proof
10.12.05 (1:06 am) [edit]Proof (directed by John Madden) was a movie that made me funnily mope around. I felt certain nostalgia as an eternal grad student, who spent too long in an academic environment just to drop out again. The movie was about a math genius father and his daughter, who was doomed to struggle with the talent and madness she inherited from her father.
The story is about death of the father, math theory the daughter established and the sturuggle to prove that was done by herself instead of her father.
There is certain beauty in the world of logic. The language/literature and math have things in common as science; the process of proving involves people's agreement because it is not about a lab work that can present the evidence right in front of people's eyes but seek for their conceptual aggrement.
The movie is quite conscious of the subject, its predicament and its own beauty. It successfully raises the issue of the difficulty of communication among people by representing the example of math genius' hell of isolation and hunger for others' understanding.
Although proving process involves 99% of concrete evidences and logics, the rest of it, 1% remains as unknown darkness. That is what is supposed to be a departure. In other words, the jump is what people call trust, or faith, I would call. You need somebody who understands your logic. Without the one, you would never establish the logic nor make yourself understood and your logic is wasted. But how can you get the one who understands you?
It takes certain strength to trust someone. But we cannot live w/o the act of trust. The movie paradoxically hits the exact point of how necessary it is to trust somebody while it elegantly shows the difficulty of doing so.