Yes, We (Shere) Khan: The Life of Pi, A Film About The Simple Bare Necessities
First, you have to watch this short video.
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
-Matthew 7:15
Why should you run? Can it be possible that you don’t know who I am?
-Shere Khan, The Jungle Book
Watch the short video. If you don’t, you may find this post convoluted and difficult to understand. It’s not very long (the video, I mean). I think it is a total of thirty seconds long.
Consider: The Life of Pi opens upon scenes of a young boy growing up in a beautiful zoo. There are monkeys, and parrots, and giraffes, and tigers, and tree sloths, and wallabies, and emus, and anteaters…skipping a bit here…and there is whimsy, and there is beauty, and there are the things the heart feels, and there is mystery, and there is the surprise ending from Home Alone where the frightening old man turns out to be nice…sorry, let’s jump ahead again, you get the general idea… One of the wild creatures is the boy himself. When he’s born, he’s delivered by a herpetologist.
But wait. I’m getting ahead of myself here. The film really begins with a conversation between two men — a frustrated white novelist, and a serene middle-aged Indian man. The zoo is one of the man’s memories. His name is Pi, which is short for Piscine. He shortens his name because “piscine,” which refers to a pure and limpid swimming pool in France, is easily corrupted into “pissing,” which refers to “a stinking Indian latrine.” That is, let’s be real, unbelievably racist, but anyway the name “Pi” has a complex dual significance. First of all, it is undecidable whether “Pi” is short for “piscine” or “pissing,” and this undecidable crossroads of beauty and horror, swimming pool and latrine, turns out later to be the film’s major theme. Secondly, “Pi” is of course an irrational number, which makes it something of a mystery, like all that is irrational (i.e. spiritual) in our world. The spiritual impulse, in The Life of Pi, exists because (according to Yann Martel) we cannot rationally decide whether life is good or evil.
As Pi’s story unfolds, several things are noticeably wrong with it. The first unsettling thing is Pi’s willingness to belong to every religion at the same time. As he grows up, he becomes first Hindu, then Christian, then Muslim. When Martel jokes that he should adopt Judaism, he replies that he teaches a course on the Kabbalah. “The house of faith has many rooms,” he tells the novelist (who very unrealistically does not immediately throw up all over the place). In Pi’s narrative, his father and brother laugh at his credulous nature, and only his mother defends him. Perhaps we are supposed to sympathize with him, too, but it’s hard to see why. His mother’s theory is that he’s still “finding his way,” but in fact Pi never does make a choice, or choose a path. He reminds me of those insufferable people who cheerfully declare that all religions “teach love,” and therefore are basically the same, as though the entire history of religious conflict has been some sort of gigantic and regrettable misunderstanding. (One such person, Alex de Silva Souto, led the theological workshop I attended in Italy this year, and came pretty close to ruining it.) These syncretists certainly do not overflow with love, though they would like to; rather, they are desperately in need, which is why they gobble up every creed in sight, and yet continue to starve. That is what we learn of our young hero, Pi.
Even Pi starts to get tired of himself, and at a moment of adolescent crisis when he has fallen so low as to actually be reading Camus (the horror!), he satisfies his “need for some kind of meaning” by falling in love. This isn’t “a kissing book,” though, as Fred Savage would say. Pi’s love affair has almost no significance other than a) to provide fodder for the movie trailer and b) to supply woman imagery for Pi’s upcoming hallucinations. What’s wrong, though, with this section of the film is a conversation between Pi and his lady about the symbolic gestures she makes while dancing. He asks her what one gesture means, and she replies, “it means the lotus is hidden in the forest.” Confused, our chaste protagonist asks her what that means, causing her and her friend to start giggling. We pretty much have to assume, therefore, that the lotus flower is her vagina. On the other hand, it is also a symbol for the spiritual quest, in which a young man seeks enlightenment (the lotus flower) by undergoing a difficult ordeal (searching the dark forest). So, which is it, Yann Martel? Which is it, Ang Lee? Is it good (spiritual enlightenment) or evil (the female body)? Perhaps we’ll never know! All we can know is that it’s another moment that seems askew — misremembered, perhaps, or dishonest.
The narrative is, loosely speaking, the same as in the first books of the Bible. We go from Eden (the zoo), to the encounter with Eve and her lotus flower, to Exodus (leaving for Canada), to Noah’s Ark (the ship and then the life raft). Let’s skip ahead a bit, past the antics with the animals (we’ll return to them in a moment), to another really “off” moment: the carnivorous island. What appears, at first, to be a mangrove swamp turns out to be a weird version of the Land of the Lotus-Eaters, where Pi can have all the fresh water and delicious food he requires, but where (unless he pushes off again) he will live a brutish life and die alone. A lot about this island does not make sense. Why does it have to be carnivorous? Aren’t Pi’s feelings of relief and relaxation dangerous enough? (Admittedly, this works better in the book, which discusses sloths at length.) If the island digests fish every single night, how do the fish get in? They’re ocean fish, which means they live in saltwater, and yet the island’s water is supposedly fresh. Why is the “floor” of the island carnivorous and dangerous, but not the canopy? Why does Pi go up in the canopy to sleep in the first place, instead of falling asleep on a nice patch of ground, and getting his face chewed off?
Nobody knows the answers to these questions, just like (as Ron Burgundy first pointed out) nobody knows what “San Diego” means. The island is not real. It is a projection of Pi’s own fears. He is afraid of becoming nothing but stomach and sex. The strange acidic pool is a gigantic, hallucinatory stomach. The furry animals swarming all over his body, and the lotus flower (ahem) with the dentata inside, are symbols of bestial desire. To his credit, Ang Lee recognizes this, and gives us a zoomed out view of the island in which it clearly resembles a supine human body.
NB: I’m about to give away the ending, so if you haven’t seen the movie, now would be a good time to continue reading, since it’s not a very good movie.
The last thing that’s wrong with this story comes right at the end. Pi is interviewed by two Japanese insurance men about what happened to him. He tells them about tigers and carnivorous islands, etc, and they don’t believe him. They insist that he tell them a different story, and he actually complies. This is pure dream-logic. Pi has no reason to tell them anything. He is not under oath. They do not have a subpoena. Considering his condition, there really should be a team of Mexican doctors and nurses hustling these two monsters out of the hospital, and banning them for life. The only explanation is that the intense pressure to tell a different story is coming from Pi himself. He is projecting his own guilty conscience onto the two Japanese men, creating a fiction in which they are menacing figures who force him to change his story.
Here’s what actually happened to Pi. After the ship sank, he was in a lifeboat with a dying Buddhist, a vicious cook, and his mother. The cook ate the Buddhist. His mother assaulted the cook. The cook killed his mother. Pi killed the cook. Pi gives us this version of the story, but only after we’ve lived through an entire movie in which he turns all of these people (himself included) into various animals, and spends most of the time trying to overcome his vicious, animalistic inner “tiger.” This is a battle that, in fact, Pi does seem to win. He ends up a placid, married, vegetarian professor of religious studies. The tiger slinks off into the Mexican jungle like some striped, sinister version of Puff the Magic Dragon.
But is everything really alright?
You see, I think, deep down, Pi hates religion. The lotus flower stands for more than his fear of women; he also despises Buddhism, because Buddhists don’t understand that nature is savage. They see the lotus flower but not the tooth inside. The Buddhist aboard Pi’s Ark — an idiot who believes that meat gravy doesn’t contain meat — breaks his leg, develops an infection, and is fed to the fish and the cook. Pi reminds me of that omnipotent kid from The Twilight Zone. Everyone he doesn’t like comes to a really bad end. His father and brother, who make fun of him, drown. His mother, who is irrational enough to cling to Hinduism, turns into an orangutan who is too doped up on tranquilizers to fend off the hyena. In other words, if you want your nice clear Parisian Piscine Molitor, you have to be as savage as the French cook.
The worst part of it, the really unforgivable part, is that despite Pi’s total inability to deal with suffering (the Buddhist with the broken leg), and Pi’s still totally unresolved love of violence and lust for power, millions of moviegoers will identify with Pi and his wondrous journey. They will feel that, somehow, this film is saying that God exists, in a really nice way where God exists for atheists, and perhaps even for Jews, what with all these new university courses on the mystical teachings of the Kabbalah. They will come away from The Life of Pi reassured that their faith is justified, and that there must be a God, because the world is beautiful, and anyway, it would just be way too sad if there wasn’t a God.
I could quote The Usual Suspects here: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Or I could quote Brian Wilson’s admirable verdict on people like Pi: “they come on like they’re peaceful / but inside, they’re so uptight.”
But I have a different quote in mind, from a book by Kurt Vonnegut that comprehends evil far better than The Life of Pi. I understand that both Ang Lee and Yann Martel have very serious qualms about the nature of human beings, and their capacity for evil, and that on some level they would like those qualms to be the secret of this story. Lee and Martel can’t really make sense of a world in which God permits so much cruelty and suffering. But that is not what the audience is perceiving “in spectacular 3D.” The audience is putting on polarized goggles and enjoying the phosphorescence. Perhaps human beings cannot stand much reality, but that incapacity is hardly their noblest trait, or the sign of a great work of art. No, strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
****
THIS POST IS REDEDICATED TO YANN MARTEL AND ANG LEE, WHO SERVED EVIL TOO OPENLY AND GOOD TOO SECRETLY, THE CRIME OF THEIR TIMES.
Thank you so much for this.
In chinese there is an axiom which loosely means those who know never tell.Spiritual people never share their experiences openly,for the experiences are very surreal and only the chosen ones get it.The rest of the world is religious,not spiritual,and embroiled in debates about religion.In this sense,life of pi tells a straight forward tale only few can comprehend since its largely allegorical. The open lotus ,as a leitmotif,tells of the opening of the third eye that refers to the meditative practices,or the thousand petal lotus that gives us humans a glimpse into the true nature of things.The story is unbelievable to those who visit pi in the hospital as many trash meditation and can never understand the true nature of lotus.but you are right lotus refers to woman’s vagina-you enter the lotus during sex and meditation-the state of samadhi.
My dear Babu,
Yes, I’m familiar with Lao Tzu: “Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know” (Tao Te Ching #56).
I’m ignorant of the many people who trash meditation, the many religious people who lack spirituality, and the surreal epiphanies of the chosen ones. But wasn’t it Lao Tzu who said, “Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being”? The “very surreal” does not sound simple to me.
As for those terrible people who hinder the spirituality of us chosen ones: “The Master thinks of his enemy as the shadow he himself casts.”
you are reading way too much into this movie. it’s a simple story of survival, and a boy’s way of dealing with the horrors of it. the premises of this story, that it’s going to make you believe in God, might have been true for Martel but was rendered rather irrelevant by Ang Lee. In the end, it’s not God that’s the focus, it’s the belief itself. And we are shown two visions of it: an idealist version of a young boy, and a pragmatic version of a grown man. the agnostic God of Martel is nowhere to be seen here.
Pi is not a pragmatist. He’s a cynic. He’s teaching every creed, and getting paid for it, so if he’s abandoned the credulousness of his youth… it’s only to become the worst kind of salesman,one who doesn’t believe in what he’s selling. A pragmatist would view killing the cook as completely justified, and if he kept being troubled about it, would consider himself traumatized. In other words, he wouldn’t accept the guilt that pervades the “realistic” version of the story.
God cannot be agnostic, as presumably She feels rather convinced of Her own existence. If you mean that Martel is agnostic, well, he’s not:
Nice post! However, there is a snake right at the beginning of the movie.
Seriously? This review is laughable.
i am Arun Rajaram – from Fairfield Ohio. I saw the snake (python) in the begingin of the movie. Perhaps Python ate cobra. I like to eat cobra. I am vegetarian turned non-vegeterian. Love meat!
Ding Ding!
to the writer of the review. you did not like the movie because you do not understand or like the doubt the character has about himself or religion and god? you dont like that he’s a cynic about religion/god? what has you so up in arms over this movie? are you religious, a “chosen one” which is, by the way, ridiculous imo…?
If you read kurt vonnegut regularly its no wonder you see this film negatively I see voneguts films as unresolved and defeatest, a neverending continuum of time and space which doesn’t delve into the compassionate nature of the human race but focuses on the irony of this world. The vonnegut mind IS like a pit of satanic delusion, suffering devoid of promise or hope. If anything this film gives hope, makes one grateful for the crumbs of decency and safety the mind must cling to. The day I or anyone cannot see our glass of life as half full of hope and promise one must certainly drown oneself and let the waves of despair overtake us then yes satan has won. But no he won’t take me and in my mind the capacity for evil is in all of us but we must overcome our fear, others, circumstances, that which is hidden and uncomfortable about ourselves-that is the true meaning of this film, in my opinion. Open up to that critique…
“The Buddhist aboard Pi’s Ark — an idiot who believes that meat gravy doesn’t contain meat”
The practice of easing certain religious practices (such as dietary restrictions) to survive the constraints of military life or ocean travel has pretty solid historical foundations. The Buddhist in this film is not an idiot, but rather is saying that when on a ship, gravy should not be considered meat, but should be considered “taste”. He is trying to be helpful so they will not suffer from hunger.
Whether or not people agree with the idea (I don’t believe Pi’s family took to it) is entirely their own affair.
Sorry to say that most of the analysis presented above have this same glib tenor
Dear Happy Buddhist,
The idea that gravy represents the difference between starvation and survival is, on its face, ridiculous. I understand the concept of extenuating circumstances, but they don’t apply here. Furthermore, many Buddhists would reject the notion that “military life” provides carte blanche to suspend Buddhist precepts, including compassion and a related preference for nonviolence.
To paraphrase Thumper, “you can call it a flower if you want to,” but that doesn’t change what it is. Your distinction between “taste” and “meat” is almost Orwellian.
This is a work of art. “It is your own affair, whether or not you agree with the Buddhist” doesn’t apply in a work of art that makes judgments about its characters, as this one certainly does.
I am not being glib. Saying that meat isn’t meat as long as you call it “taste” — that, gentle reader, is glibness in its purest form.
I have a different understanding of Happy Buddhist the Sailor, and certainly not because “the Buddhist aboard Pi’s Ark — an idiot who believes that meat gravy doesn’t contain meat”… Happy Buddhist the Sailor certainly knows the meat gravy contains meat, but being mindful that the he has choices in that situation, on one end he may (1) choose to refuse rice with gravy and hence starve at personal detriment, (2) confront with the clearly unyielding arrogance of the cook, which baits further misunderstanding or even violence, also towards personal detriment, both (1) and (2) representing the two extremes that only brings personal detriment, he chooses to take the middle path, accepting that he chose to take the rice and gravy already “adulterated” with meat, but not physically taking the meat. Of course this solution probably only applies to Buddhist who voluntarily choose not to consume meat, not because it is out of obedience or to please a Higher Being, but because they mindfully refuse to consume meat in order to prevent the killing of another sentient being (animals). And I use the descriptor mindful because the “degree of wickedness / evilness” of an action depends on the individuals intention for that action. Hence, Buddhist teaching doesn’t recommend that adherents abstain from meat, but they should abstain from killing. Hence, rice with meat gravy sans the meat is ok (Happy Buddhist the Sailor didn’t order it, it was pushed upon him by the Arrogant Cook who clearly misunderstood the request for “no meat”). I would also think that the next course of action for the Happy Buddhist the Sailor would likely be that the next time he’ll ask the Arrogant Sailor for rice only. P.S. Adherents of the oldest branches of Buddhism, like Monks collecting alms in Thailand and Sri Lanka, can eat meat if it is provided as alms. Of course, the people giving alms are not encouraged to give meat.
Yeah, I saw the snake, too. A…big…friggin’ boa, I think.
And what the hell is racist about “a stinking Indian latrine”?
All latrines stink, especially if they are in the tropics. I’ll bet you think ABC, NBC and CBS actually report the news, too.
All in all, a beautiful movie. I prefer a story that doesn’t leave you hanging, but it was impossible to not like the story between Pi and John Parker.
Regarding the boa constrictor — my mistake. I’ve edited out the bits about a garden with no snake; they were merely re-statements of my theme, and do not change the substance of the post.
I was not discussing literal latrines, but a racist distinction between what is pure and French on the one hand, and what is putrid and Indian on the other. Your attempt at a scathing comeback is definitely hindered by your poor reading skills.
All in all, a beautiful movie. I prefer a story that doesn’t leave you hanging, but it was impossible to not like the story between Pi and John Parker.
Actually, it was very possible not to like that story. For example, I didn’t like it. The story doesn’t leave you hanging, in fact, but it quite possibly did leave you hanging, since you also thought I was writing about toilets when I was quoting and interpreting a statement about language. Here’s a hint: the more realistic story is what happened.
You’re welcome.
I don’t think that the latrine thing was racist, i just think that it meant that to a French person who understands Piscine as a french word, it means something pure, but to the ears of an Indian who speaks English it sounds like pissing, so your attempt at a scathing comeback is definitely hindered by your poor listening skills :)