God as a Beautiful Lie in Life of Pi

In 2004 a massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean caused a tsunami that killed more than 200k people. Among the victims were more than 800 people who were on a train named, in a bit of dark irony, The Queen of the Sea, that was hit by a wave and knocked off the tracks. Among the survivors of this train wreck was one Daya Wijaya Gunawardana, who managed to escape with his family through a window. Gunawardana credited their survival to his prayers to God.

The world is full of stories like this. Survivors of disasters often credit a deity for saving them while so many others died. I can't help but wonder whether no one else on the train thought to pray, or why, if they did pray, God didn't save them. But many among the faithful find such tales compelling evidence of divine intervention. With its lone survivor of tragedy and themes of faith and religion, one might think this is the kind of story unfolding in Ang Lee's 2012 film Life of Pi. The film subverts this expectation to make a different case for God, one that is problematic in a whole different way.

I didn't really know much about Life of Pi before I clicked the play button. I knew it won a lot of awards. I knew it was a great technical achievement in visual effects. I knew it was mostly about a kid on a small boat with a tiger and a lot of people found it uplifting or inspiring. It is this last part that I take issue with, as the story on offer was a nightmare better suited to a horror movie.

The story is framed by a conversation between the adult version of Pi Patel and a writer seeking inspiration for his next book. Pi's story, the writer has been told, will make him believe in God. Though Pi himself doesn't assure any such spiritual awakening, the dialog is an implicit promise to the audience. Watch this film and God will be revealed. It's a hell of a promise for any movie outside of the evangelical Christian propaganda genre to make.

As a child growing up in a literal zoo, Pi's father makes him watch as one of the tigers kills a goat. This is when he first learns a few harsh realities about nature's indifference to humanity. Animals are not moral agents, no matter how much we anthropomorphize them. Nature doesn't give a fuck about your suffering. Through the rest of the film we see Pi essentially tortured with these lessons over and over in various ways.

As Pi goes from one nightmare scenario to the next, we are often reminded, via his dialog with the writer and voice-over narration, that an omnipotent being of pure love is waiting at the end of this journey. The promise of this destination grows increasingly grotesque as Pi suffers alongside the innocent creatures he is powerless to help. For example, a terrified zebra with a broken leg gets eaten alive by a hyena while Pi watches in horror and tries to swat it away with a boat oar. The all-loving God at the heart of the story remains a silent voyeur to all this suffering, as indifferent as nature.

There are plenty of theodicies Life of Pi might have employed to attempt a justification for the brutality in which it revels. I personally don't find any of them compelling, but they might have worked for the story. Instead it takes what I consider an even more insulting approach.

--Spoilers incoming--

Pi's journey is far-fetched but it doesn't really require a supernatural explanation. Surviving all that time alone on a small boat with a tiger is unlikely but not impossible. Yet when he finally makes his way back to civilization there is a sense that he must confront reality after returning from a fantasy world. The bond he imagined he had formed with the tiger evaporates as the creature returns to the jungle without so much as a glance backwards. He then finds himself recounting his experience to two incredulous insurance agents, the ultimate symbol of the mundane.

The insurance agents insist Pi tell them the "real" story. Pi tells them another version of events where the animals are actually other humans. This version of the tale is just as brutal, if not more so. In place of a hyena eating the zebra, it is the ship's slovenly cook who kills a fellow castaway, does a cannibalism, the kills Pi's mother. Pi, taking the place of the tiger, then has to kill the cook or suffer his mother's fate. Pi then also does a cannibalism, eating part of the cook and using the rest a fish bait. Because humans are moral agents, this story can be read as more evil than the fantastical version.

There is one stand-out hint that the whole tale is a figment of Pi's imagination. The tiger spends a good deal of time hiding under a tarp before emerging to kill the hyena. But the hyena was also hiding under that same tarp. Unlike the other improbable events in the film, this in particular seems to defy the story's own logic. We've been reminded over and over that animals act according to their nature; there is no reason to think the tiger would have spent all that time ignoring the hyena only to jump out and kill it at a convenient moment.

In the end, the viewer, along with the writer and the insurance agents, must choose which version of the story to believe. Do we ignore the hints that Pi has made all of this up and accept the fantasy? Or do we accept the less colorful reality? Here at last the story's apologetic is revealed.

The subtext of Life of Pi can be summarized in three lines: 1) Life is a story. 2) You can choose your story. 3) A story with God is the better story.

Yann Martel - author of Life of Pi

Is this a good reason to believe in God? Consider the implications. In the fantasy, you might see God's hand in saving Pi's life but you then must ignore all the lives God didn't save and all the needless suffering that still occurred. The zebra would have suffered much less if it had drowned in the shipwreck or broken its neck instead of its leg when it jumped into the lifeboat. If God saved Pi, God could have also saved his family or just prevented the ship from sinking in the first place.

The writer, who is a stand-in for a skeptical audience, enthusiastically embraces the fantasy. Pi says to him, "and so it goes with God," thus fulfilling the promise made to the writer at the beginning. Whether or not the promise is also fulfilled to the viewer will largely depend on their individual predilections, rendering the whole message essentially meaningless.

We are meant to see the reality as much uglier than the fantasy. Instead of being tormented by the machinery of nature, which has no moral agency, Pi is tormented by another human, who does. It makes no sense to view nature as evil, but we can view the cook as evil. He kills Pi's mother, and then Pi himself is corrupted when he has to kill the cook. The reality contains more evil than the fantasy. But to embrace the fantasy, we must pretend the real evil doesn't exist. Ignore the evil man who killed Pi's mother; pretend it was just a hyena killing a zebra. The circle of life, and all that. One need only read the latest headlines to see what happens when people ignore the evil around them and live in a fantasy world. Left unchecked, evil festers and grows.

Life of Pi leaves us with a God who may comfort the wretched but does not truly help them. This God is a beautiful lie made to hide an ugly truth. To me, that doesn't sound like God at all.