All we are left with, as Nash is nursed back to quasi-sanity by the love of a good woman - the film smoothes over his real-life rocky marriage - is Nash's loopy obsession with secret codes.
More from Trevor Timm: the truth about secret war – and an obsession with state secrets.
Sure, my obsession with writing secret messages in hieroglyphs may have been an early indicator of my interest in cryptography, and I did hack my GeoSafari (what's up, 90's kids) to create my own quizzes on the Ptolemic dynasty, but this story also made two things very clear to me: my father has always been supportive of my intellectual curiosity and my independence.
She didn't know I had a secret obsession with the character.
It's O.K. if you're, say, a middle-aged woman who harbors a secret obsession with mastering Angry Birds.
More than one feminist friend has quietly admitted to a secret obsession with the show, while others embrace their fandom openly.
But when you examine the sheer scale, and radical scope, of the 19th-century obsession with dreams, illicit sex, secret confessions and the collapse of reason, you have to wonder if the surrealist movement actually said anything new at all.
One suspects that at least a couple of them already harbor a secret obsession with the likes of Minesweeper, Tetris, Solitaire or Bejeweled — as do so many desk jockeys — but it seems sadly unlikely that many, if any, of them will ever actually sit on a couch with controller in hand.
In the play's duller passages I found myself indulging the fantasy that Mr. Baldwin was actually playing the role in the guise of Jack Donaghy as he reveals his secret obsession with Burton in an ego-driven spectacle at a corporate retreat.
The hero is Max Glickman, a cartoonist whose life's work, begun as a child with his friend Manny, is a graphic history of the Jewish people, "Five Thousand Years of Bitterness", fuelled by a secret obsession with the Holocaust his defiantly secular parents would rather forget.
