Celebrating Cinema

Celebrating Cinema

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Pi (1998)

by Darren Aronofsky 


An Analysis

Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) in his apartment
Brilliant number theoretician Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), who counts a mathematics mentor, the hot young woman next door, and a little girl upstairs as his only regular acquaintances, self-medicates his way toward the siren's song of numerology, as two seemingly different forces cajole then coerce for his rare abilities.  Darren Aronofsky's debut, Pi, scintillates with cinematic talent and a 128-bit-encrypted narrative.

Golden Spiral
The math and science history habitué will nerdgasm as Pi shows and tells of Möbius strips, Fibonacci numbers, golden spirals & rectangles, Archimedes, da Vinci, EuclidPythagoras, and more. Those unfamiliar will do well to seek counsel from Wikipedia, Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (1973), and Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980). Lacking such knowledge, though detracting from one's enjoyment, will not hinder the viewer's understanding of the film.



<<<  SPOILERS BELOW  >>>

Please see the film before reading further

Fried by a literal computer bug--an ant--Max's supercharged P.C. spits out and prints a series of digits upon its death, a series Max believes is the first numbers of a 216-digit code. This series, and the quest for its completion, begins Max's descent.

Marcy lecturing Max
Pressured by unseen caller "Marcy Dawson from Lancet-Percy, a predictive strategies firm," to schedule a meeting, Max, a polite hermit, first hangs up, and only later takes to yelling that she leave him alone. Marcy and her henchmen, each dressed for Wall Street domination, corner Max, arranging to give him a military-secret integrated computer chip that, once installed, ranks Max's computer among the world's most powerful.  Lancet-Percy, in exchange, wants Max's numerical key to predict and exploit the stock market. 

Max (left) with Lenny
Max, a secular Jew, is soon befriended by Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman), a Hassidic Jew practicing Kabbalah among men who see the Torah as a mathematical puzzle--a sort of Old Testament version of the unfortunate 1997 best-seller The Bible Code. Aronofsky smartly waits until late in the film to allow us to notice that once Max leaves his apartment, Lenny always happens to be not far away, appearing at just the right time...  Lenny's sect wants Max's code to unlock the true 216-character name of their god, and do who-knows-what with the power that accompanies it.


A Messianic Max
We may be accustomed to interpreting financial firms and religious orders as antipodal organizations, but a closer look reveals a common fanatical desire for power, one via wealth, the other via divine decree. Max feels the pressure from both, but Max develops a messianic complex--he is the chosen one.

Pi's rave-like soundtrack, predating Doug Liman's Go (1999) and Greg Harrison's Groove (2000), and featuring Massive Attack's "Angel," emphasizes frantic, hypnotic tension in Max's relationship with worlds external and internal.

Opening shot, Pi.
Aronofsky's visual choices impress upon the audience Max's state of mind at least as often as Gullette's formidable countenance and speech.  From the opening shot, the only time we know Max to sleep, we understand a visual treat awaits. We can postulate different interpretations of Aronofsky's choice of a grainy, high-contrast imagery.  Perhaps he wants to make us feel we are watching via cheap security camera, helpless but to watch and worry. Perhaps he believes the lack of definition itself instills unease, that a crisper image would have made us feel safer. Does the graininess place Max in the past, present, or future, or in another world that resembles all three?


The oft-copied coffee cup from Godard's 2 or 3 Things...
Aronofsky's re-creates some of Godard's famous coffee close-ups in  2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, using cream to illustrate nature's spirals. In Godard's lengthy narration over the coffee cup scene, he whispers "when the lightning progress of science makes future centuries hauntingly present, when distant galaxies are at my doorstep..." Perhaps this was on Aronofsky's mind when he had Max's genius blow Lenny's mind, "I've never seen that before."

While vacant subway stations always, but not exclusively, indicate Max's nightmares, dream/hallucination sequences are not easily demarcated from actual in-film events--or is all of this so implausible (or unnecessary to the story's greater point) that there exists no in-the-film difference between the real and the imagined?  


John Randolph wearing the camera in Seconds
Aronfsky's camera helps us feel Max's emotion journey. Aronofsky again steals from the best. Early, a paranoid Gullette is wearing a harness-mounted camera that focuses back on his character, Max, similar to the opening of Seconds (1966), John Frankenheimer's paranoia-filled masterpiece. Chase scenes involving hand-held, jerky cinematography, sometimes coupled with fish-eye lenses, conspire to show Max's stress-infused frenzies.


Robert Duvall as THX 1138
Max's pill-popping, subcutaneous injection scenes look and sound like Joe Gideon's in All That Jazz (1979). Three times Max narrates the same story about himself at age six--he stared at the sun so long, it blinded him for hours. Three times in the film, each after a torrent of emotion overwhelms Max, the screen fades to a blinding white. The third fade-to-white shows a distant a shaven-headed Max suspended in white, reminiscent of George Lucas's debut, THX 1138 (1971). Aronofsky may want us to draw the parallel between Max's end to pill-popping and (Robert Duvall's character) THX 1138's avoidance of state-imposed medications, because both succeed in reclaiming their lives. The fades-to-white represent Max's new way of staring at the sun--Max stares at numerology so long, and it has blinded him.  


After literally or metaphorically lobotomizing himself, Max finds peace and becomes friends with little girl Jenna again--he has no need to be the math prodigy anymore. His life's balance has returned, and we are left with hope for Max's new life, possibly with the hot woman next door.  


Pi's teaser!



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