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TWC - Free Previews
We provide the free previews for you to get a feel for the kind of content that makes The Writers Channel such a great community, and show you why you should join now.
 TWC member Jason Smith takes a regular look at a couple of famous scenes and examines how to write a highly communicative moment without dialogue in Visually Speaking.
Visually Speaking - A Beautiful Mind
Did you see "A Beautiful Mind," last year's Oscar winner for Best Picture? Are you sure? Maybe you just imagined it. While somewhat schizophrenic (In terms of tone, it couldn't make up its mind; Love story? Thriller? Drama?), it is an elegant story about Nobel Prize winner John Nash Ph. D., told by writer Akiva Goldsman and director Ron Howard. 'Mind' chronicles the personal and professional frustrations the brilliant-thinking Nash suffered at the hands of mental illness, focusing on his struggle to bring order to his disorder, to find a pattern, a mathematical equation, to explain the chaos swirling inside his head.
Wanting to bring us inside the mind of Nash, Goldsman and Howard make sure we notice patterns in things just as he does. The camera shows us geometric shapes, straight lines and right angles in the scenery, in the architecture, in windows and landscaping. In one shot, Nash's distorted shadow appears very much at odds with the horizontal lines of a flight of stairs as he climbs them. In other words, this man and order don't mix. Nevertheless, he continually looks for it, finding patterns and shapes in fine crystal, fruit on a luncheon table, on a colleague's tie. Out one night with his girlfriend, he links together stars to form whatever shape she requests; including an umbrella and an octopus.
Even as Nash searches for his theory of "governing dynamics," he seeks out patterns in everyday things, which for him represent peace of mind. In his professional life, he's also attempting to make peace out of war, supposedly working for the U.S. government breaking enemy codes in order to prevent an invasion. He arranges random headlines on the walls of his office, threading yarn from one to the other, finding connections (or so he thinks). Eventually the yarn creates what looks like a spider's web across the wall. Even as he strives to find the pattern, the formula or equation, that will bring order to his mind, he becomes more ensnared, more caught up, in the visions and the false conspiracies it creates.
If the visions (the imaginary roommate, Ed Harris' G-man, the made-up missions) are Nash's attempt to explain the chaos in his mind, peace can only come from no longer trying to explain it. It isn't until Nash finally acknowledges they aren't real, until he embraces the concept of disorder, that he begins to gain control over them.
Even as Nash gets better at ignoring the visions, the question remains, how much of his life, and his work, can he regain? Can he acheive the one thing that always alluded him, that which he desired most: acclaim, from the public and his peers, for his "original ideas?" He does get it, near the end of the movie, in the faculty dining room, when the other Princeton professors line up at Nash's table to bestow upon him the ultimate tribute. They lay down their pens in a nice, neat row. All except one of them, that is. The last professor lays his pen down askew, perpindicular to the others. It's a kind of farewell to patterns. Finally, for Nash, order can exist next to disorder. In the universe, and in his own mind.
:: Jason Smith is a reformed Northern Californian now living in Los Angeles. He has worked as a writer and editor for a variety of publications, incl. Surfer Magazine, Variety and The Los Angeles Times. While he enjoys being a screenwriter, he says that, ultimately, he would like to tend bar.
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