Why I Hate "A Beautiful Mind" Part 2

In a previous post, one that was quite popular, I put forward a number of reasons why I hate the film A Beautiful Mind. In this post, I want to approach the story of John Nash's life from a different perspective. First, though, I want to say something generally about schizophrenia. For the last couple of decades, the most favored explanation for schizophrenia has been that it results from a dopamine imbalance. Older theories, though, such as the stress-vulnerability model and the theory of the double-bind, attributed madness to environmental stressors. I prefer these older theories. My own theory of psychosis is so simple it may seem banal- that a person experiences a psychotic episode because there is a problem in his life which he has trouble identifying and no idea how to fix.

Consider the following scenario concerning a hypothetical subject we shall call John Nash. Nash is a mathematical genius and is reasonably famous, especially in his field. In his mid-twenties, he is engulfed in a scandal - he reputedly exposes himself to another man in a public bathroom. The circumstances surrounding this event are confused and Nash himself is unable to give a satisfactory account of what happened. As a result of this scandal, he is dismissed from his position at the research facility at which he is working. Because of this, and because perhaps of other, less publicized incidents that may or may not have occurred, rumors start to spread that Nash is gay. Nash senses that he is the subject of rumor but, because he is in fact straight and finds the idea that others might think him homosexual utterly repugnant, is unable to make sense of what is happening. In his late twenties, he forms the paranoid delusion that he is the victim of a Communist conspiracy and that everyone who wears a red tie is a member of this conspiracy. Nash suffers a complete breakdown and is institutionalized. 

Unfortunately treatment does not improve his condition. In fact, it actually makes it worse. This is the 'fifties after all. Schizophrenia is completely misunderstood by the general public; homosexuality is not only illegal but a dirty word that is never spoken out loud. People assume that Nash is being treated not for schizophrenia but for homosexuality. Perhaps his psychiatrists themselves believe that he is homosexual - at this time homosexuals were also given insulin shock therapy and were thrown into the same asylums as the schizophrenics. Nash's problem, a problem of how he is perceived by others, has been exacerbated rather than ameliorated.

What can Nash do? It turns out that Nash, who is married, has an illegitimate child from a previous relationship. At one time, to pick a fairly revealing moment in his life, he writes a letter to a friend saying that he believes this child will be his "gay redemption". What does he mean by this? Nash means that he believes or at least hopes that his illegitimate child will prove that he is straight. But he can't use the word 'straight' because in the 'fifties and 'sixties use of the word 'straight' as a synonym for heterosexual has not yet caught on. The bigotry of the era prevents those who say they are straight from being believed.The more Nash fights, the more enmeshed in the situation he becomes. Nash is in a double-bind and cannot escape.

As time passes, knowledge that Nash is schizophrenic rather than homosexual spreads among Nash's acquaintances. Bizarrely, this change in public perception cures Nash's psychotic symptoms – Nash prefers people to believe that he is schizophrenic than believe that he is gay. The change in how he is perceived resolves the problem in his life. In 2000, Ron Howard directs a film about Nash, putting him forward as an archetypal schizophrenic, completely misrepresenting his condition and life, and sweeping all references to sexuality under the rug. Perhaps, in a way, this is something that Nash might want. But it is nevertheless bullshit.

I have written this short  film treatment based on my memory of the little I have read about John Nash. I am not an expert on Nash, but I believe it is more or less accurate. For a more detailed but in a way less true account of the his life, you can take a look at my original post, "Why I Hate A Beautiful Mind".

Concerning Love

One sign that a person has too much time on his hands is that he or she starts to worry obsessively about the nature of love. Ordinary people do not tend to think about this issue overly much. And yet it is a problem. In English, the word 'love' has an extraordinarily broad compass, ranging from Christian love (which can be described as love for one's neighbor, love for the poor and the oppressed, a love that is general and political) through love for one's friends, love for one's family, to love for one's inamorato or inamorata. It is only with respect to the last type of love that a sexual component is involved. This profound ambiguity in the meaning of the word 'love' presents a genuine problem. The concept of love has been integral to Western society for generations, to a culture where marriage is based on free choice rather than arrangement; furthermore the concept is the lynchpin of discourses ranging from religion to sexuality. Love is sometimes exalted as the highest good; sometimes, by contrast, it has been viewed as dirty and evil. (See my post "Concerning Kafka and Wilde" for a discussion of this.) In the contemporary Western world, love is just as problematic as it was in Wilde's day. (A good example of a contemporary film that  explores this problematic is "I Love You, Man".)

Perhaps the reason that the concept of 'love' is so complex and confused is that the word encompasses too many different types of phenomena. The ancient Greeks distinguished between four different types of love - agape, eros, philia and storge. Perhaps the English speaking world would be better served by discriminating between different types of love by using different words for the different attitudes people adopt towards each other. At the very least, we could discriminate between love that has a sexual dimension and love that does not. The issue, as ever, is one of language. Our terms are ambiguous and vague. How much confusion and conflict could we resolve if people found ways to use language more clearly and precisely, to find common ground with respect to words?

A issue related to the problematic surrounding the word 'love' is a confusion concerning the terms people use to characterize their relationships. It is quite common among many people on the left, at least in this country, for a person to describe his or her significant other as a 'partner'. I was once attending a coffee group, a group for people who were patients of the Mental Health System, where the Occupational Therapist present alluded in conversation to her "partner"; one of the young patients there asked her if she was a lesbian.  The poor OT  had no idea how to reply. The young patient explained that, where she came from, Hamilton, only gay people ever used the word "partner". The OT defended herself, as best she could, by saying that she preferred the word "partner" because it seemed more mature.

Now, personally, I dislike this use of the word "partner". There may be good grounds for using it from a Feminist perspective, in that employing this word avoids buying into the power relations historically implicit in gendered speech, but I prefer language that is transparent, that is gender specific: it seems to me more honest. For example, I prefer the words "boyfriend" and "girlfriend", immature though they may seem, because they specify the sex of the one referred to and because they indicate that the relationship is in the public domain. I tend to describe my father's current squeeze as his 'girlfriend', despite the fact that my father  is in his sixties, because it seems to better describe their relationship. The word "partner", by contrast, makes the relationship seem like a commercial arrangement.

Another anecdote that demonstrates how difficult issues of language can be with respect to relationships concerns a friend of mine who identifies sometimes as a lesbian and sometimes as bisexual.  This friend, despite being in a Civil Union with a woman some years older, recently acquired, with the full knowledge and consent of her partner, a male paramour. The word my friend used to describe her inamorato was "lover". Although I think very highly of my friend, use of the word 'lover' in this context put my teeth on edge. For two reasons. First, because it is again gender nonspecific and second, because of the ambiguity surrounding the word 'love' that I described earlier. Use of the word 'lover' in this context seems to cheapen the concept of love somehow; it seems to reduces all love to sex. The battle for Marriage Equality in recent years was based on the idea that Gay people can enter into committed monogamous relationships as much as Straight people can, that homosexual and heterosexual erotic love are of the same quality. My friend's story makes me wonder why we went to such lengths to fight for marriage reform. In my strange and admittedly quite poorly written post, "Me and Jon Stewart Part 3", I described Jon as "a lover" - my intention was not to say anything about sex but rather to suggest that he displayed the virtues of Christian love, a strange thing to say I admit of a Jewish atheist, but true nonetheless. Love and sex are often two separate things. It is possible to have sex without love and love without sex. But the battle for Gay marriage was a battle premised on the notion of love, on the the idea that erotic love, regardless of who it is between, is sacred.

Given these ambiguities and confusions surrounding the concept of "love", it may seem that a solution could be to follow the Greek model and have different words for different types of love. There may, however, be a reason why we use the same word to describe all these many different ways of orientating ourselves towards others. Perhaps all love contains an element of sublimated sexual desire, as Freud no doubt would say; or perhaps when we tell our beloved that we love her we are inviting her into our family. I don't know. I admit I may seem to contradict myself. I haven't resolved this issue in my own mind. But the question certainly deserves further investigation.

You might ask what my own attitude to love is. I would say that I don't fall in love easily. I think I try to follow the example set by Lou Reed in Venus in Furs, where he sings about "love not given lightly"; in fact, I was in a relationship and sleeping with my first girlfriend for several years before I told her that I loved her and, when I first did so, I did so accidentally. We broke up briefly as a result. All in all, I think it is better to profess love too little than too much; people who love excessively have, I think, significant issues. I think of the refrain from Fleetwood Mac's song Tusk: "Don't tell me that you love me. Just tell me that you want me."