Stage 7 in Pi: Chapter 1 Part 9 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

Stage Seven in Pi (1998)

A feature [film] is so large that you can leave something and return to revisit it. It’s sort’ve like a Go game. The board is so complex and so many battles are waging that you can flow your attention from location to location. Just try to maintain a macro, larger vision of the entire piece and the honesty to answer to yourself if each micro moment is working. —Darren Aronofsky, Pi

The essence of stage seven is distancing in order to glimpse the “big picture,” a picture incorporating constant flow. The above from Aronofsky’s “Guerilla Diaries” show that, making a movie about the search for total knowledge, he was seeing his activity itself in “macro” terms related to the imagery of Go (one of the themes of the film and a game the cast played between takes). The first part of level seven is a recognition that, examined from sufficient distance, everything begins to blur together, so that traditional distinctions and “Truths” no longer carry conviction. Expressing this was Aronofsky’s conscious goal in the film. He quotes the following stage-six remark by Philip K. Dick as “sum[ming] up Pi”:

Maybe all systems—that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbiotic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about—are the manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all, the unexplainably warm and giving (Aronofsky, 43).
Nonetheless, one drunken evening during the filming, Aronofsky found himself making the following inebriated version of a stage-seven speculation:
I think birth is the act of forgetting that we are all part of the same force. Birth is God sprouting eyes to stare at God. These eyes must not know that they are staring at God—which is themselves—because then they could not appreciate the beauty of their own existence. (Aronofsky 44)

The keyword in the first of these quotations is “Maybe.” It provides the same kind of frame that the drunkenness does for the second. Perhaps there is no system or perhaps there is one that we must “not know.” The first position is stage six because if there are no systems, then there is no way of judging people, however different they may be and thus no obstacle to empathy. The second position simultaneously posits a mysterious, stage-seven order and forbids knowledge of it. What nudges Pi into stage seven (albeit not very far), is that instead of giving quick reference to vaguely intuited meanings, Pi obsessively details their complexity like a real chaologist poring over computer print outs.

On the one hand, Pi contains some data that its protagonist’s search for a universal system is paranoid and delusional. Repeated images of a living brain seem to arise from his subjective experience, most obviously when he dreams of them on the subway train. If he is hallucinating, his other nightmarish experiences might also be purely subjective, including his abduction by Marcy Dawson. Certainly, his drilling a hole in his head (whether real or hallucinated) appears crazed. Such evidence of his insanity is reassuring to viewers with lower-numbered Graves levels than seven (because people tend to see Graves stages other than their own as weak, criminal, insane, or foolish).

On the other hand, Aronofsky introduces into the film a notion comparable to his own drunken reverie. Max may have discovered a universal (albeit suicidal) pattern that can predict the stock market, causes computer’s to come alive, unlocks the secrets of the Bible, and relates mysteriously to the fractal spirals that Max (and other mathematicians) find everywhere. During the period of the film’s production, The Bible Code was a best seller, so the idea of a divine secret was being embraced by a wide public. Aronsky himself had become interested in Kabbalistic speculations about scriptural cryptography when he stayed among Hassids during a trip to Israel. As to the stock market, chaologists were beginning to chart it as they were also raising new interest in spirals and “the golden rectangle,” which Max also discusses. Finally, the magic number that the protagonist, Max, allegedly discovered is, according to the Kabbalists, the secret name of God. It vitalizes computers, a situation analogous to the Jewish legend that this Name could bring to life a clay statue (called a “golem”). That Max’s teacher found a two-hundred-sixteen digit number registered by dying computers and that the Kabbalists have been seeking a number of exactly equal length seems to be more than coincidence. In one scene, he is able to predict the number sequence in the stock market, and knows that it is about to crash. Normally, this would be enough to convince the audience that he actually has discovered a universal number sequence. Complicating the situation, however, is Dawson’s later disclosure that her company has been using his sequence to buy stocks. Perhaps, thus, the market is being programmed to follow his sequence. She says, “You dangled the carrot, the right picks, but then you only gave us part of the code.” This may imply that his system did accurately pick certain stocks. Based on his own experience, Sol warns that the number causes human minds to become aware of their true nature as it does for computers and that this awareness is fatal to both. In Jungian terms, individuation (at first) requires separation from the collective unconscious, so that recognizing one’s relationship to it risks being reabsorbed by it.

Hassidic interpretation sounds more optimistic: the name of God, we are told, is only suicidal to those who are impure. For the pure, it forms a necessary part of Jewish religion, “the key into the Messianic age” (Aronofsky 145). With its assumption that atonement with God comes from purity (i.e., lack of sin), this phrasing is very stage-four. With more complexity, Max argues that, since the number functions by giving self-awareness, only someone who uses it with consciousness of its mathematical meaning can have that heightened awareness and employ it properly. In a sense, this is saying that the goal is to make conscious a collective unconscious, i.e., to manifest the Self Archetype. Being at stage seven, Max (whose very name signifies the large) insists that only someone who sees the big picture has attained to true understanding. Nonetheless, according to the “Guerilla Diaries,” Aronofsky intends Max’s later removing the mathematical section from his brain as a rejection of this search for the “macro,” i.e., a turning back from stage seven as well as from the mind. Such a rejection of knowledge has been a science-fiction theme since Frankenstein. What continues to make this formula marketable, however, is not just the future shock that causes many to hear with joy that science is ungodly and must be rejected. The audience also comes to see exciting discoveries and hear challenging new ideas. (Cautionary tales usually contain a titillating depiction of the evils they denounce.)

As a fascinating warning against stage seven, Pi thus has much that might entice one toward that stage. As the increased popularity of science fiction in the last few decades testifies, a multiplex, information culture has a tentative willingness to consider speculative ideas, even though there are probably not yet enough people at stage seven to constitute a movie market for an entirely positive portrait of that stage.
What Pi does achieve is the dramatization of metaphysics, as, for example, in Max’s and Sol’s argument over the game of Go. Sol insists that since “the Go board … [is] a microcosm of the universe… it is … complex and chaotic …. with no simple pattern” (Aronofsky 103). Max counters that, as games of Go progress, they become predictable, i.e., some basic pattern emerges. By using the word, “chaotic” Sol has, in fact, made an opening for this response, since chaology is concerned precisely with discovering patterns in what previously seemed total disorder. Consequently, when Sol denounces the idea that such a pattern exists as insane, the audience should suspect his motives. When later he discloses that he believes that there is a hidden number and that it caused his heart attack, this is almost enough to make Max’s position credible—but not quite. Max’s idea that we are near endgame blends with the Hassids’ that they can usher in “the Messianic age.” As with Ghostbusters, an audience cannot take apocalyptic warnings quite literally after so many centuries of their being made again and again, false each time. So, the movie remains elusive. Ironically, because of this elusiveness, it gives the audience a taste of stage seven by forcing it to figure out what pattern lies behind the film’s complex images. Made for less than $60,000 and designed for a relatively elite audience, it won for Aronofsky a best directing award at the Sundance festival and has been transferred to another of the mediums of popular culture—a comic book. As we shall see in chapter three, anticipations of stage seven have appeared in mainstream cinema, but considering how directly Pi presents that stage, his thriftily crafted “big picture” deserves considerable credit for having reached as wide attention as it has.

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 1 Part 10

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