So, there’s this article circulating about Shane Carruth’s (Primer, Upstream Color) unfinished screenplay. It sounded pretty amazing. Well – it sounded like it would’ve been amazing – if he’d made it. The layout describes something that sounds like Avatar meets Pi.
Remember “Pi”? Another film by a five-star director?
No, not “Life of Pi”. I mean the Aronofsky flick.
I saw that movie back when I knew even less about the “Golden Ratio” than I do now (still drool on myself trying to explain it). The idea of the golden spiral is based on a pattern Fibonacci came up with that manifests in nature. If you take the numbers 1,1,2,3,5,8 (and so on), and combine any latter number with one of the former ones, you get what’s called a “perfect rectangle”. From that, you can make shapes of the same ratio within that box, and then arcs, which make… a “Golden Spiral”.
A spiral itself isn’t much of a BFD.
What is, is the fact that this spiral is observed repeatedly in nature – from our thumbprints to the galaxies above. Sunflowers, shells – even waves barreling to shore can be snapped, mapped, and plotted to display all the points of a spiral with the same ratio.
Retrospectively, I sorta kinda get “Pi”. It even makes sense why it was shot in black and white (which annoyed me first go round). The entirety of the film, the protagonist is driving himself batty with math – trying to deduce some divine formula by assigning some higher force black and white parameters.
I think anyone afflicted with thoroughgoing introspective proclivities can find themselves in a cerebral pickle like this.
This character, for example, is so intent on getting the answer that he regresses into agoraphobia, and even ignores the beautiful neighbor chick who tries to befriend him. When he finally thinks he’s close to unfurling the universe’s furtive code, his computer short circuits.
And so does his sanity.
After the initial viewing, I was like “whaaa?” at the end. “He stabbed himself in the head and then everything’s fine and he’s smiling at the kids in the park and the sky? WTF?!”
And the answer is pretty much the reverse of FTW. Fuck the “what”, “why”, “where”, and especially “who”. The character at the end gets that his spiral decoding is a self-inflicted downward spiral. There’s nada at the bottom we don’t already know or can’t already feel. So internal interrogation’s sorta stupid. In many different religions, “I am” seems to be synonymous with the supreme. That means God’s no wishing machine. It’s not a “he”. Not the good-doer battling a bad-doer. It’s just nature; reality – as it is. When we handle it, we’re alright. Start questioning it, and we land a slew of psychoses.
Science has its place for making us comfortable in our daily lives as we live them. Because of it, we can manage pain, prolong lives, and buy the great pair of tits we weren’t born with (and if your god’s a person, you can blame him for that). Sometimes it even reminds us that there’s something far larger than us. But it’s useless for actually hacking some divine mind. Ever seen the show “Life After People”? If we all evaporated in a couple minutes, the world would still spin. And we wouldn’t be here to measure its involute phenomena.
Do you reach for the CliffsNotes when you want all the beautiful details of an actual novel? Hope not. Then why apply a smaller 5-sense-limited-science– to… I ‘unno… the one that preceded it?
I’ll get all’a them other answers when I stop breathing and die, thx.
And so will you. So stop speeding up to the red light.
Especially when you could be pooling your tech-efforts into developing an app that brews and brings me Starbucks in bed every morning. I swear. Brains are wasted on the brainy.
There’s your spiral.