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A Beautiful Mind (DreamWorks LLC and Universal, 2001) Through eyes that read the book first Heroes are often, as mythologist Joseph Campbell has emphasized, people who undertake a journey, face great odds, and live to tell about it. Shamans are often featured in myths, but they are usually individuals who are obligated to serve society. They have a different kind of glory. They often must accept lower standards than the rest of the group, just to be accepted, since the demands placed upon them are dire. Should they fail, they can be mocked, ridiculed, driven into exile, treated like clowns, and even killed. Mythologists tend to look backwards in time and evaluate legends from different places and contexts. Rarely do they look at the mid-twentieth century for good source material since it is still too close to us for objectivity. If a generation is limited to thirty years, then the end of World War II (presumably 1945) occurred less than two generations ago. There was a romantic movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the West that was marked by a strong re-emerging interest in myths that had been long forgotten. This increased in the years preceding the world wars, and mythology was indeed blamed for the racial movements of the time, including the rise of the Third Reich. Animators like George Lucas and Walt Disney used animation in a radical new answer to the broadening interest in myth. Enter Dr. John Nash, the subject of the book “A Beautiful Mind” by Sylvia Nasar and the movie by the same name. The movie is a stark piece of revisionist fancy that should by no means assume the title of the book, because there is so little factual or structural similarity between the two. When one imagines the Cold War, the icons that come to mind are most often the Dr. Strangelovian characters of cinema, yet it is rarely realized how soon the fifties followed the forties, or what a scary time the fifties were for a lot of people. Indeed, for a great many people, the Great War was still continuing in its manifold forms, only magnified and more dreadful, more sinister. It is still too close in time to speak of the war without giving offense or causing tears for some. The losses and catastrophes were so great that the whole period has remained a black cancer in the story of humanity, and it would seem that scientists were anything but heroes here. So, the American cinema paraded them throughout the fifties and created a particular mythos that seemed to diminish all previous attempts at fantasy fiction. The parents and grandparents of the baby-boomers needed piñatas to lighten the horror behind the façade of optimism, and for this there would be many willing participants, many freaks and Boo Radleys and not a few geniuses to haul from their dormitories and laboratories and burn in the public square. After all, haven’t all geniuses throughout history had bizarre personalities, except perhaps Albert Einstein? Dr. Nash is a mathematic genius and he knows it. He is severe with just about every man he meets and is practically begged by the world’s premiere center for mathematical research; the Princeton Mathematics Department, to join them. He enters the world scene right after an estimated 40 million people (1/5 of the total war casualties of the 20th century) were erased off the face of the earth within the space of five years, in a war termed “The War of Doctors," since half of Germany’s doctors were members of the Nazi party. Nash is invited to research for pay with Einstein and some of the brightest mathematicians in the world. So elite is this small group of academics that assignments are rarely given and largely unnecessary (just to satisfy the administration), --grades are immaterial, a pointless contrivance. Dr. Nash even takes the opportunity to lecture Einstein for two hours on a radical new approach to quantum physics. Einstein is impressed by his ideas but tells him he has a lot more to learn about physics. Where is all this in the movie? It is left out. Nash soon gets hired at the RAND Corporation, located in Santa Monica, California. The movie, however, somehow mistakes this for the Pentagon.
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