Current Forum: Session 12: Independent Films & Overall View	Read 6 times 	
Date: 05-Apr-2001 20:58:12	
Author: DRAKE-BOYT, ELIZABETH D. <edd1290@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: My Problems are Purely Mental 	
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       In the preface to their book, "Where Mathematics Comes From", Lakoff and Nunez speak of "The Romance of Mathematics" and bullet a series of myths about math. They conclude that 
brief section of their book with the statement that "It is a beautiful romance--the stuff of movies like 2001 (Kubrick: 1968), Contact (Zemeckis: 1997), and Sphere (Levinson: 1998). The mythification of mathematics and science in film would be an interesting study in itself, but the scope of it is too broad to approach here. 
       Nevertheless, in view of our discussion about independent film techniques and the math topic of Pi (Aronofsky, 1999) "faith in Chaos", I find it most interesting that these real life mathematicians should refer to movies that present themselves in traditional Hollywood narrative style. These films were not independent ventures understood and appreciated only by a very few "math cultists", (with the possible exception of Sphere) but rather enjoyed a fairly broad popularity. 
       There are some characteristics the above movies share in common with Pi, which I would like to examine by way of arguing that Pi is not an independent film (despite its circular narrative, grainy over-exposed black and white filmic treatment, and a completely doomed, self-destructing protagonist). Instead, Pi follows a typical Hollywood line in its (uncomprehending and casual) treatment of math and physics as esoteric subjects beyond the reach of the movie audience that 
goes to see it.
       One element Pi shares with these other Hollywood films is that it juxtaposes functions of mathematics and science with expressions of the subconscious mind: the irrational, the dream, the speculative, and the spiritual in varying degrees. An abnormal experience derived from math or science is presented in all these films as both intensely personal and individual, yet at the same time designed to be accepted by the movie audience as sweepingly universal. In 2001, Dave alone survives to enter the mysterious black monolith and experience himself physically and mentally at different moments of his existence simultaneously. But the final images of him in a "pre-birth state against a background of space and a distant but significant earth present him as standing for all of humanity. 
       Mathematics as a universal symbol language is referred to in Contact by simple tonal relationships of pitch and speed is somehow exchanged between highly generalized and unseen aliens and one single little boy out of the whole of the human population on earth. And Sphere offers an alien mechanism through which each person who comes in contact with it confusingly merges reality with private functions of his or her individual brain, resulting in remotely intersecting and deadly nightmares among them. 
       In a similar way, Max is on a transformative journey that is deeply isolated from the rest of humanity--it exists, in fact, entirely in his own brain. I would disagree with Mark's summation of the conclusion of the movie, even if the film is ambiguous about it. My interpretation is that Max goes so far over the edge with taking drugs and searching for "the ultimate answer" that he literally burns his brains out (as well as the "brains" of his computer, Euclid) and either cannot or will not answer the simple math questions of a child. He has perhaps found the answer, but, like Dave in 2001, the small boy in Contact, or the deep-sea scientists in Sphere, Max does not "come back" to tell the rest of us what he has found. Is the cinematographic message of this mythology for science and math a way of reassuring the average movie-goer that "there are just some things that the human mind was never meant to know" and that those who go too far will never return? Are these films a type of horror cinema in which the few who find "the unified theory that explains everything" become inhuman monsters excluded from human expression once they have found it? 
       The search for an ultimate answer to the human condition as represented in film uses icons of mathematics and science as tools, but the seeker at some point must abandon those tools (Hal, for example in "2001" the ultimate mathematic computer tool, is shut down) and take a leap of "faith in chaos" in order to find the answers; rather like a religious leap of faith in its abandonment of logic in the process. A cognitive and analytical function is thereby rendered spiritual in a way that assumes a mythic relationship between math and religion. The mysteries, or chaos of physical nature as the sublime sensibility are also simplistically joined in these films with the abstract concept of math--supporting such popular ideas as, "the numerical value of pi explains the configuration of galaxies" (Lakoff and Nunez). The movie Pi suggests this with many visual references to the sun, tree branches being moved by the wind, turbulence in smoke and water flow, a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction going on in Max's computer, and even a 
diagram of bifurcating attractors in the cracks of the bathroom mirror against which Max smashes his head. These latter icons have more to do with physics (though these images can be expressed in formulas) than the numerical value of Pi. It's as if the movie just threw those icons out there to verify its thematic relationship to physics and math. But the relationship of the numerical value of Pi to those icons remains unclear; they are just visual or conceptual "props" for the movie. When we examine it from this perspective, it is not difficult to present Pi as a traditional Hollywood narrative. 
       Race issues are simply omitted in this movie unless you count the black woman and the Hassidic Jews who pursue Max. As I have suggested in our powerpoint presentation, these minorities are reversed in "Pi" into oppressors. Max also can't tolerate a love interest, thereby leaving him more time for his mind to turn into tapioca pudding, so the gender issue is also one of omission. 
       It could be argued that the class of mathematicians is heavily stereotyped as a group of mentally unbalanced loners and outcasts of society as personified in the character of Max. This stereotype serves Hollywood to reassure the average movie-goer that it is far more normal, or at least OK to be "math illiterate". But I personally know a mathematician who hates computers, grows walnut trees and daffodils, and has been happily married for 53 years.
       Readings I have found useful in discussing aesthetics and the relationship between art/spirituality and science are, The Artful Universe by John Barrow, Turbulent Mirror: An 
Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness by John Briggs and F. David Peat, and Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez. Not that I understand all that I have read in these books. The language of mathematics particularly is beyond my cognitive reach. But I have found it useful to just look at the pictures, think about the ideas, and let intuition work its way through the analysis.