Pi (as in π, 1998)

 

Pi (as in π, 1998)

 

Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis): “Listen to me. The Ancient Japanese considered the Go board a microcosm of the universe. When it is empty it appears simple and ordered, but the possibilities of game play are endless. They say that no two Go games have ever been alike. Just like snowflakes. So, the Go board actually represents an extremely complex and chaotic universe. That is the truth of our world, Max. It can't be easily summed up with math. There is no simple pattern.”
Maximillian "Max" Cohen (Sean Gullette): “But as a Go game progresses, the possibilities become smaller and smaller. The board does take on order. Soon, all moves are predictable.”
Sol: “So?”
Max: “So, maybe, even though we're not sophisticated enough to be aware of it, there is an underlying order... a pattern, beneath every Go game. Maybe that pattern is like the pattern in the market, in the Torah. The two-sixteen number.”

 

This zero-budget SF film is about Obsession, Paranoia, and how dangerous the longing for Transcendence can be. The Pi of the title, the Irrational Number that all of us know, is touched upon only lightly, it had once been of great interest to Character Sol, but Max is chasing something slightly different. Still, Pi is film’s the central Metaphor, as it represents the limits of Reductive Logic underlying almost all Mathematics and other Sciences, a fundamental Mathematical Constant representing something that sounds easy, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, but can’t be nailed down neatly, the decimal points keep stringing out endlessly; as of May 2025 (so long after this film was released), it’s at a record-breaking 300 trillion decimal places that still hasn’t ended or started to repeat.

 

Max’s obsession is about a simpler number, only 216 digits long, that he believes is equivalent to the Unified Field Theory that was so elusive to Albert Einstein towards the end of his career. The more Max contemplates the number, the more he scribbles down arcane calculations, the more he suffers from Migraines and Hallucinations, and the more he is stalked by Sinister Forces. True, he’s an Unreliable Narrator, constantly popping apparently prescription pills to control his Migraines, so maybe these Sinister Forces are an extension of his Hallucinations, but the film also grounds its Reality carefully, and Max is playing games with people equally as Obsessed as he, so, likely, Thuggish Wall Street Guys (led by Marcy Dawson (Pamela Hart)) & Thuggish Hassidic Jews (a casual encounter with a Torah Scholar named Lenny (Ben Shenkman) bring them into the story), are real. You see, Max’s research might allow him to predict Stock Market Fluctuations. It also might lead to the Mystical True name of God hinted of in the Torah, whose invocation will bring about the Messianic Age. And, not for nothing, 216 is 6x6x6, or 666, the Number of the Beast in the Christian Tradition. It is one of the great films concerning (well, also one of the only films concerning) Arithmomania, a Mental Condition associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and characterized by an abnormal fixation to count objects, perform mental calculations, and obsess over specific numbers.

 

It was Directed by Arron Aronofsky who co-Wrote it with Eric Watson and Sean Gullette. Gullette who also stars as Max; Gullette and is so good as the self-isolating, troubled Genius, one can almost feel Max’s Migraines. His apartment is as cluttered as his thoughts. His intensity of focus is in his eyes, his chaos is in his gestures.

 

It is filmed in unusually high-contrast B&W utilizing a Reversal Film Stock usually associated with still Photography, but extremely rare in feature-length films. Aronofsky again, "We didn’t want it to end up looking like ‘Clerks’ [1994] and be all gray. We wanted it to be black or white. We were inspired by “Sin City” by Frank Miller [he’s referring to the comic book, first issued in 1991, not the film version of 2005]” Aronofshy’s Cinematographer was Matthew Libatique, “Matty was brave enough to take on Reversal film, which many of us shot in film school, and its black and white Reversal, extremely hard film stock to expose.” It made the World, both Real and Imagined, starkly Abstract. (Libatique would work with Aronofsky repeatedly in the future.)

 

There’s use of the Snorri Cam (a camera strapped to the Actor's body, named after its designers, the Snorri Brothers) accentuating the subjectivity, underlining Max being an Unreliable Narrator, but also grounding his mania in recognizable experience because of really excellent, Guerilla-Style, location footage of lower-Manhattan and a little bit of Brooklyn (scenes on the NYC subway were filmed illegally). Aronosky, “The idea behind Pi was to make a fully subjective movie …We can shoot the other actors [meaning not Sean Gullette] almost POV, almost straight-on, but Sean was almost always shot in profile so he was more of an objective, and the audience was seeing his point of view more subjectively ... Because we were trying to be subjective, every little gimmick we did, we tried to have a reason for."

 

This is combined with over-lapping imagery of the Symbols that Max is trying to turn into Coherent Codes, and disturbing things that are wholly of Nightmares, like the repeated appearance of Ants, especially of them crawling across exposed Brain Tissue. The latter Surreal Nightmares fits into the former elements like a key-into-lock because if the rapid cutting and montage techniques (Editor Oren Sarch, who would also work with Aronofsky again) creating a flow between the Mundane and the Profane, Max’s actual Life and his growing Madness.

 

Also of note is the score, mostly electronic, aggressive and danceable, cold early on, later often warmer and Romantic, always brooding, then exploding with pulsations as Max’s Migraines hit (Composer Clint Mansell, formerly of the band Pop Will Eat Itself and, in the future, another frequent Aronofsky Collaborator).

 

An interesting thing came up in an interview with Writer/Director Aronofsky, which addressed Composer Mansell even though Aronofshy was actually talking about Editor Sarch. Reading it, I feel Aronofsky surrendered some control to Mansell, as Aronofsky may have different music playing in his head as he put the project together, suggesting a profound trust between the two. "That comes from my hip-hop upbringing. I've always wanted to introduce hip-hop filmmaking to film. So, I've been thinking about ways of doing that for a long time. There's hip-hop art--graffiti, there's hip hop dance--breakdancing, there's hip-hop music--rap, but there really isn't hip-hop film. So, for a long time, I was trying to do that--to introduce some ideas. I think it's partly an attitude. I think this film is sort of hip-hop in the fact that we were shooting in subways late at night for 10 of our 28 days. Also, I think it's a way of cutting, musically and stuff. I'm sure it's thematic also. I needs to be anti-establishment. It's a hip-hop cyberpunk film." But Mansell isn’t Hip-Hop, he much learns towards the Techno and Trance with strong Classical Influences.  

 

The film “Pi” has been most compared to is Director David Lynch "Eraserhead" (1977), also a Surreal, B&W, debut features, but while Lynch’s intent was to demonstrate a Disorder surrounding us that we deny exists, Aronofsky’s movie is about the vain struggle to impose Order on the Chaos. Critic Jesse Fox Mayshark stated it this way, “‘Pi' achieves some of the organic weirdness of Eraserhead, although Aronofsky isn’t nearly as bold as David Lynch (Lynch never felt the need to explain anything) … It’s like a music video for eggheads, and it’s a pleasant surprise—too often, studios seem to assume that smart people don’t like fun movies, and people who like fun movies aren’t smart. It’s nice to see someone thinks there’s a market for a film that is both.”

 

In “Pi,” for all its spinning and clicking and cutting, the narrative is still as linear as one of Max’s drawings of spirals. The spirals are everywhere, not only Max’s drawings, but cream in coffee, cigarette smoke, the tidepools of the East River. Pythagoras’ and Leonardo Da Vinci’s Golden Ratio, also known as the “Fibonacci Sequence,” named after yet another Great Mathematician, is something the film obsesses about.  Aronofsky stated, “Some of the structural things we did relate back to the spirals and also the Fibonacci sequence. For instance, we even shot the film in a ratio called 1.68 which is rarely ever shot. It’s shot sometimes in Europe, but it’s never really shot in America, and the reason we shot that is because that’s the Golden Ratio.”

 

In another interview:

 

“It was just some cockamamie idea I had. I mean, you look at DNA, and you look at the Milky Way. That's kind of weird that they have similar form, similar shape. We're built from it, while living in a giant spiral. What does that mean? Maybe there are a lot of spirals that we're not quite seeing. We can see the big one. We can see the small one. What's in between? That was [one] of the ideas. The more I started to do research, I started to see that there's a lot of books, a lot of people are really into this idea of repeating patterns on all different levels. You start to see spirals in nautilus shells, ram's horns, in the way a plant grows--they grow in spirals, in our bones we have spirals. There's so many of them. Our fingertips, if you look really closely there's spirals. They're everywhere. It's a little creepy.

 

"It's strange when you start with all these different ideas, and they seem totally foreign and different, and then you start to push them together, and slowly but surely, they start to fit together in a way that you never expected. It's almost like Max, the way he sees patterns everywhere. You're always looking for a unifying pattern for all these different themes in your movie, and as you start to work on them more and more, they to come together."

 

The pity for Character Max is that he draws the spirals moving outward, reaching up for something, but the story is moving in the other direction, they are his Descent into Maelström. As Critic MaryAnn Johanson put it,  “‘Pi’ straddles the line between brilliance and pretension to the point that it’s hard to know on which side of that line it eventually rests.”

Most of the people in Max’s world are terrible, but that is largely his own fault. Having become so insular, leaving his apartment so rarely, unable to deal with people who offer nothing except decency (Devi (Samia Shoaib) is sweet on him, and he her, but he’s also terrified of her), leaving only the Thugs and Exploiters who are able to sniff him out. Sol, his Mentor, sees what is happening to his best Student, and tries to warn him, as Sol had suffered the same himself, but Max is beyond listening to good advice.

 

Sol: “Have you met my new fish my niece bought me? I named her Icarus after you, my renegade pupil. You fly too high; you’ll get burnt too.”

 

And this film, so rich in detail, doesn’t miss the opportunity to include an image sunlight through the wings of a gliding toy bird.

 

Max’s narration/confessions tie his Migraine condition to a Childhood Memory, “When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes, and everything came into focus, and for a moment… I understood.”

 

Max is committed to Three Principles that he has built is life around:

1) math being the language of nature.

2) all things can be understood through numbers.

3) there are patterns in nature.

 

Sol doesn’t disagree, but after suffering a stroke, he humbly admitted to himself that these real Principals are beyond the limits of Human Understanding and embraced a richer life focused on family instead. Sol could be Max’s redeemer, but Max is not ready yet, Max is far more like the Thuggish Hasidics who threaten him.

 

Writer/Director Aronofsky borrowed all the Mathematical Equations from a textbook, and the Jewish Numerology is grounded in centuries of Kabbalah research (the 216-digit name of God is called the “Shem ha-Mephorash,” though 12- and 42-digit names seem more popular in those Mystical Circles). Character Max has built a Supercomputer named “Euclid” in his tenement apartment, which is dubious because of the energy demands that ut=ltra-fast processing would demand, and anyway, how could he afford the Processor he doesn’t have the power to run? But that also plays into the Real-World foundations of the film’s Fantasies.

 

There’s something called “Moore’s Law” which is named after Gordon Moore who, in 1965, predictively claimed that Transistors and Microchips Computing Power Doubles approximately every two-years, leading to Exponential Increases in Computational Power and Performance, with minimal cost increased. What Moore failed to anticipate was the Heat-Energy created by this Exponential Increase, and in more recent years, the Heat and Energy draws demanded by Increased Performance has created a Crisis in the Industry, as there are now unexpected Infrastructure and Environmental problems emerging in the actual work of the Utopian Dream of an AI-driven Economy. Maybe it can’t deliver on the promises because of its own weight, much like Howard Hughes “Spruce Goose” airplane in 1947, or the Dot-com crash that came soon after this film’s release.

 

During one of Max’s more severe Migraine attacks, Euclid also has a kind of Mental Breakdown, it flashes Abstract Patterns on its monitor, then Hebrew letters, and then dies.

 

“Pi” cost a mere $60,000 to make, financed largely by $100 contributions from friends and family. (Note, most films published Production Cost include Post-Production, basically everything before Marketing; in this case, oddly, Post-Production cost were left out of most articles; the real total was more like $128,000, still insanely cheap). All involved, even Actor Margolis, already an industry veteran of prominence, earned an identical, minimal salaries (there’s actually Union Rules regarding this, the SAG Limited Exhibition Agreement which Actors are paid $75 a day for films that can only be shown in limited Art Venues) plus a share of the film (the same rules mean the Actors get more money latter if the film suddenly gets a surprising distribution deal). It eventually grossed over $3 million domestically, a tiny amount and demonstrating why the film is somewhat obscure, but it still drew much industry attention to all involved and represented a remarkable Return-on-Investment. Keeping to the “Return-on-Investment” measure, it was a bigger success that the same year’s big-budgeted SF films striving for maturity: “Dark City,” “Siege,” and “Sphere.”

 

Since this film, Aronofsky went on to be the most radical and acclaimed of USA Filmmakers, getting hailed even when a specific project bombed, because no two films were alike. He switched to a harrowing Realistic exploration of Addiction with “Requiem for a Dream” (2000). After that, he dropped some of his stylistic elements, extreme angles and aggressively fast editing, with the contemplative SF film, “The Fountain” (2006). “The Wrestler” (2008), was a pretty straight-forward Drama that received Oscar attention. He returned to Surrealistic Psychodrama with “Black Swan” (2010) which won an Oscar. “Noah” (2014) was a grand, FX-heavy, Biblical Epic that defied Biblical Literalism. “Mother” (2017) was a notoriously perverse Horror film. “The Whale” (2022) was a Drama set in a single room about a self-destructive man longing to Redeem himself after tossing his life away and earned two Oscars.

 

Let me leave you with a quote regarding this film by Critic Christopher Runyon, “When you give up all that’s left of yourself to find the answers, you have to be prepared to never be able to go back.”

 

Trailer:

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