Exploration of schizophrenic personality in Ron Howard’s Movie A Beautiful Mind

Abstract

This research analyzes Ron Howard’s Movie A Beautiful Mind from the perspective of Schizoanalysis to study the protagonist, John Nash who develops the schizophrenic bent of the mind, which is the result of capitalist system of production. The entire capitalist system highlights the trends toward invention, innovation and discovery. The discovery inspiring system of capitalism is largely responsible for making Nash obsessive. However, his obsessive interest in discover new theory of governing dynamics makes him figure of fun and eccentric. Thus, the deviant manners of Nash begin to degenerate into the hallucinatory fantasy, which is the significant part of schizophrenia. Capitalism generates multiple desires in human mind and turns them into desiring machine. In addition to this, an individual turns them into body without organs to fulfill their desires which is never to be mitigated. As a result, they begin to remain on illusionary thought and action by avoiding reality. Nash's obsession of innovative position in MIT for breaking the codes reaches to the climax where he begins to demonstrate the symptoms of oddity, insanity, hallucination, abnormality and alienation. That is to say, this research focuses on John Nash, a schizophrenic character to show how the capitalist society is responsible to turn a normal human being into a schizophrenic and paranoid.