My personal favorite, most believable movie genius is Professor Falken/Fredkin from War Games, even though he didn’t do anything brilliant during the course of the movie.

Matt Damon plays some Southie genius/bruiser with an eidetic memory and superior reasoning skills. Instead of being smart, he’s a smart ass.

Aside from solving some whiz-bang math problem on a blackboard while working as a janitor, he enthralls the leading lady with a glib dressing-down of a sweatered grad student in a bar with his knowledge of history. Of course, Damon reverts to The People’s History of the United States; Damon was an admirer and close friend of Howard Zinn.

The biggest reason silver screen “geniuses” are so unconvincing is that their characters are written by Hollywood writers who are anything BUT geniuses.

The most famous (and politically outspoken) actors and actresses are mostly high school and college dropouts. Those who did graduate college were mostly Theater majors. Theater departments have some of the lowest entrance requirements for college.

One could name some notable exceptions to the rule of ignorant, uneducated actors, but the evidence would be anecdotal. Hollywood artists are mostly morons. If they demonstrate any intellect, it’s only because Hollywood writers contrived it.

More broadly, I was objecting to the implicit argument that financial success through investing can represent an example of genius.

Americans are a bit too quick to conclude that folks who have made lots of money must have done so because of unique, personal attributes or insight. Perhaps this tendency comes from the Calvinist notion of the “Elect” – that you can recognize those who are meritorious in God’s eyes by their material success – but given how volatile markets are, and how quickly fortunes can disappear, that idea seems to imply that God is moody (or Moody’s?).

Along with the assumption that personal attributes determine wealth comes the assumption that one person’s “strategy” for making money is reproducible by other people. There’s an entire industry of “How-To” and “Self-Help” books that cater to this notion; yet an investment/business strategy is only as reproducible as the circumstances are identical. And most of the time, circumstances aren’t identical.

Back on the subject of what genius is – theoretically I could accept the “objective” measure that Perich describes; but are there really standardized tests that are well enough designed to quantify aptitude in creative fields like visual art or musical composition or poetry or science? I like the argument of Mlawski et al. that genius can manifest in many different types of intelligence, and that we should distinguish between the work-of-genius and the person-who-is-a-genius – the distinction being that the person-who-is-a-genius produces multiple works-of-genius.

Like, when Francis Crick postulated the existence and function of tRNA years before the chemical species had been isolated – that was a work of genius. Or when Santiago Ramon y Cajal figured out much of how the nervous system develops and functions based simply on his microscopic observations of fixed neuroanatomic structures – that was a work of genius. And both of those individuals made several important contributions to science, so I’d consider them both geniuses. By contrast, Jim Watson contributed intellectually to just one major advance and spent the rest of his career as more of an administrator. So I wouldn’t call Watson a scientific genius (although I would call him a douchebag).

How do we acclaim something a work of genius? It’s depends on how well an individual reader / viewer / listener / etc. knows or respects the work. So it depends on individual taste or esteem. But it also depends, as Perich states, on the work’s fame. A lot of people would call the Kanon in D by Pachelbel a work of genius, while I would consider it tripe, especially when compared to the Chaconne from J.S. Bach’s second Violin Partita. Additionally, individual works are more widely acclaimed when the artist is better known. Was Planck’s initial work on quantization really less impressive than Einstein’s application of this theory to describe the photoelectric effect? (Thomas Kuhn thinks so.) But while Americans do not consider Planck to be as famous as Einstein, Germans have all heard of him – they even named their national scientific society the Max Planck Gesellschaft. (“Max Planck” is also Shechner’s porn alias.) So perhaps we just ignore Planck because he never lived in America.

Similarly, far fewer people know Schubert’s piano works than Beethoven’s. Each was original and novel; the difference is that Schubert didn’t have the same level of patronage that Beethoven did – it’s like Beethoven was on a major label and Schubert was just on underground mixtapes.

Finally, I’m surprised this thread has continued this long without acknowledging that Hollywood’s best shot at accurately portraying a “flash of genius” will be if someone can convince the GZA to make an Auto Bio pic.
Fenzel should reiterate his offer of Mint Milanos.

If you’ve watched interviews with great artists, it actually rings pretty true–they have this thing in them that demands getting out, but they really don’t get what it is beyond some sort of vague idea. Same with a lot of scientists. Einstein only had a glimmer of the consequences of his theories of relativity or the photoelectirc effect. That has been stuff that has been worked out in the many years since.

“Genius” is also a matter of being acclaimed as a genius, so that adds the subjective element you were alluding to.

Having not seen the movie in a very long time, I may be way off target here… but surely all geniuses are eccentric people with crazy hair!

Arcadia is a bit different – it’s important to the plot that we in the audience believe Thomasina to be a genius, and since the theme of the play revolves in part around the question “what is genius?” the type of “handwaving” that works in Star Trek just won’t do. But Stoppard is cheating here – Thomasina seems brighter than she would otherwise because we have the benefit of hindsight; the things she discovers baffle her tutor but are familiar to us. Take Thomasina out of her context and put her in a modern postgraduate Calculus program and she wouldn’t stand out. But we don’t care, because what we need to understand about her is linked to the context, to the story, which is what we’re sitting in the theatre for in the first place.

Same thing with Proof – we don’t need to see any feats of genius, because that’s not what the play’s about. The play is about trust, and the fact that Catherine wrote an amazing proof is just a dramatic device. It could be a recipe for delicious cake, and the characters could all be bakers, and it wouldn’t change the story one bit, except that a mathematical proof – or rather, the lack thereof, is a handy metaphor for the sort of leap of faith a romantic relationship requires.

I think a true depiction of genius is besides the point, except as it serves the needs of the story. In Amadeus, Schaffer spends time establishing Mozart’s genius, but, as in perich’s analysis of a scene from the film up there, it’s all encoded in the dramatic action. I think any competent playwright that has a passable understanding of his or her subject has the tools to portray genius, if that is what he or she needs. (Not to suggest that Schaffer is merely a competent playwright – he’s very good, even great. But he no more needs to be a true artistic prodigy to dramatize Mozart’s life than he needs to blind six horses in order to tell a compelling story about that).

Yes, I know, I’ve steered the discussion onto the stage when the original question was about Hollywood. The problem is that Hollywood, in general, isn’t in the habit of employing even competent writers. The Beautiful Mind scene about the girl is a great example of that – it’s a reasonably well-crafted dramatic scene that is supposed to get across Nash’s genius, but it fell short for reasons already described. This could have been solved with a little more work. If someone on board had said “wait, that’s a poor example of Game Theory,” it would probably be a much better scene (or, more likely, a different scene that serves the same dramatic purpose). Same with the NineNinetyNine.com thing. Of course, bad writing, careless editing, and just plain sloppiness is not a problem unique to movies about genius…

So the commenters start discussing what this OSG can be. But what if there is none? What if ‘genius’ is a social and cultural construction? Is there any objective standard that says Mozart’s music is better than Salieri’s? Is there a scientific reason that we hold Einstein in higher regard than Planck or Faraday?

Don’t get me wrong: I do believe that some people have made a greater contribution to human knowledge or art than others, but not because we can measure it, but because we have *debated* it. And culture is part of this debate. [Nathalie Heinich wrote an extensive study about this process in the case of Vincent van Gogh.] So is the question ‘how can movies depict genius?’ the right one?

I think movies show genius by telling you someone is one, by creating myths about the creative process and by showing reactions from other characters (like in the scene from Amadeus – even if you’re completely tone-deaf you know excactly whose music is better). Which is *excactly* how genius is portrayed in real life.

So not only do movies show genius convincingly, they also reenforce the existing construction: Mozart’s reputation was further cemented by Amadeus by strengthening the ideas we already had of him (the playful, childlike genius) in a strong (and very well made) narrative.)

I’m just wondering: did John Nash’s reputation suffer because the film made of him sucked so bad (and misrepresented his theory to add injury to insult)?

The moment when the genius is understood by Salieri (and by us as the audience) is when Salieri is sight reading the folios one by one, becoming entranced by their perfection, and the voiceover is betraying his thoughts. The moment of genius revealed happens when the genius character himself is not even on screen.

I do see what you mean, and while the scene is an example of wonderful filmmaking, does not sufficiently convince the audience of Mozart’s genius.