Pathology in Gaze Perception; "A Beautiful Mind"

In my view, one of the many advantages of aging (I'm a 51 year old male) is that the "Look" of persons or the "Gaze" of society gets less intimidating. When in my puberty I had a pimple on my face, I felt like the whole world was watching me. Now, with my identity more secured (and less pimples of course 😊), I realize that most people, "looking" at me, are not actually "seeing" me, busy as they are with beeing seen themselves.
    This is  healthy, "normal" personal development, and goes for the most of us. But not for everybody! What if the person peeping through the keyhole, in Sartre's example of "the Look", was deaf? Or what if this person didn't feel any guild, after being caught? Or what if the tin can floating in the sea, in Lacan's example of the "Gaze", litterally seemed to look at or speak to him?
    It's clear that their can be numerous disturbances in "the visual field". This flaw can be purely physical (blindness, deafness, anosmia etc) or mental; for instance autism (unable to interact with your environment "correctly") or paranoid schizophrenia (seeing and/or hearing things that aren't there). And Hollywood wouldn't be Hollywood if it wouldn't use this given in many movies, either in a comedy (See no Evil, Hear no Evil), a feel good tearjerker movie (Rain Man) or suspense (The Sixt Sense).

                                              

    A film that more or less combines these genres is A Beautiful Mind (2001), directed by Ron Howard, starring Russel Crowe and Jennifer Connely. It's a biographical drama film based on the life of John Nash, a brilliant but also schizofrenic mathematician and Nobel Laureate in Economics. The story begins in Nash days (the 1950's) as a graduate student at Princeton University. In the first half of the movie we are lead to believe that John is a somewhat unworldly but brilliant student, almost autistic in an innocent way. He's better with numbers than with people, especially women. "Let's have sex, after all it's just an exchange of fluids", is his (obviously unseccesful) attempt with a beautiful blonde. Then the inevitable brunette comes in. Alicia is an intelligent math student that does understand and accept his awkwardness, and they get married. Meanwhile John is asked to help the Pentagon to decipher Russian military codes (it's the heyday of Cold War and paranoia McCarthyism). The Russians find out about him, and a series of exciting complications follow.
   Then there is a sudden turning point in the movie, when the viewer is made clear that al this exciting "spy-business" hasn't happened in reality, but only in John's head. The friendly, autistic savant turns out to be a dangerous paranoid schizofrenic. Risking her life, and that of their infant, Alicia covinces John to acknowledge his illness and to seek for psychiatric help. After the inevitable setback, she manages to get John of his medication, by learning him how to "live with his heart, not with his head". He picks up university life again, and is awarded a Nobel Prize thirty years later. All's well that ends well. 

So what can be said about this movie in "Gaze perspective". There seem to be two Gazes; that of an unabled person with a serious illness, and that of the man in general. The positive thing about this movie is that it tries to make schizofrenia understandable to the general public. For John, windows are not to look through to "the Other"(like in Hitchcock's Rear Window), but things to write his mathematical equations on. He can't break out of his own head. Nice symbolism. Also the trick in the first half to put the audience on the wrong footing, makes clear very well how "real" delusions are for a schizofrenic. But the illness is sauced with an inappropriate romanticism. The male illness must be compensated by excellence in another domain, i.c. mathematical brilliance (or by wealth as in the movie Les Intouchables). Also it gives the illusion that this illness can be overcome by strong will and (female) love. The reality is different of course. Most schizofrenic are not genial or rich, they life in a dirty, dark, lonely and utterly un-romantic world, and must stay on medication for the rest of their life.
    In feminist perspective, could we say that Laura Mulvey's "Male Gaze" is more absent here (with a self-doubting, vulnerable, multi-layered, emotional male lead) than in films with healthy, macho, one dimensional characters like John Wayne or Rambo? On the contrary. In my, perhaps cynical, opinion it is just a way of the male dominated industry to lure more women to the cinema, while managing to preserve the male gaze. The so-called weakness of the male lead is used in a more sophisticated, almost dastardly manner to again completely control the setting. Firstly, this movie completely fails the Bechdel test. Alicia is asked only once (by a male friend) how SHE is coping, but this is not elaborated on any further. Second, the film is full of gender stereotyping: brunettes are smarter dan blondes (but not as genial as men of course), and men think with their head, but women feel with their heart (which makes them perfect nurses who eagerly give up their own career for that). It's the romantic idyll of "stand by your man, no matter what" and "female love conquers all (even schizofrenia)" that rather irritates me.
  
Sartre once said: "Hell is the Other", but if the other is an illusion in your own head it must be squared hell. I find the subject fascinating (I'm not a fan of fantasy movies where the dangerous others are purely fictional, like zombies or aliens), but in A Beautiful Mind it is elaborated in a disappointing manner. If you want to know more about John Nash and schizofrenia, you'd better read the biography by Sylvia Nasar, on which the movie was based. The fact that the movie won four Oscars probably says more about Hollywood, than about the worth of this film.