I watched Pi last night. It’s a fairly interesting (if a bit long) art flick about a math genious who goes insane due to his obsession with finding a pattern in Pi (and, in fact, mathematical patterns in everything). Part of what leads to his madness is his obsession with finding a fundamental truth beneath outward appearances. Fredric Jameson once defined postmodernism as privileging surface over depth. He meant that as an insult, but it’s better taken as a compliament. The protagonist’s assumption that “all things can be described with mathematics” is useful and true. His assumption that this mathematical description is somehow more true than other sorts of descriptions is what drives him crazy. Anyway. It wasn’t a bad movie, but Aronofsky’s more recent Requiem for a Dream is, IMHO, better.