Postmodernity in Pi A look at mathematics, madness, and mysticism in Darren Aronofskys Pi

Pi (1998) begins with our protagonist Max Cohen (Samuel Gillette) recounting a story from his childhood. He talks about how his mother always told him not to look at the sun.

So when I was six, I did. The doctors didnt know if my eyes would ever heal. I was terrified alone in that darkness. Slowly, daylight crept in through the bandages and I could see. But something else had changed inside of me. That day I had my first headache.

A brilliant and yet unstable mathematician, Max is not particularly obsequious to social conventions. His movements are hurried and nervous. He doesnt look people in the eyes, and can come across as simultaneously neurotic and hostile. The viewer immediately begins to question his mental health and narrative trustworthiness. He also has little interest in money, repeatedly turning down a Wall Street firm that is seeking his expertise on ways to predict the ebbs and flows of the stock market. His only real fixation is to discover and then understand the actual mathematical patterns that govern all events. This fixation on discovery and understanding was the reason Max disregarded his mothers warnings and stared into the sun until he permanently harmed himself. The notion of Max as an Icarus-like creature, whose quest for some greater understanding metaphorically destroys him, pops up later in the film more explicitly. In a subsequent scene Max sits across a coffee table and the game of Go from his former mentor, Sol Roberson (Mark Margolis). The old man lies back in his armchair, calm and measured. He tells his former pupil about how he has named one of his new fish Icarus. And lest their be any confusion, he explains that he named the fish a fter you my renegade pupil. You fly too high. Youll get burnt. Aronofsky uses mysticism like this throughout Pi to drive home a point. He works by metaphorically weaving these seemingly disparate, yet curiously similar, themes together into something unifyingin the process creating a conversation between postmodernist scientific theories that, at least

Aronofsky tries to argue, have come to define the underpinnings of all types of our postmodern studies or expressions. Dion (2007) argues that Aronofskys blending together of the disparate themes of mathematics and mysticism is closely analogous to the change in scientific inquiry that emerged as a result of postmodern scientific theories. He notes how, traditionally speaking, the divide between science and spirituality has been vast and deep for some time. He recounts the classic dichotomous struggles of 17 th and 18th century scientist (Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton) whose findings directly lead to conflict with biblical references. In the last century however, the traditional divergence between mysticism and science has gradually been reduced and today they seem as closely aligned as perhaps they have ever been before.