Name: Pi: Faith in Numbers - Brows Held High
Uploaded: 2017-11-09T05:26:04.000Z
Duration: 11 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

♪ [instrumental -- "Procession of the Nobles" by Rimsky-Korsakov] ♪

[movie audio:]
"12:45. 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 the numbers of any system, patterns emerge."

[Kyle audio:]
This man with unkempt hair and sunken eyes is a reclusive New York mathematician

named Max Cohen, and he restates these assumptions ad nauseum.

And as unhinged as the character may seem, his assumptions appear reasonable.

Of course math is natural, and of course everything around us can be represented by numbers.

Everything -- our economy, our politics, our health -- depends on their reliability.

So, Max Cohen, who's closer than anyone on Earth to understanding that truth, must feel pretty secure.

[movie audio: smashing, screaming, high-pitched screeching]

And, yes, I know I didn't release this video on Pi Day,

"Pi" is the debut film by Darren Aronofsky.

Aronofsky's body of work sprang from this source. Max, like so many other Aronofsky characters,

is in search of some form of transcendence -- some great, impossible feat.

Something that takes them beyond human experience and into the sublime.

And it always, always, always, always, always...
goes badly.

It's not like it's the most famous scene in the movie or anything.

Pi's aesthetics owe plenty to surrealist masterpieces, like "Un Chien Andalou."

Of course, in the mid-'90s, with grunge and MTV breaking molds,

The movie made famous use of SnorriCam, AKA the universal signifier of getting plastered,

plus high-contrast photography, which eliminates all grays,

giving it a scratchy, grainy look, which uneases.

And the result of all these creative choices is that "Pi" is a subjective film.

Everything the camera does is tied to Max.

We are inside Max's head. We, too, seek truth as he seeks truth.

And with his home computer, he *finds* truth -- in the form of a 216-digit number.

And others want that truth. From Wall Street...to the synagogue.

[movie audio:]
"The High Priest had one ritual to perform in the Holy of Holies. He had to intone a single word."

"The true name, which only the Cohanim knew...was 216 letters long."

[movie audio: screaming, wailing, drilling]

If we're all supposed to be closer to God, then why would proximity to Him hurt?

Common religious films talk about revelation as being this great loving force which overwhelms and uplifts.

And, yes, this is a movie less about math than it is about religion.

Aronofsky's had a lifelong fascination with Abrahamic religion. It's even present in "Noah," as panned as it was.

But his interpretation of scripture is rather...
esoteric, to put it lightly.

[movie audio:]
"You ever hear of Kabbalah?"

So, a very quick rundown of esoteric Jewish theology.

Judaism teaches that there was a direct connection with God that was present at Creation

and was lost with the expulsion from 
the Garden of Eden.

At the Tower of Babel, we lost that connection 
further -- when God confused the language of 
the tower's architects.

This is why Judaism and its offshoots stress the importance of the Holy Word.

It's why, at Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, children are instructed to learn passages from the Torah in the original Hebrew

And why many observant Jews refuse to write the full name of God -- to avoid taking the

God is present, but They are also absent.

As twentieth-century Kabbalah scolar Gershom Scholem wrote, "Once the fear of sullying God's sublimity..."

"...with earthly images becomes a paramount concern, less and less can be said of God."

"The price of God's purity is the loss of His living reality."

"To preserve the purity of the concept of God without loss of His living reality --"

"that is the never-ending task of theology."

God, in this view, isn't the old bearded man reaching down to touch Adam's finger.

God is Schrödinger's cat. 
God is the tree falling in the forest.

God is what Kant might call the "noumenon," something which, by definition, one can't experience

God *is* That Which Cannot Be Proven -- because if you could prove Them, then, by definition,

That's the frustrating thing about theism, that necessary comfortability with the lack of answers.

I'm sure plenty of doubters have thrown their hands up in frustration the umpteenth time their questions

have been brushed off with, "...Eh. Mysterious ways."

I mean, yeesh, no wonder that guy put a drill to his head.

Of course, you can sit back smugly and say, "The answer's obvious. We can't explain God..."

And that's a perfectly logical conclusion. I'm a nonbeliever, myself.

But Aronofsky...doesn't like easy answers.

He's taken that core theological question
and reframed it...

To have an ant, and to add another ant, 
will produce two ants.

But first, don't I have to apply the value of "1" to this ant?