Film Review A Beautiful Mind And Shutter Island - 996 Words

When it comes to Hollywood, knowing the difference between reality and sensationalized filmmaking for the sake of profit is important. Hollywood tends to exaggerate and manipulate the truth. The portrayal of Clinical disorders in film are examples of how Hollywood can alter reality. In both A Beautiful Mind and Shutter Island, the psychological disorder depicted is paranoid schizophrenia, but one does a better job of depicting the disorder accurately than the other. In A Beautiful Mind (Howard, 2001), the main character is John Nash, a brilliant mathematician from Princeton University. Nash’s symptoms first appear when he begins attending Princeton. He believes that he has a roommate named Charles Herman, but Herman is a hallucination caused by Nash’s schizophrenia. Later in the movie, Nash meets with Parcher, a U.S. Department of Defense agent, and believes that Parcher asks him to be a decoder for the government. Nevertheless, Parcher is also a hallucination inflicted by his disorder. Similarly, in Shutter Island (Scorsese, 2010), Edward Daniels has hallucinations of his dead wife and children. Daniels also has nonsensical delusions and believes that the hospital on Shutter Island is experimenting on innocent humans. These scenes show the manifestation of the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. Nash’s symptoms in A Beautiful Mind (Howard, 2001) are not limited to his hallucinations of Herman and Parcher. He appears to have disorganized thoughts as well, and has a breakdown