So Smart It Hurts

In the upcoming “Royal Tenenbaums,” Royal (Gene Hackman) and Etheline (Anjelica Huston) Tenenbaum preside over a brood of prodigies who grow up to be losers. Richie (Luke Wilson), a junior tennis champion, inexplicably breaks down in the middle of a big match and retires from the game. His sister, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), who received a $50,000 playwriting grant while in the ninth grade, now sits in a bathtub and paints her toenails. Her other brother, Chas (Ben Stiller), a financial guru in grade school, still makes money but is chronically embittered and wears a red track suit in case of fire.

Never mind how these characters got that way (it has something to do with their feckless father). The point is that they hew to a stereotype all too common in Hollywood, even though the filmmaker, Wes Anderson (“Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore”), can hardly be called cravenly commercial.

That stereotype is this: The Tenenbaums are geniuses, so they must be miserable.

In Hollywood, you can never be too rich or too thin, but you can be too smart. It’s OK to have a beautiful face. It’s not OK to have a beautiful mind. Smart people are socially inept, inward-looking and compulsive, bedeviled by their obsession with whatever it is that they do, be it mathematics, piano, painting, lexicography, chess, cryptography or just general “Jeopardy!”-like knowledgeableness. Lurking in the background is the computer nerd.

There has been a frenzy of projects featuring such characters recently, and there’s more to come. There were the films “Shine” (tormented pianist), “The Luzhin Defence” (tormented chess master), “Pollock” (tormented painter), and “Good Will Hunting” (tormented working-class kid); the biographies “The Professor and the Madman” (tormented wordsmith) and “A Beautiful Mind” (tormented mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr.); and the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play “Proof” (tormented mathematician’s daughter). Upcoming are “Enigma” (tormented code-breaker) and an adaptation of “A Beautiful Mind,” starring Oscar winner Russell Crowe as Nash.

Why the glut of geniuses? In the past, they were seen, if they were seen at all, as tortured artists (Michelangelo, Van Gogh), absent-minded professors (Fred MacMurray, Sam Jaffe) or mad scientists (Dr. Frankenstein, Captain Nemo). The mad scientist stereotype was especially significant because it reflected the public’s discomfort with technology, which, whether the issue was smokestacks or hydrogen bombs, was seen as threatening rather than beneficial. Times have changed. Now it’s our friend the electron (or the gigabyte). Even the events of Sept. 11 haven’t changed that.

“Everybody knows we live in an information age,” says Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the book “A Beautiful Mind” and teaches at Columbia University.

“When people focus on a technological society, scientists and inventors become sexy subjects. It’s by connecting with these people that you can access ideas and subjects that would be quite intimidating otherwise.” In other words, we can’t understand Nash’s game theory, which won him a Nobel Prize, but we can acquire some appreciation of it if we learn about him and the times he worked in (the 1950s).

Nash conformed to the artistic genius template. At first harmlessly eccentric, he became delusional, claiming to hear alien messages and planning to become the emperor of Antarctica. In the film, he conjures up delusions so vivid that the audience at times doesn’t know what’s real.

According to Nasar, although Nash’s oddness was not unusual in people who think outside the box, the fact that he was a schizophrenic was. The only other genius she can recall who was schizophrenic was the dancer Nijinsky.

Most geniuses, if they are anything, are neurotic, experts believe. Which you could say about a lot of people. Perhaps it’s a matter of degree. Nash, in the movie, has an obsession with patterns. He introduces himself to a fellow student by noting that there must be a mathematical explanation for the ugliness of his tie (he actually has a point). He charts the behavior of pigeons and of a woman whose purse is stolen. This is strange, but it’s not necessarily nuts.

“I was trying to be as reflective as possible of the actual guy,” says “A Beautiful Mind” screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. “John was apparently socially awkward even in the rare air of Princeton, where eccentric behavior was, at least in those days in that field, the norm.”

“A significantly large number of artists have mood disorders, such as bipolar disorder,” says Dr. Clifford Pickover, who wrote “Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen.” “In fact, it appears that both major depression and bipolar disorder can sometimes enhance the creativity of some people. So while we cannot say that the neurotic behavior of some great scientists causes their greatness, it likely plays a role.”

Of course, not every genius is extraordinarily weird, and not every genius is going to provide us with insight into a world we want to understand. In the case of “The Professor and the Madman,” the genius was William Minor, a 19th century physician-turned-lexicographer who contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary from his cell at England’s Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (he was committed for killing a man and complaining that he was being spirited away while asleep to perform sex acts). How many people are really interested in the first written usage of the word “art,” what that usage was, and how it was arrived at and cataloged? According to “Madman” author Simon Winchester, many readers were drawn not to Minor’s work, but to his outsider status. His madness made him a rebel.

“I was fascinated by how well the book did in Australia,” Winchester says. “Partly it can be explained by their interest in the English language and in Victoriana.” And part of it, he says, is that “he’s the Ned Kelly of lexicography.” (Kelly was a famous Australian outlaw.)

This may explain the appeal of wild-man physicist Richard Feynman, who, according to Pickover, had his “bars, brothels and bongos.” (Feynman, who wrote several best-selling autobiographies, is the subject of Peter Parnell’s “QED,” currently on Broadway.)

Of course, geniuses might be of interest simply because they’re better at something than we are. Not surprisingly, they can be resented for the same reason, especially when who they are is not commensurate with what they are.

The play and Oscar-winning movie “Amadeus” was all about the disconnect between Mozart’s genius and his infantile behavior, and the outrage felt by his rival Salieri at the unjustness of this. Winchester says that William Smith, the founder of modern geology and the subject of his new book, “The Map That Changed the World,” was shunned by the scientists of his day, whom Winchester describes as “perfumed dilettantes,” in part because of his lowly origins.

There is also something inherently undemocratic, or at least unearned, about geniuses--all men are supposed to be created equal, which may explain why they are often knocked down a peg on-screen. Of course, there’s nothing democratic about good looks or inherited wealth, but it seems more socially acceptable to find these attributes attractive, not offensive, at least in this culture. New York magazine critic Peter Rainer attributes this propensity to American anti-intellectualism. He cites as Hollywood examples “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” “Little Man Tate,” and Matt Damon’s gifted character in “Good Will Hunting.” Damon might be smart, but it doesn’t do him any good.

“If you’re brainy, then there is something suspect about you, and it’s only when you can be brought down to size, when you can show that you’re the same confused lummox as the rest of us, that you can be considered sympathetic,” Rainer says. “What these movies do isn’t so much champion genius as bring it down to our level so that we can feel better about ourselves. We may not be geniuses, but we’re better off than these people.” In fact, Damon finds happiness only when he renounces his gifts and chases after the girl.

There is the sense in this movie, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and “A Beautiful Mind” that these characters do not enjoy what they’ve got. It’s a curse. Richie is always being asked about his tennis meltdown. Margot is haunted by her writer’s block. Even Chas, who seems to have fulfilled his early promise, finds that his talent can’t keep the world at bay. Nash can relate to others only in terms of gamesmanship. At one point, a girl slaps him when he proposes that they skip the palaver and proceed to exchange bodily fluids.

However, as both Nasar and Winchester point out, many geniuses not only love what they do, it actually prevents them from going crazy. In Minor’s case, lexicography kept his madness at bay (unlike Nash, he could continue his work even while disturbed because it involved repetition rather than a mathematician’s flights of fancy).

Before he lapsed into schizophrenia, Nash was plagued by anxieties that as he approached 30, his best days were behind him. His work, when he could do it, brought him closer to people rather than pushed them away. The film has it both ways: Nash becomes functional when he returns to Princeton and resumes his work; on the other hand, he concludes in his Nobel speech that his brain didn’t save him, the love of his wife did.

“I think there are a lot of factors,” Goldsman says. “This notion of the diet of the mind [in which he ignores his delusions], that’s how John characterizes his remission from schizophrenia. The truth is nobody knows why some people get better and some people don’t. Certainly for the sake of the movie and for the truth of John’s and Alicia’s lives, he would never have survived long enough to have the chance to get better if it weren’t for her.”

All these issues are played out in “Proof.” The protagonist is the daughter of a mathematician who went off the deep end. She fears that she inherited both his genius and his instability, although audiences see very little of the former and a lot of the latter. She’s hostile, unkempt, holds conversations with her father (who is dead), and doesn’t say much that is mathematical. She claims to have written a revolutionary proof, but it appears to be in her father’s handwriting. Although the play seems to traffic in genius stereotypes, the characters don’t seem so different from you and me, and it concludes with the daughter embracing who she is.

In fact, no less an authority on the subject than John Nash, who is now 73, approved of this depiction of genius. Nasar took him to see it. “He loved it,” says Nasar, who admits she was a little nervous about his response. “It was so much fun to see him laugh and react to ‘Proof’ because [the father] is clearly inspired by Nash’s story, and to witness John Nash seeing this on the stage in front him--it was adorable.”

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John Clark is a regular contributor to Calendar.