DeConick A.D

K
CHAPTER NINE
The Pi of Politics
Maximillian “Max” Cohen
Darren Aranofsky, the famous producer of unorthodox films such as Requiem
for a Dream and Black Swan , began his career in 1998 with a bizarre
esoteric film, π ( Pi ), about a bizarre Gnostic Jew. The low-budget, grainy
black-and-white film features Maximillian “Max” Cohen (figure 9.1), a recently
graduated PhD mathematician who lives alone in an apartment that
he has turned into a giant computer. He has named the computer after
the ancient Greek father of geometry, Euclid. Max literally lives inside of
Euclid—its screens, motherboards, wires, and keyboards are mounted on
the walls and affixed to every surface of his apartment. Max believes that
mathematics is the language of the universe and that there is a numerical
pattern, a number, that explains everything about us and our world. He
is intent on finding it.
The opening screen is nothing but raw white light, blinding. In this
first scene, Max reveals that he had a terrifying experience when he was
six years old and stared directly into the sun. At first, he says, the light was
so bright that he was overwhelmed. Then his pupils shrank to nothing. It
was then that he had an epiphany. He saw clearly. He understood everything.
Afterward, the doctors didn’t know if Max would ever see again.
They wrapped his face in bandages.
As we watch the adult Max wake up after suffering a cluster migraine,
he tells us in an overdub that his childhood epiphany had changed something
inside of him. The day he woke up and took the bandages off was