| Author |
Title |
Publisher: |
Date |
Format |
| Darren Aronofsky |
Pi |
Independent film |
1998 |
Film |
| Suggested
By: Alan Liu |
Added:
6/11/2000 |
| Last Modified:
9/19/2001 |
Comments:
(Mini-review by Alan Liu)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Sean Gullette as Max Cohen, this 1998 indie film shot in black-and-white to a driven, techno-music score is deliberately and aggressively unpleasant in its aesthetic. But it is obsessively, even compulsively interesting in its exploration of the nature of the mind's perception of order, chaos, and information.
Max Cohen is a number theorist who, when he was six, contravened his mother's warnings and stared into the sun. After the resulting temporary blindness, he was changed. He was a mathematical prodigy who could perform difficult calculations instantly in his head. And he had . . . headaches—devastating, blinding, yet also all-revealing headaches of schizophrenic intensity. Now, as an adult, he lives in paranoid isolation behind multiple locks in a New York apartment surrounded by an insane, jury-rigged ensemble of computing equipment and multiple monitors. At the heart of this ensemble is his personal "mainframe," whose processor chip is strangely bugged (ants crawl over it like an allegory of random chaos). His mathematical pursuit is the secret of pi, in whose endless non-recurrent sequence of digits he wishes to descry a "pattern"—a pattern he constantly tests (for purely intellectual gain) against the stock market. The pursuit of the pattern in pi is the same mad game that once almost burned out his mentor, an aging mathematician with whom Max occasionally plays Go. Relax, take a break, be intuitive, stop calcuating, the mentor tells Max. But meanwhile, people are after Max. There is the financial firm that will go to any lengths to compel his insight. There is the group of Hasidic Jews (numerologists who read scripture as a secret code of numbers) who lean on Max's Jewishness and try to strong-arm him into revealing the secret pattern in pi, which they believe is the name of God.
And, oh, those headaches, which the film realizes in stunningly piercing assaults on our senses (high-pitched sound, violent cutting, etc.)! They come whenever the chaotic surface of reality seems to bend inward toward Max with the pressure of some great index finger of design, when—in a sustained allusion to the Fibonacci numbers, a patterned series that seems to occur uncannily everywhere in nature, especially in spiral forms—the order of nature is about to be revealed. In those moments of head crash—timed to the crashes of his mainframe, his specific angel of revelation—the Truth comes. Max sees surreal visions fading all to white; while on his computer screen he sees a 216 digit number (the same number, it turns out, that his mentor had encountered and fled in his pi research, calling it a "bug"). What is that 216 digit number? Is it the name of God, the riddle of the stock market, the salvation of Max's personal hell?
In short, if transcendence is now information (we stand not in the light of revelation but of information), what is the truth contained in the information from which the universe is created? (Clue: the answer has something to do with a power drill, whose bit, of course, is another spiral form.)
Viewers of Pi will also be interested in M.D. Coverley's online work of hypertext fiction titled Fibonnaci's Daughter: http://califia.hispeed.com/Fibonacci/choice.htm
Pi has a runtime of 84 minutes. For more information, see Internet Movie Database entry. |
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