[First draft of my review appearing in Jung and India, Spring: a Journal of Archetype and Culture (vol. 90, Fall 2013, guest-edited by Alfred Collins and Elaine Molchanov)]
Still attracting full houses to its stunningly beautiful 3D visuals, Ang Lee's Life of Pi (2012) is a largely faithful cinematic rendering of Yann Martel's fantasy adventure novel (2001) of the same name.
Born a Tamil Hindu in the former French enclave of Pondicherry, Piscine (Pi) Molitor Patel, named after his Uncle's favorite swimming pool in Paris, becomes obsessed with the meaning of life and seeks his answers by "converting" successively to Christianity and Islam, and attempting to hold on to all three religions simultaneously. Unlike his indulgent mother, the skeptical father, who owns the town zoo with its prize Bengal tiger, sees this as a sure formula for inextricable mental confusion. Repulsed at first by the irrationality of the faith, Pi is irresistibly drawn to the sacrificial figure of the crucified (Son of) God and his Eucharist.
Circumstances oblige the family to move with their animals for a better life in Canada, only for their Japanese freighter to capsize in mid-Pacific. When the raging tempest finally clears, Pi finds himself the sole human survivor adrift on a life-boat with a wounded zebra, a female orangutan, and a spotted hyena. After the frenzied hyena has mortally mauled its defenseless fellow creatures, the hidden tiger suddenly springs forth powerfully from beneath the tarpaulin to finish off the small time terrorist.
At the far end of his odyssey, the adult Pi describes himself as a Catholic Hindu, who teaches Kabbalah at the university. Instead of attempting to make sense of the unlikely ocean-crossing in terms of the author's spiritual quest, some otherwise educated commentators seem obsessed with figuring out the most favored path, through what may be characterized as `religious' bean-counting. Internet Hindus, for example, are not quite sure whether to feel proud that Patel remains a steadfast practitioner of their ancient all-inclusive dharma ('religion') or to accuse Piscine instead of being a treasonous proxy for a sly U-turn by his Western creator. For, having earlier praised Vishnu for bringing him to Christ, he now thanks the Preserver for coming to the rescue in the avatar of a fish that he kills to nourish the tiger and himself. But why would a story of traversing the ocean for 227 days with a Royal Bengal Tiger make any listener believe in God?
Taunted as "Pissing" at school, he shortens his French name "Piscine" to the more respectable "Pi" and strives to prove his intellectual prowess by working out this foundational fraction to its umpteenth decimal on the blackboard. But the Cartesian brain that deliberates upon and resolves the most complex equations is but the cortical appendage to a spinal column that remains rooted in and sustained by the most primordial instincts. When Pi challenges this menace that has leapt out as it were from the cage of his own unconscious, the tiger suddenly turns its back and literally drowns his self-composure in a rain of urine. Or is it the `Hinduized' Martel's zoo-logic pissing on his own "I think, therefore I am" Enlightenment rationality? For "in that elusive irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge" (p.???).
When the Japanese insurers of the freighter refuse to believe such a fantastic itinerary, this sole survivor invents an alternative phantasm of human brutality: he was adrift with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, and the ship's cook, who killed both sailor and mother to cut them up as bait and food. His Canadian interlocutor deduces from these human-animal correspondences that Pi himself could only be the tiger, appropriately named Richard Parker through a clerical error at the zoo. For the key to this forced cohabitation of socialized man and untamable beast is the ultimate identity of the two.
At their first zoo encounter, the still 'innocent' teenager held out some raw flesh through the railings as one might coaxingly to a pet dog. The father disabuses this naive projection of civilized emotions onto the bloodthirsty creature by forcing his child to witness the inevitable fate of a live goat. The 20th century Russian mystic Gurdjieff expressed the inner predicament of the spiritual quest through the riddle of having to transport, one at a time, a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage on a small boat across the river without the goat eating the cabbage or being devoured by the wolf, when left together on the bank by themselves. Here, the mortal challenge for the human steward is to deliver his onerous charge to the other shore without being consumed by his inner beast. Pi is eventually so successful in contriving a modus vivendi--feeding the tiger but not with his own body--that the dangerous pet even sleeps with his head cuddled and scratched on the human lap. Yet, the ungrateful Parker merely pauses, without looking back, before disappearing forever into the thickets, leaving his rescuer somehow disappointed at this lack of acknowledgment. Ancient Chinese manuscripts show enlightened Buddhist monks, though overflowing with universal love, accompanied by a fearsome tiger rationalized to the laity as pacified protector. The happily married Pi, who recounts this 'unbelievable' story from the beginning, has confronted and transcended his own inner demon.
The Pondicherry zoo serves to juxtapose the human and animal worlds, preparing us for the confrontation between reason (ego) and instinct (id) within the lone survivor cut off from the rest of society. Beneath this appearance, however, zoology has become the handmaiden of theology. [to be completed]
Thrown into the swimming pool at an early age, Piscine owes his survival to the mentorship of his 'Uncle', who was so attached to breathing water that he had to be swung in circles by his feet at the moment of birth to expel the amniotic waters from his lungs. For Freud, the "oceanic feeling" at the heart of all mystical experience is induced by a regression to the maternal womb, and some subsequent psychoanalysts have emphasized the importance of reliving the trauma of birth and even of 'killing the mother', a motif that has abundant resonances in the symbolic life of Hinduism. Not only does the orphaned boy have visions of his beloved mother sleeping within the wreck at the bottom of the ocean, her orangutan counterpart on the lifeboat is soon mauled to death. For the Life of Pi is an initiatic voyage of shedding one's humanity to confront, embrace, and transcend the beast within. What opposes the silent, sinewy, and beautiful tiger to the garrulous hyena, whose rabid bark is even worse than its repetitive bite, is what distinguishes raw power reduced to its pure, pristine, dangerous, and sacred essence from the petty mutual violence of men. In the 'humanized' retelling, it is Pi himself who finally kills the hyena-cook.
Violence here is not so much a question of ethics, much less of cinematic aesthetics, but foundational like 'original sin' (ontological). Hailing from the ancient land that produced the Mahatma and the extremes of Jain self-denial, Pi's vegetarian family has hardly anything to eat in the galley, where they are aggressively taunted by the racist French cook (the visceral Gérard Depardieu) for their almost natural aversion to meat. But adrift with dwindling rations, Pi is before long obliged to sink his own teeth into the raw fish he feeds his ravenous ward. Vegetarianism is deliberately deconstructed on the idyllic island where the bioluminescent algae turn out to be carnivorous to the point of digesting shipwrecked humans, so much so that even the fearful tiger flees back to the lifeboat.
A highpoint in the 3D effects is the primordial tiger unexpectedly leaping out from the screen at us, titillated viewers, as though we were the one cast adrift on that endless ocean. On Dec. 16 after having followed Pi's otherworldly itinerary at a Delhi cinema, a young woman tried to take a passing bus back home only to be gang-raped to the point of being disemboweled. Richard Parker, who had seemed so human but refused to become so to Pi's ultimate despair, had pursued her on his senseless rampage...
Sunthar Visuvalingam
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