If you’ve never seen Pi, Darren Aronofsky’s first (and best) movie, I strongly encourage you to check it out.
(Hint: it’s not just a number; it’s a concept of existence. Or something. Even a math illiterate like myself can appreciate how numbers and pure calculations describe and define multiple aspects of what we call reality. That doesn’t mean I endorse being force-fed Algebra as a teenager.)
Also: the soundtrack is incredible. And it has aged well not just as music, or audio accompaniment to some very striking scenes, but as a historical document. Coincidentally or not, trip-hop was breaking big just as our Internet adventure was getting real. As a result, the industrial, technical (technological) noises of the music mirrored what was happening inside our machines. Remember days when you had to dial-up to get online? Or when you needed bigger discs to store more data, and the subsequent clicks of memory being saved? Remember when the art of computing was a more tactile experience? This soundtrack –and film– functions as an already somewhat time-capsuled window into the ways we used to do the impossible: making the world smaller (via the freely available information and the relative ease with which we could access it) and larger (via all that information bringing us data that we didn’t know we needed or wanted in ways that expanded not unlike the actual universe).
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It’s also a bit of a mind-fuck that analyzes the idea of going crazy trying to interface with the infinite (something all of us approximate every time we log on). If the infinite is unreachable and ultimately unknowable, it’s a combination of arrogance and insanity to think we can grasp it. Of course, as social commentary, Pi delineates –and deconstructs– the two primary ways we attempt to infiltrate and/or organize our Gods: organized religion and money. Both are avenues and endpoints. We take it as gospel from what we hear and all we’re taught that the most efficient pursuit of a higher power and/or wealth is to bend down before a deity or a dollar sign. If, as is typically the case with the most organized of religions, epitomized by the one led by a pope who lives in a palace (inside a city), it’s the intersection of faith and fealty that leads to bigger numbers (of followers and currency). In the states we made (make?) Wall Street our Mecca and, as recent history has revealed, the charlatans rigging the charade are quite literally outside the law, no matter how much carnage they cause. They are, after all, merely in search of the same thing so many who would not hold them accountable strive for: immortality via the illusion of affluence.
