What a strange film. I have put off watching it for a decade, for a number of spurious reasons. I don't really like Russell Crowe, I think Paul Bettany is either brilliant or terrible but never anything in between, Jennifer Connelly can't appear on a screen near me without me wondering when the Henson puppets are coming, Ed Harris is great in everything but criminally under-used... Anyway, it is sitting at number 198 in the IMDB top-250 films of all time. And I have seen 171 of the others so I wanted to cross it off the list.
I am not Schizophrenic or hallucinatory. So a lot of the movie is not directly comparable. But in order to make their movie a bit more palatable they also give Nash a lot of Asperger's symptoms which are very similar to what I have, although much like Big Bang Theory do with Sheldon they are somewhat amplified to make them more filmable.
I could argue about the mistakes they make when trying to explain game theory and Nash equilibrium. I can even explain the mistakes in a concise enough way that it fits into this post. But I can also see why took the shortcuts to squeeze it into a single scene I their movie. And I can't see anyone reading this and caring about the maths.
But back to the point. Some of the points of the film are very reminiscent of what I have been through the last 2 years. So I want to talk about them.
The pills are very much as portrayed. They do fuck up how you function to such an extreme degree that even basic logic processing becomes difficult. And cutting out the higher end functionality of someone smart is distressing in itself, more so than the symptoms of the illness. Not comparing myself to Nash but I am smarter than the average bear, and the effect the pills had on that, and on my memory, was terrifying.
"I find that polishing my interactions in order to make them sociable requires a tremendous effort. I have a tendency to expedite information flow by being direct. Often I don't get a good result. " I could have said that. Although I would probably have been more direct about it. Nash's solution in the film is to find people who can deal with his directness and discard others. This used to be my approach. It is surprisingly effective.
His eventual solution to his mental problems, having had everyone else push him to try their solution, is to discard everyone else's failed techniques and to tackle those problems in his own way. Not with the drugs or the therapy or any of the recommended techniques. He simply chooses to be a different person and then applies his own mind to that purpose.
So, what should have been a couple of paragraphs seems to have turned into a full-blown post and has even dragged me away from the one I intended to finish and hit "publish" on this morning. But it has brought me to my point.
I decided a while ago that I like who I used to be. And to be honest I don't like a lot of the person I have had to live in for the last 17 months, but I have continued to tolerate him in order to survive in my current situation. But I am past done with him so I am going to be the old me again. This is going to suck for some of you because a lot of people didn't like the original me.
I am going to say the things I think, without tying myself in knots trying to figure out if the listener will like them or not. Anyone who can't deal with that, it is their problem. And if you think that is selfish then; tough, it probably is. But I have to live with me and you don't. And I am done living every minute with a person I don't really like.
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