The film A Beautiful Mind depicts Nobel Peace Prize winner John Nash’s battle with schizophrenia. The movie opens with Nash in graduate school. It seems that he has a hard time relating to those around him, for example, when he was trying to speak with the woman in the bar he could not seem to find any words to say to her. Granted it is difficult for some men to speak to a woman, his extreme awkwardness and inability to form words in this social situation could have been an early indicator of his disease. Another indicator could have been how confident he was in his intelligence which he felt was far superior to most people.
Nash is visibly confused when his roommate Charles walks in. This was the first tip off to the viewer that there’s something off. Charles, along with a few other “people”, is a part of Nash’s hallucinations. The movie shows three of his hallucinations that he built relationships with: Charles, Marcee (Charles’ niece), and Parcher. These “people” are examples of visual and auditory hallucinations.
Nash begins “working” for the government on what he believes is a secret mission. An agent named Parcher tells him that there is a bomb and they need Nash’s help. The hallucination, Parcher, convinces Nash that there are codes in the newspaper and that is how he is to find out where the bomb is. He tells him that the spies send messages to each other through codes in the newspaper. The movie is set when communism and the Russians were a huge fear in America. This is the start of the persecutory delusions that eventually land him in a mental institution. After a hallucination in which Nash sees men being shot, he starts to believe that there are people after him. During a lecture he sees who he believes to be Russian spies coming for him. In an attempt to escape he is cornered by a psychiatrist, Dr. Rosen. The men who he thought were Russians were there to take him to the hospital. While he is at the hospital he is diagnosed with paranoid...