Last night I watched Pi for the second time, this time with my GF. I was secretly hoping she’d explain it to me, but when it was over, she looked at me and said “I don’t get it.”
Bummer.
So let’s see if I’ve got this right. When you answer, please talk to me like I’m four.
When Max was a kid, he looked at the sun, which caused him brain damage. This turned him into a super genius, but also gave him bad migraines and hallucinations. He was working on a computer program to calculate longer values of Pi, and he was searching for patterns in it. When the computer found one, it was some sort of Magic Number, which caused the computer some sort of brief sentience before killing itself. Said Magic Number was also capable of predicting stock prices and accessing God Almighty. Then the WallStreet/Hasidic baddies got all medieval on his ass.
Correct so far?
Max also saw a lot of strange things like spies, ants, and computer goo. Oh, and Bleeding Hand man in the subway station. Were these all hallucinations?
In the end, Max achieved enlightenment, but decided it was too much of a ahem headache to bear, and so drilled into his brain to make it all stop. Both his headaches and his genius are cured.
How I did?
As a followup question, when was this supposed to take place? The use of rotary phones and 5.25" floppies made it seem really old, but the film is dated 1998. Did it just take a really long time in post production?
Actually, I got the impression Max had been hallucinating more and more as the movie went by, and less and less was actually real. Notice it gets more and more bizarre as the movie goes on, with conspiracies popping up everywhere, and things becoming increasingly convoluted? I took that as subtle sign that he’s slowly going insane and by the end he’s pretty much in own little fantasy world until he drills a hole in his head.
As for all the old equipment, I guessed because what he had was sufficent for his purpose and he never felt like he had to get anything newer. Or he’s just really attached to his equipment and wouldn’t give it up. He seemed highly eccentric and I’ve heard that people like him can be like that.
Basically, it reminds me of “Blue Velvet” or “Videodrome”, movies that just get increasingly bizarre as they go on and you can believe the world is a very disturbing place or it’s all in the hero’s mind.
And I forgot to mention, Notice his friend did tell him that obsessing was going to drive him crazy. I think he was pretty well obsessed by the end.
(Somehow HPL talking to tdn tickles me. Acronyms unhttp://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=7120463ite!)
I have not seen Pi or a Beautiful Mind, because I can’t watch movies about crazy people very often, but I think in the latter it is meant to be explicit that the “narrator”, John Nash, not reality, was unreliable? And perhaps the slow decay of the world in Pi is meant to be ambiguous; we’re not meant to know whether it is insanity or the ‘magic number + genuis’ (hence the return of sanity when it is drilled away) corrupting the world. This is only a guess - those who have seen the films please do tell me if I’m off-base.
I guess it makes sense if you assume that Max is completely mad as the movie starts. That’s the only possible reconciliation of his number-theoretic background and the ideas he professes.
Not to thread-shit, but this is the single worst treatment I’ve ever seen of a technical subject. Ignoring the fact that the basic premise is nonsensical, every time they try to cite a single technical detail, they get it wrong. Sometimes it’s only a little wrong (the golden ratio is referred to as phi, not theta), and sometimes it’s very wrong (“Surely you must have recited all of the 216 digit numbers by now!”–I actually laughed out loud at that line).
That is the only movie my husband and I got so bored watching we ended up having sex on the sofa. Sure, other movies lead to sex on the sofa, but none of the rest through sheer boredom.
I have no idea what it is about, and I have no desire ever to see it again and find out what I missed.
I liked it a lot.
He’s bonkers, ala Jacob’s Ladder or a Beautiful Mind or Mulholland Drive or Brazil (or Foucault’s Pendulum or Island of the Day Before (perhaps)). The unreliable narrator motif. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the technical errors were intentional.
Well, I was bothered by the pi thing crashing his computer. I had to explain to the others in the room is that crashes are caused by conflicts with software, and a good programmer can eliminate such problems that would crash the program.
IIRC, itwas the True Name of God, not pi per se, that crashed the computers. Ergo it was a mystical/metaphysical crash, not a programming conflict. BTW, I’m pretty sure the TNoG crashed Max’s wetware as well as his hardware. His brain was fried like a plantain by the end.
First of all, the number Max is really interested in is Phi, the golden ratio that is supposedly found everywhere in life (Cecil even has a column on it). Why the movie was titled Pi? Beats the hell out of me, but it should have been Phi. There’s no reason for it not to be Phi.
Are you saying the movie erroneously refers to it as phi? As far as I know, phi is the correct notation.
The antiquated technology is more I think for cinematic effect than anything. The scene where the ant crawls out with the computer goo is (I believe) a reference to the Greek myth where Daedalus threads a conch shell by tying thread to an ant and placing honey on the other side. Max’s anecdote about his staring into the sun isn’t so much an explanation for why his head is the way it is, but I think is placed to illustrate his willingness to examine something that shouldn’t be scrutinized so closely until it quite literally damages him–as we see later in the movie.
My thoughts exactly. All the hallucinations may or may not have significance in some kind of trippy allegorical way, but they’re not happening. Max is losing it. And he’s losing it because he’s stumbled across some fundamental property of the universe–the name of God, the algorithm that governs the stock market, the solution to every math problem, whatever you want to call it–something so vital to existence that to know it is to break down the entire system. I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know if anything analogous exists in the world of software.
Darren Aronofsky (the director and writer) is one pretentious son of a bitch. Pi is loaded with more superfluous metaphors and visuals than is probably good for the movie. But he can work a camera like few people I’ve ever seen.
No, the movie referred to it as theta. I was so excited when he was talking about the golden ratio, thinking they were actually going to get something right, and then they had to go give it the wrong notation…
Well I think it was an excellent film. It is all supposed to be allegorical of course. The bits of number theory and computer science are just in it to lift the allegory. Therefore it doesn’t matter much if it is realistic or the computer equipment is up to date. Actually Aaronofski chose the equipment to be not up to date, so people wouldnt focus on the technical aspects. I think this was well made, and as a scientific mind I find this stuff fascinating. There aren’t that many movies about scientists.
Other great things about the movie. The camera work of course. He is even more brilliant in requiem for a dream. Also I like the way he takes atypical characters as the stereotypes. An indian girl as the sex symbol, and a black woman as the power symbol.
The allegory thing doesn’t excuse him for making errors of course.
