Three Days On

[handful_ofdust]

So, yeah: Labour Day. On which there was labour, but not that kind. I spent the long weekend, predictably, doing little except the usual round of chores and Cal-looking-after. Made a few notes, thought about various shit, saw some films (Green Lantern: First Flight, Ed Brubaker's Angel of Death (starring Zoe Bell) and State of Play, if you're wondering). According to my list, I'm now up over 161 books read in 2009, so at some point I should probably post a list of the best stuff thus far, with brief annotations. "Should", ha ha.

But today is also Day One (and only, per week) for Cal at Senior Kindergarten, which means I really need to get my ass in gear and lay some pipe before I have to go ferry him over to Surrey Place (then rush back here and lay more pipe, etcetera). Time's a-tickin'.

Oh, man. Where's that damn Tommyknockers machine that lets you simply dream an entire novel in beautiful first draft prose when you need it, anyhow? As I recall, it also heated your water, and maybe made you coffee at the same time. Screw you for teasing me, Stephen King.

Comments

[sovay]

(Continued because I blew out the character limit.)

Seriously, I would almost recommend you watch A Beautiful Mind up to the point where the montage starts and then turn it off. It might be the most fascinating turn in the entire story and the film clearly has no interest in it: the years between the point where Nash realized that he was mentally ill—that he could not reason his way out of schizophrenia, because his reason itself was faulty—and the point where it began almost not to matter, because he found intellectual ways to distinguish the real from the delusional and trust in his choices, even if he could not make himself believe in them. That's, what, the early 1960's to the late 1980's? We see them in little snapshots, invariably Nash on-campus at Princeton, or his son going off to school, or his wife leaving for work (which she seems to have done decade after decade to support them); these scenes are a way of indicating time passing, but not change. We don't see the support structure Nash creates around himself, or asks others to create, or their effects on his daily life. We don't see the places where the structure breaks down. We don't see how his behavior adapts, or does not adapt, to the changing cultural tectonics—when the Cold War ends, what does that do to his delusion of being recruited to break Russian codes? Is his hallucinatory roommate still stuck on D.H. Lawrence? As Nash becomes aware of new children's books, does the roommate's equally hallucinatory niece appear to read them? There is a fascinating scene in which his wife admits frankly that most days she doesn't love her husband; mostly she feels trapped, stressed, guilty over these feelings and then resentful of her guilt; but as her husband is learning to look at the world and trust in its reality, she makes herself look at her husband and trust that he is still, somewhere under his meds and his muttering, the man she fell in love with. That's so much more complex than the usual wide-eyed unconditional support, it deserved more exploration—the minutiae and messiness integral to any life, especially a life one hopes to present as art. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that Ron Howard agrees with me. The last third of the movie never falls into Love of a Good Woman Cures Mental Illness, thank God (it's more like Love of Serious Defense Mechanisms, Also, Checking with Non-Schizophrenics to Make Sure That Guy from the Nobel Committee Actually Exists), but it's much too close for comfort; and it treads distinctly over the line of the crazy genius mythos that the film had avoided so successfully for two hours. Fine, Nash won the Nobel Prize. That's no excuse to compress thirty years of his life into some affirmative cliché. And after such an unsentimental, occasionally uncomfortable character study of a man who happens both to be a brilliant mathematician and a paranoid schizophrenic, it depressed me.

That was way more than I meant to write about A Beautiful Mind. I think essentially it's worth watching for Russell Crowe, but only if you are willing to stick your fingers in your ears and hum through the home stretch. There is also Paul Bettany, but if you really want him and Crowe, that is why God made Master and Commander.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Well, damn you! Now I'll eventually have to look it up. (As opposed to Master & Commander, which I could just pull out and watch right now, if I wanted to.;))