Pi
Max Cohen is a paranoid loner in a small apartment jammed to the gunwales with sophisticated homebrew computer equipment. As such, hešs both more likable and more dangerous than a gun-obsessed wacko like Travis Bickle. For, unlike Travis, Max isn't looking for respect, or a girl friend, or money. He's looking for the meaning of life, which, based on a reasonable set of assumptions that he postulates and repeats over an over, he is pretty sure exists. He almost had me believing it.
Max is a pretty smart guy with a Ph.D. in number theory from Columbia University. He looks for patterns in pi, which famously has none as far as anyone can figure (until Max, that is). He applies these patterns to understanding the stock market. He's not interested in the money, of course; he just wants to understand the underlying structure.
Max is also a pretty sick guy. When he was a kid he stared at the sun for several minutes, resulting in temporary blindness and a permanent susceptibility to devastating headaches. He does what he can to treat them but they won't go away, and they plague his work. He's Icarus, of course, and the movie makes sure that you catch the reference.
Pi is director Darren Aronovsky's first feature. It's low, low, budget--filmed in a harsh, overexposed black and white which portrays Max' state of mind quite well. There are no effects in Pi, just images, all of them disturbing. The streets and the apartments look cramped, ugly, dirty and dangerous (and really, the movie implies that you are much safer on a New York subway at 2.00 a.m. than in Max' apartment at high noon). The music is an insistent techno dance soundtrack that complements the gritty visuals, giving the movie a reckless driving energy. Together they effectively portray Max as a lonely, focused man living a very dangerous life.
Unfortunately, Max is being chased. By people, for one. It seems that he came upon a 216 digit number when his computer blew out during a critical analysis of stock market fluctuations. He tosses away that number in frustration, but certain people want it--a cartel of stock market investors, for one, who think that number holds a key to the rise and fall of share prices. Max is also chased by a group of Jewish mystics looking for the name of God. Max resists both groups at first but then gives in. The financiers give him a military grade computer chip as big as your fist. The Kaballists show him that the Torah is really a long string of numbers. (Max gets hooked when he finds the Fibonacci sequence in the Hebrew words for father, mother and child). Max decides to give both sides what they think they want.
The human bad guys here are not especially convincing. The leader of the cartel comes off mostly as cranky and out of sorts, and Orthodox Jews are not typically a group a screenwriter will go to when the desired effect is heavy menace. Yet there is something else out there that is really scary, and its mixed up with that 216 digit number (which Max commits to memory). That's what Pi is all about at the end.
There are a couple of ways to read Pi. On the one hand, it works as pure science fiction. It's not billed as such, but director Aronovsky seems to have read a fair amount of the stuff; I saw, or thought I saw references to Dick, Van Vogt, Gibson, Stephenson and a whole raft of others. As sf, Pi is straighforward but scary, with few special effects and relatively straightforward violence. Pi is idea-based sf.
If you donšt like the science fiction reading of the movie, Pi also works as a study of paranoid obsession. A paranoid sees patterns everywhere. So do conspiracy theorists, religious mystics and stock market players. A lot of these patterns do exist, as mathematics shows. When you take these clean patterns from number theory to everyday human behavior, you risk becoming a kook. If you can't take a break from this sort of thing (as Max' old graduate advisor suggests) you become a dangerous kook, if only to yourself.
Kevin Welch, kwelch@mailbag.com
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