Darren Aronofsky was pushing the limitations of the human body in the very first moments of his very first film.
The first thing we learn about Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is that when he was six years old, he challenged his mother's claim that he would go blind if he stared at the sun. He didn't go blind, eventually recovering from a temporary loss of vision. However, he also started getting headaches that still plague him as an adult and have basically ruined his life. Whether he'd have developed the same obsession with mathematics -- or a Rain Man-like ability to multiply two large numbers together and provide an immediate answer -- without the sun staring incident or not, we don't or can't know, because Max did stare at the sun and he did almost go blind.
From his very first film, Aronofsky wanted his characters to challenge assumptions because that's what he planned to do himself. He also wanted them to look at things that made them uncomfortable, and for us as viewers to do the same. It was an assault on our flesh -- or more properly our corneas -- from the very start.
There are certainly scruffy elements that remind us that this was Aronofsky's first film, like the decision to shoot in black and white -- almost nobody makes a black and white first film anymore, though it was pretty common back then. A decade or two earlier, it was guys like Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch debuting in black and white, and in the very same year, a director who came of age at the exact same time as Aronofsky -- Christopher Nolan -- also debuted with his black and white feature Following. I don't want to get sidetracked, but an extended side-by-side comparison of these otherwise dissimilar filmmakers is warranted at some point, especially since they had moments of potential crossover, as both were once associated with the reboot of Batman.
Scruffy and first filmish or not, this film is possessed of a real certainty of what Aronofsky wanted and planned to do for the next 25 years of his career. (And yes, that makes this a particularly nice year to be doing this King Darren series, as it marks a quarter century of Aronofsky in our lives.) Some of his tricks, which would also become a bit of an Aronofsky trademark, may strike us as the try hard instincts of a film school student. But I gotta tell you, I miss that kind of try hard instinct, and Aronofsky didn't stop at trying hard. He tried and succeeded.
(It did occur to me, though, whether we'll think back on newer filmmakers who have made their first films, and so easily be able to identify such film school techniques in those initial efforts. If new filmmakers don't use black and white anymore to break into the business, what will be the distinguishing marks of their earlier efforts?)
The repeating short montage of Max popping pills to control his headaches is of course something Aronofsky would expand on in horrific ways in his next film, Requiem for a Dream. We don't need to get ahead of ourselves discussing that one because it will be on the docket in April.
One film we won't discuss in this series, because I saw it again only two year ago and decided to skip it for King Darren, is The Fountain, and there's an interesting repurposing of imagery from this film in that one. It seems Aronofsky is particularly interested in the shaved head of Gullette at the end of this film -- shaving your head being another form of assaulting the body's natural form -- because the first thing I thought of when I saw it is the shaved head of the astral plane version of Hugh Jackman in The Fountain. The themes of The Fountain remain a little opaque for me even after that second viewing, but it seems to be a continuing journey down the philosophical/mathematical rabbit hole that Aronofsky started in Pi.
I think one of the reasons Pi is so tense and haunting is exactly because Aronofsky gets the math right here. Or rather, I should say, we don't know whether he gets the math right or not, but he's presented it in such a way as to make the numbers seem really eerie -- the irrational number that is this film's title, but also the 216-digit number that might both be key to predicting the stock market and may unlock something hidden in the Torah. The whole bit where the character played by Ben Shenkman explains how Hebrew words have corresponding mathematical values seems crazy, even though it is likely something scholars have discussed for centuries.
This is no easy task. The challenge for Aronofsky here is similar to depicting the work of a brilliant artist or musician. If the paintings suck or the music is awful, it tends to undercut the brilliance of the artist or musician. So if the math that obsesses Max were just a bunch of mumbo jumbo that didn't chill us on some level, the movie would not be nearly so effective.
That said, the character played by the future Hector Salamanca (this is where I first became aware of Mark Margolis) cautions Max about the thin line between mathematics and numerology. In telling Max that he'll start seeing the number 216 everywhere he looks for it, which will seem like proof but really just be a confirmation bias, he's kind of answering the core question of Joel Schumacher's The Number 23, still nearly a decade off in the future.
The other thing Aronofsky really gets right here, which factors into all but his most realistic films, is the paranoia. Max's imagining of ghoulish things in subways -- such as a brain on a staircase -- has a visceral impact. In fact, in that moment when he's prodding the brain with a pen, and it lets out a high-pitched scream on the soundtrack every time the pen touches the surface, it reminded me of a technique Danny Boyle would use in a future #1 of mine. It's very similar to that bit in 127 Hours where Aron Ralston is twanging his nerves like the strings of a guitar.
Of course, it's not actually paranoia if people are really coming after you, and Max's handling by both the Wall Street people interested in his algorithm, and the Rabbinical folks who are hoping to unlock the secrets of God, keep the unbearable tension close to peak levels.
I didn't see Pi in time to rank it, and I may have only become aware of it after the fact, possibly in relationship to Requiem -- though I'm quite sure I saw Pi before I saw Requiem. Looking at the movies I did rank in 1998, though, I'm guessing I would have had this just inside my top 20. I really enjoyed revisiting it.
There's probably more I could say about Pi, but there's also more I have to do in my day today. I might get that chance anyway in April, since Requiem will certainly be in direct conversation with this film.
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