Sometimes I have moments of strange separation from my name.  I’ll just hear it or stare at it and wonder what it is. Because it’s not me. And I am not sure what is. If I think long enough, I’ll wonder how I was given it, or why anyone has to be called by one thing their whole life…. when we are all many things.

Here is part of my first draft of my film analysis paper. This part was just my summary of the movie (80% of which I will end up cutting out). I am in the process of editing it, and turning it into a worthwhile piece of writing right now…

Note, however, the ingenious alliteration:

Despite their apparent differences in demeanor and interest, Walter really was utterly in love with and devoted to Kitty. Teeming with spite he makes a rather weighty proposition. He informs Kitty that she must either accompany him on his journey to a small Chinese village at the heart of the ongoing cholera epidemic, or he will shamefully divorce her on the grounds of her infidelity. He will list Charlie Townsend as her lover. Kitty is horrified, and insists that dragging her, a delicate young dignitary, to this dangerous war zone of disease is insanity and completely barbarous of him. She insists that Charlie, her gallant lover, will not allow for it. Walter is humored by this notion and tells Kitty that if Charlie agrees to divorce his wife and marry her, that he will let Kitty divorce him quietly. Much to Kitty’s dismay, Charlie is nothing more than a wily wanton womanizer, who whittles away her sense of worth with his wildly wicked ways. He cares no more for her than a bear cares for old honey, or than he cares for the scum infesting Walter’s cholera-ridden water samples. He agrees to no such proposal, benefiting too much from his alliance with his wife Dorothy. Kitty, feeling deeply downtrodden by his cruel rejection, decides to depart from Shanghai and dejectedly accompanies Walter into the depths of destruction and ultimate death.

Ron Howard and Akiva Goldman’s conscientious use of windows in A Beautiful Mind is effective as a device for accentuating the experience of mental illness. The symbolic implications of the windows can lead viewers to uncover layers of meaning from multiple perspectives.  Their use in several pivotal scenes illuminates the structure of the visual narrative.

To appreciate the layers of meaning that can be derived from the windows in this film, one must first be familiar with its structure. A brief examination of the structure of A Beautiful Mind must begin with an even briefer summary of the life of its protagonist.

John Forbes Nash was accepted to Princeton in 1948 at age twenty. Despite his sometimes off-putting confidence bordering on arrogance, one of Nash’s contemporaries attributed his success in the mathematics department to his “clear, logical, beautiful mind” (Nasar xii). Nash promptly produced a series of papers on a new theory of mathematics that had applicability in a wide range of fields. While at Princeton, Nash married Alicia Larde and, shortly thereafter, was diagnosed with schizophrenia. During the decades to follow, he was pulled into a delusional reality with an ensemble of hallucinatory characters. The devotion of his wife and his eventual receiving of the Nobel Prize for his early work lifted him from social obscurity and lead to a miraculous recovery.

Screenwriter Goldman said concerning his approach to covering such complex subject matter, “Mental health movies are often like going to the zoo; it can be wonderful, but you go with the normal person surrogate and together you view the person with mental illness; you see the person from the outside in and it does a disservice to our ability to empathize and understand. If we saw the world the way people who suffer see it, we would understand them differently.”

And Goldman does just that. To the audience member encountering this movie for the first time with no prior knowledge, the first half of the film appears to be the fast-paced account of a genius’ involvement in a top secret government operation. The viewer becomes attached to the four main people in his life: wife, Alicia (played by Jennifer Connelly), roommate and best friend, Charles (Paul Bettany), Charles’ niece, Marcee (Vivien Cardone), and government confidant, Parcher (Ed Harris), completely convinced of their reality. About an hour into the film, the audience learns that only Alicia is real, thus causing the viewers to question their assumptions about the reality that they have been invested in, similar to how it may have been for the real John Nash upon learning of his illness.

For those watching the movie for the second time or with prior knowledge of John Nash’s condition, the film is composed in such a way that it is still engaging. Sparsely placed clues to the falsity of his reality constitute an all-together different set of insights for the returning viewer.

As this film is primarily concerned with differing perceptions of reality, the prominent role of windows, in eighteen key scenes, gives the audience the option of internalizing the narrative from Nash’s point-of-view or as a spectator looking in. The duality of our relationship to windows – the ability to look in and out – makes them an appropriate symbol considering A Beautiful Mind’s ability to be ingested two ways by viewers.

Significantly, the first scene featuring a window is the first time Nash and the audience meet delusion number one: roommate Charles. Nash’s desk is situated against a large multi-paned window looking down on a courtyard on Princeton campus. The scene starts with a shot through the window of some students playing rugby below. The focus abruptly shifts bringing the square pane of glass into clear view at which time Nash’s hand appears in the frame and draws a dotted line down the center. Throughout the scene Charles is carrying on a one-sided conversation as Nash tries to concentrate on his work. The height of his apartment as seen through the window emphasizes his feelings of superiority. The shift in focus shows Nash’s obliviousness to the outside world. The dotted line bisecting the glass can be seen as a representation of the splintering of his realities at that moment.

His condition doesn’t reach a dangerous level, however, until a scene in which Nash, feeling pressure from the administration to “publish or perish” and coaxed by his imaginary friend, pushes his desk through the window sending it crashing to the ground. Looking down on the pile of wood remaining, the two laugh at their misguided aggression in the presence of some perplexed onlookers. The broken window represents the collision of Nash’s two worlds.  The shared laughter that ensues can mark either a moment of relief, for the first-time viewer, or a chilling realization of the seriousness of his condition, for the informed viewer, who sees, with the onlookers, only a solitary figure hunched over the window sill, chuckling to himself.

As the plot progresses, John Nash is caught up in an imaginary secret operation which leaves him almost debilitated with paranoia. This is visually represented in the film with multiple shots of him peering out various windows with the shades drawn; an image so striking it was later used extensively for advertising the film. Again, the viewer, depending on his perspective, either looks out with Nash, sharing in his paranoia, or looks in on him with concern.

Perhaps the most disturbing scene in the film is viewed by Nash’s wife and psychiatrist through a window over-looking his first session of electro-shock therapy. The audience looks on with the two from a very high angle, this time emphasizing Nash’s descent into obscurity.

After a brief period of recovery, Nash relapses back into his fantasy world.  To keep from being discovered, he takes his code-breaking to an abandoned garage behind his house. All the windows in this garage are completely opaque and allow no intrusion from the outside world, representing the gravity of Nash’s condition. No longer is he burdened with a distorted view of reality, but completely separated from it.

A scene following Nash’s eventual recovery shows him working on some equations on his enclosed front porch. Instead of being surrounded by windows, he is surrounded by mesh screen, a material that lets in both light and sound. At this point all viewers are on the same page along with Nash for the first time. His old (real) friend Saul comes to pay him a visit and they exchange greetings through the screen door, highlighting Nash’s final connection with and acceptance of the outside world.

The real John Nash remembers little from his days of insanity.  Akiva Goldman said about adapting Nash’s life for the screen “Within this perfectly detailed exterior life I could build an inner life and in so doing, give the audience a window into what it might feel like to suffer from this disease.”  A Beautiful Mind shows the expansion of this idea, under the direction of Ron Howard, into a motif that leaves the audience with a deeper understanding of the film’s content.