Schrödinger's Man

Early in the Coen brothers' astonishing new film, A Serious Man, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a small college in Minnesota, sits down with one of his students, a South Korean immigrant named Clive Park (David Kang). Gopnik has just finished a class in which he has tried, while furiously scribbling equations on a giant blackboard, to explain to his students the concept of Schrödinger's Cat. Now, he is meeting with Park because the student is upset that he got an F on the midterm, believes the grade was unfair, and insists that he understands the material. The only thing he doesn't get is the math.
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But, Gopnik asserts, the math is the entire point. Park may well understand the basic theories, but if he doesn't understand the math, he doesn't understand physics. The stories that Gopnik tells his class -- the things that Park says he understands -- are merely illustrations of the math, to make it easier to digest. The stories don't really matter. "I'm not even sure I get the cat," Gopnik says.
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Like everything else in Larry Gopnik's life, his meeting with Park will turn out badly. Gopnik will also find out that his shot at tenure is in doubt, that his wife is leaving him for Sy Abelman ("Sy Abelman!?") played by Fred Melamed, that his brilliant but troubled brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is involved in things he probably shouldn't be, and, in short, everything in Larry's life is collapsing, quite suddenly. This relentless collapse makes up the vast majority of A Serious Man, that and Larry's tortured and blackly hilarious quest for meaning through what amount to essentially absurd conversations with a series of rabbis. But I believe that early scene with Gopnik and Park is the key to this whole film.
.After watching the amazing last five minutes of A Serious Man, it's easy to walk out and think of it, as so many people seem to have done, as a big, cruel joke, a mockery of faith and the idea of meaning in the universe. Certainly it plays like that on the surface, and certainly it even works that way -- the film's ending felt to me like a kick in the teeth. However, let's look at what Gopnik says to Park again. First, he says the math is what counts. In other words, the universal order that can be traced through mathematics, or the lack of chaos that math represents. Second, the stories that illustrate the math don't ultimately mean much -- we tell ourselves these stories as a way of deceiving ourselves that we understand, but the truth is that if we don't understand the math -- which, when you look upon Gopnik's blackboard, seems to be an impossible task -- we don't know squat. We don't know what we don't know.
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One of the rabbis (George Wyner) Larry consults about his growing existential and real-world crises tells Larry a story, which I won't get into here, that involves, among other things, the fact that in the Hebrew alphabet, each letter has a corresponding number. In the story, knowledge of this fact leads a man on a quest for meaning that appears to Larry to have been fruitless, but I think he misses the point entirely, and in fact I think the rabbi does, too. This meeting is incredibly frustrating to Larry, because the rabbi does not wrap up his story in a way that satisfies Larry's understanding of its resolution or its point, but he doesn't notice (and why should he, really?) the optimistic swing the story takes at the end. The protagonist of the rabbi's story -- a real man who lives in the same Minnesota Jewish community as the rabbi and Larry -- followed numbers, followed math, towards a happier life, or rather back to a happy life. How did he get there? He doesn't know, but he got there.
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Math is order. For many of us, beyond a certain point, it doesn't make a lick of sense, but it is the map of the entire universe. We know and accept that, as we also know and accept that even those who can understand the math hit a point where the math simply charts things we don't understand. Certain elements of quantum physics we know to be true -- the math says so -- but why it is the way it is still bewilders even the most brilliant among us.
.So. If, in Judaism, math is not only order, but language, then math is also God, or evidence of God. We tell stories about God, such as the Old and New Testaments, as we tell stories about math, such as Schrödinger's Cat. These stories provide us with the opportunity to grasp concepts, but these concepts remain entirely abstract in our day-to-day reality. Gopnik deals with both the vastly complex math, but also the stories, on a daily basis, but when his own sense of order begins to disintegrate he is unable to apply his own knowledge of, say, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, a theory about which he dreams, but is unable to take to heart. Who can blame him, and yet...
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In his review and analysis of A Serious Man in Tablet, an on-line Jewish magazine, Liel Leibovitz talks about Gopnik's quest for an answer, and explanation of life and the universe. Gopnik thinks he's going to find this in just a few days, and that the answer will be easily understandable -- the fact that he never does find it strikes him as enormously unfair. But Leibovitz says:
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Simplicity is the enemy of modernity. So is doubt. Modernity—in its American strand, at least—requires of its practitioners a growing specialization, an increased sophistication, a neverending striving towards certainty. It is, in other words, the very opposite of the Talmudic undertaking, in which the argument itself is the central pursuit and a finite truth, should it ever materialize, is of little concern. When Jews rid themselves of the Talmud, the ars gratia artis, the scholarly license to see the world for all of its competing and contrasting strands, and when they immerse themselves instead in the target-oriented, painfully concrete, and intolerably specific modern world, then, the Coens tell us, they’re in deep spiritual trouble.
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Gopnik, the poor bastard, doesn't get it, but who does, these days? It's my belief that the reason A Serious Man is being regarded by so many as a mean-spirited mockery of the very idea of spiritual faith is because a lot of people don't understand how much of faith and religious thought revolves around the ideas of doubt and questioning. Many atheists think that those with religious faith do not, or pretend to not, ever experience doubt, or accept doubt as a part of their belief (present company very possibly excluded, but this has been the bulk of my experience in recent years). They think that doubt -- or, maybe more precisely in this context, uncertainty -- is the same thing as atheism, and therefore anything that expresses doubt or incredulity towards a religious quest is ipso facto a victory for their side. Well, it's not, and never has been, and the Coens, I think, know this.
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Because, ultimately, what is it that Gopnik doesn't understand? His life. He doesn't get why his life story is suddenly playing out like this. And, of course, "story" is the operative word (forced in there by me, but still valid, I think). Unlike Clive Park, Larry Gopnik understands the math, but not the story. And what's the story in this case? A Serious Man. So A Serious Man is the cat.
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