There is a magical time in a human life, between the ages of 12 and 22, where one is most prone to being transformed by art. Yeah, you heard me, art. I assure you, even the most uncultured, vacant-headed, troglodytic young person you can think of is being shaped by art in ways you or I are currently incapable of. I know this because it happened to me, and it happened to you – it happens to everyone. Those are the years of our lives that get indelibly colored by the popular culture around us: the music, film, TV (and now memes, websites, & apps) that we will recall with nostalgic wistfulness from our mid-30s until the day we die. It’s a highly specific flavor of experience that gets frozen in hippocampal amber and defines, for you, “this is what it meant to be young.” And that, dear reader, is a perfectly legitimate way of being transformed by art.
You’re welcome.
The pop-culture identity formed in our youth becomes a platform to encounter whatever comes next. It is the reason we rail against whatever teens and twenty-somethings are into when the cultural winds change, and we are no longer connected to what it means to be hip. As Grandpa Simpson wisely intoned, “I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore, and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary, and it will happen to you!” Grandpa gets it.
Of course, this is only part of the story. Found among the halcyon days of teen spirit that are destined to turn into nostalgia fertilizer are the transformative, eye-opening encounters – those books, songs, TV, and films that change you forever, the things that you are compelled to tell everyone within in earshot, “YOU JUST HAVE TO EXPERIENCE THIS.” If young you is lucky enough to meet someone else who is *also* into that thing, it becomes proof of a special bond. If that person also happens to be cute, you cannot help but wonder if it means you are destined to smooch them, a smooch sealing a covenant of mutual understanding made manifest by a shared love of Moby’s album Play, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Neuroscience, and Torah… Well, that’s what I was looking for.
I am explaining all of this so you can understand the full context of my appreciation for Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 film Pi, which I saw when I was fifteen. To me, Pi is not just a semi-experimental, big-idea, black-and-white indie movie shot for the price of a pack of smokes. It was and forever will be The Movie That Blew My Teenage Mind. Pi was a movie that dramatically altered the way I consumed all other media and ideas henceforth. It was a Rubicon of experience, altering everything else I encountered after.
Pi is the story of Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), a theoretical mathematician who is looking for a numerical pattern lurking among the decimal places of the number π|pi (forgot that day in geometry? It’s what you get when you divide a circle’s circumference [distance around] by its diameter [distance across]). Max thinks this number is likely to decode the stock market, which unsurprisingly draws the interest of a thuggish Wall Street cabal. His work is also noticed by a group of Hasidic Jews who believe Max’s work will reveal a number buried in the Torah (ancient Hebrews used their letters as numbers), a number that is the True Name of God, whose invocation will bring about The Messianic Age. (Dear reader, if you noticed that all these people are just looking for the same thing understood in different ways, congratulations, you’re ahead of the class).
Max’s only friend is a former professor and mentor, Sol, played by the late great Mark Margolis (best known as the “Bell Ringing Guy” from Breaking Bad). Once upon a time, Sol chased the same elusive number Max seeks, which caused Sol to have a nervous breakdown and retire. He now serves as Max’s weary, gravel-voiced Jiminy Cricket, holding the hard-earned wisdom of Daedalus. Sol urges Max to stop yearning for the sun lest he get burned, but Max is undeterred.
Pi is a movie about perspective, and we experience Max’s consciousness through his recorded notes: “11:15 restate my assumptions: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge.” Graphs, stock prices, diagrams, and Hebrew Scripture are superimposed into the frame, drawing us into Max’s hyperlinked mind. All of this is framed with impressionistic moments of montage with disjointed sounds evoking an unintegrated experience. Pi is designed to offer many questions: What is reality? What knowledge is not worth having? What madness lies at the fringes of being? Like traditional Jewish Texts, Pi allows itself to leave many of these questions unanswered – the real answer lies in you, if you dare to look.
The movie Pi (1998), unsurprisingly makes great use of charts like these. Credit: A24 Films.
It’s worth mentioning the role that the score plays in creating an unsettling mood that binds the film’s unwinding character study, gripping narrative action, and lofty philosophical musings. Pi’s soundtrack was written and arranged by Clint Manswell, who compiled a string of jaunty and ethereal electronica songs by bands such as Aphex Twin and Massive Attack. Manswell’s own arrangements have haunting rhythms delivered in quick and choppy succession, invoking racing paranoia and stochastic terror. We are opening up the basement door of existence, leading to a swirling, incomprehensible maelstrom.
Pi is a galaxy-brained jaunt through math, metaphysics, religion, and existential psychology; a cinematic pre-Wikipedia rabbit hole with the narrative chassis of a white-knuckle thriller. Max is being chased by bloodthirsty capitalists, Max is being chased by Messianic-fevered Jews, Max is being chased by his own growing madness — all while Max chases his White Whale of Truth. Intensifying the drama is Pi’s grainy colorless film that lends itself to harsh whites and impenetrable blacks, combined with the movie’s aggressive editing, the film invokes a state of anxiety and disquiet. Max ventures into the unknown and there are dragons waiting for him.
As a late ‘90 teen, my mind was burst open by Pi‘s firehose of heady connections, but as an adult in 2024, such a movie seems less novel. The Internet has allowed people to easily share their multidisciplinary musings about the nature of reality with ease. Edu-tainment content about the neuroscience of Baroque paintings, the mathematical structure of rap lyrics, or how geology influences voting patterns are pretty ordinary fare nowadays. It’s tempting to state that Pi was a herald of our modern everything-is-connected-worldview but that perspective always existed. Thanks to our “Explainer Content Industrial Complex,” such an understanding is just easier to find and express. Today, many of the themes and connections in Pi could serve as blog posts, videos, podcasts, and newsletters. I wonder if a movie like Pi is less likely to be made in an era when we are all peering behind the looking glass.
We never stop being transformed by art or lose our capacity to be psychically rearranged by new revelations, but the “mind-blowing experience at an impressionable age” is a specific type of encounter that only happens during that formative time in one’s life. For me, Pi was not the only one, and another film could have given me a comparable type of consciousness-expanding experience. Other likely contenders that didn’t get the gig were: Waking Life (2001), Mindwalk (1990), My Dinner With Andre (1981), or The Matrix (1999). These films were mind-blowers for many people; however, Pi was the right film for me at the right moment, an alchemical combination of art and viewer that forever changed my young consciousness. At the age I am now, I know it will not be possible to have that type of experience with a film ever again, which makes Pi precious. Fortunately, it’s really freaking good on its own merits and definitely worth seeing.
Pi is likely a movie that will be best appreciated by someone of that age of impressionability, someone who has the pieces but was never asked to connect them before, suddenly able to see a greater whole as our hero does. But Pi is also a movie that could have only been made by a first time director, an ambitious director, a broke director who was bursting to express something and make the most of the crude implements before him. Pi is raw and imperfect and a little weird, but so is being young, so is staring into the bare maw of creation as your small limited mind desperately tries to grasp infinity.
Pi is a movie about yearning and searching. What it means to be hungry and desperate while chasing something too big to ever possibly have…sounds a lot like being a teen to me.