate and best friend, his friend's young niece and a mysterious Department of Defense agent (who will be described in the following paragraph) are each hallucinatory, part of a psychotic ailment.
After the conclusion of Nash's studies as a student at Princeton, a scene is presented in which he supposedly travels to a United States Department of Defense facility to crack the encryption of an enemy telecommunication. When the aforementioned Defense agent is first shown, he is standing still and quietly observing Nash from above, while partially concealed from the movie’s audience, as well as from Nash, behind a screen. Later, in an outdoor scene, the agent encourages Nash to look for patterns in magazines and newspapers, ostensibly to thwart a Soviet plot. Consequently, Nash begins to have increasingly paranoid delusions that lead him to behave erratically.
After observing this erratic behavior, one of his coworkers follows him during one of Nash's late night "drops" of "top secret Soviet codes" that he had cracked. His coworker sees Nash place the documents into a...