The Number 23

Feb 23 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 8

Any movie getting made is a small miracle. Movies are such gargantuan efforts of creativity that I have simply stopped being surprised when I find out that some long awaited project like Joel & Ethan Coen’s adaptation of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union will never be made. It’s tough enough to get five people who like each other to agree on a time and place to have brunch; I simply cannot imagine the degree to which mountains need to be moved to get a few dozen people together to make a motion picture happen. There are so many points during a movie’s development where doubtless it’s tempting to say “no, it’s not worth it, let’s just throw in the towel and make another season of Survivor instead”, but people persevere. They persevere because of a vision of the art they’re making, Maybe it’s because they feel passionate about the story, maybe it’s because they think it’ll be really cool to behold once it’s completed, maybe it’s just because they think it’ll make a heap of cash, who knows, but the wheels keep turning despite all the friction keeping it from happening. Most of the time that gives me hope and inspires me to see people persevering in the face of difficulty to create art. Sometimes though the art that’s created is The Number 23 and I think “dozens of people said ‘Yes, this should be made.’ None of them had the sense to stop it.”

The Number 23 is the story of Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey), an animal control officer whose wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) buys him a book for his birthday called “The Number 23”, which is the story of a detective named Fingerling (also Carrey) and his lover Fabrizia (also Madsen). Walter begins to notice connections between himself and the protagonist in the book, who himself feels haunted by continual occurrences of the number 23 in his life. In the book, Fingerling ultimately kills Fabrizia in the book after suspecting her of infidelity, causing Walter to spiral into a panic about his own life. He desperately seeks out the author of the book, credited as “Topsy Kretts”. Is it his friend the college professor Isaac (Danny Huston)? The convict (Mark Pellegrino) serving time for a suspiciously similar murder to Fabrizia’s in the novel? The head of the local psychiatric hospital (Bud Cort)? Is it Agatha? Is it his son Robin (Logan Lerman)? The answer is dumber than you think!

I feel a little bad clowning on this film because its genesis is surprisingly sweet. A writer named Fernley Phillips had moved to California from the UK with the aim of breaking into screenwriting. He spent years writing the screenplay for The Number 23 while living a frugal/destitute existence, to the point where “he would wait until McDonald's offered hamburgers for 29 cents and buy five to save for the coming week.”¹ In 2002 an assistant producer named Alissa Ferguson working for producer Beau Flynn read the screenplay and loved it. She loved it so much she helped shepherd it through a five year development hell period, and hit it off so much with Fernley that she ended up marrying him in 2005. As best as I can tell, they’re still married and have the kind of home where they can have a dog, a miniature pig, and 14 chickens, which sounds adorable. In a world where The Number 23 is a masterpiece, this is the charming start of the story of a Hollywood power couple. The Number 23 is not a masterpiece, and while Fernley Phillips succeeded at his goal of having a career as a real Hollywood writer, it was also the end of that career. Phillips has not written a second produced screenplay.

A good deal of the plot of The Number 23 revolves around the 23 enigma, itself a subset of the phenomenon known as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.² The sharpshooter fallacy occurs when a fallacious hypothesis is invented, and then people begin observing instances of that hypothesis and ignoring data that falls outside of it. The origins of the 23 enigma appear to come from various figures of the late 60s counterculture and spread via the author Robert Anton Wilson, best known for his Illuminatus! Trilogy of books with Robert Shay. Wilson wrote in the Fortean Times after the release of the film in the May 2007 issue that the 23 enigma was first noticed by William S Borroughs:

According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.

The number is also of import in the gonzo quasi-religious countercultural movement the Discordian Society, whose central text the Principia Discordia states:

The Law of Fives is one of the oldest Erisian Mysterees.

It was first revealed to Good Lord Omar and is one of the great contributions to come from The Hidden Temple of The Happy Jesus.

POEE subscribes to the Law of Fives of Omar's sect. And POEE also recognizes the holy 23 (2+3=5) that is incorporated by Episkopos Dr. Mordecai Malignatus, KNS, into his Discordian sect, The Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria.

The Law of Fives states simply that: ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR ARE SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO 5.

According to Wilson, after Burroughs told him about his deadly 23 encounters he began collecting instances of the number 23 in his own life that seemed to be of significance and incorporated them into Illuminatus!, a novel series whose stated purpose was to collect the various conspiracy theories and mystical thinking surrounding the druggy counterculture he was a part of and incorporate them into a story specifically designed to induce paranoia in its reader. Illuminatus! is a compelling text (it’s a doorstop and I’ve read it twice) but it’s also harrowing and defies categorization (I’ve read it twice and would have difficulty describing what it’s about) and I can absolutely see someone reading it and attempting to take that paranoia on the page and think they could adapt it for the screen. I can even see this miniature version of Illuminatus! being something incredibly compelling on the page, but as soon as you put real people and real imagery around it the whole thing just starts unravelling and becoming absolutely unhinged in a silly way rather than a scary or thrilling way.

While I doubt anyone could pull off this story and make it as thrilling as it seems to think it is, the combination of director Joel Schumacher and star Jim Carrey only serve to make what is only delicately thrilling into something full blown unintentionally comical. Schumacher is probably most remembered for his entries in the world of Batman films: Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997), which are either camp classics that celebrate the more over-the-top and silly bits of Batman mythos or trash that destroyed the franchise for years after Schumacher put nipples on the bat-suit depending on who you ask.³ Despite his Batman reputation though Schumacher is completely capable of delivering thrills. The Lost Boys (1987) is a treasure, and The Client (1994) and Phone Booth (2002) are eminently watchable. All of those movies have thrills that are deeply tangible though, the characters are in real danger from vampires or the mob or a psychopath with a sniper rifle. The Number 23 is intended to derive its thrills from its protagonist losing touch with reality, and shooting Jim Carrey seeing a bus whose route number is 23 with the same kind of jump-scare-energy as shooting Keiffer Sutherland with fangs just doesn’t work.

this is “scary”

Carrey himself was in the midst of a mid-career reinvention where instead of exclusively playing rubberfaced slapstick he was looking for more dramatic roles after proving he could successfully tug at heartstrings after making The Truman Show (1998). To the best of my knowledge this has worked one (1) time: the heartbreaking romantic drama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). I’m happy to be proven wrong here, maybe his performances in Dark Crimes (2016) or The Majestic (2001) are secretly amazing, but in The Number 23 he brings just enough silliness to the performance that it introduces unintentional comedy to the film. He perpetually mugs a little too hard and throws a little bit of comic improv into otherwise serious scenes. His naturally broad physicality make the film’s many sex scenes feel a little less Fatal Attraction and a little more American Pie. As his cool guy detective counterpart Fingerling he carries around a saxophone⁴ that he never plays. And I can’t help but wonder if the fact that Sparrow is an animal control officer who has an alter ego as a detective is a really roundabout Pet Detective joke? It’s silly is what I’m saying. Every attempt to make this movie dead serious comes across as profoundly, deeply, and stupifyingly silly.

You might think that after all this dogging I’m going to conclude by saying that you should stay away from The Number 23, but I am not. Norbit is a movie I would advise you to stay away from because I barely laughed during it. The Number 23 is a movie I laughed at nearly from start to finish. I stared slack jawed and cackled as Jim Carrey flinched at address numbers on houses and telephone numbers. While sitting alone watching it I found myself continually exclaiming “WHAT?” to no one in the living room. If you’re the kind of person who likes to invite friends over to get a little high and gawk at something ridiculous; if you’re the kind of person who already knows names like Ed Wood, Neil Breen, and Tommy Wiseau, this movie is for you. In the parlance of The Flop House podcast,⁵ The Number 23 is a classic good bad movie.

Rating: ★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

Economics: Bafflingly, this movie made money. The Number 23 opened at #2 at the box office ahead of Bridge to Terabithia and just behind Ghost Rider, both in their second week of release. It went on to make $78 million at the worldwide box office plus $28 million in DVD sales on a $30 million budget. The amount of money this film doubtless contributed to the global cannabis economy is sadly unrecorded.

Worst digital color correction: The turn of the 21st century was a time when digital post-production was beginning to come into its own and copies of Final Cut Pro began outselling film-cutting editing bays. One thing digital post production rendered trivially easy was overlaying a color pallet on top of a shot to establish mood or tweak visual language. Sometimes this is used well to make scenes and individual visual elements pop. Sometimes you use it in The Number 23 and just make everything red.

Next Week: Wild Hogs and Zodiac

1. NY Times Style Section Jan. 2, 2005 https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/fashion/weddings/alissa-ferguson-and-fernley-phillips.html

2. The name for this fallacy comes from a metaphorical story / joke of a Texan shooting at the side of a barn and then upon observing a cluster of bullet holes in one location, paints a target surrounding that cluster, making it look after the fact like he was purposefully firing there. Apologies to any Texans who now feel negged by statisticians

3. The former position is held by culture critic Glen Weldon. The latter position is held by literally everyone else who has seen the films in question

4. Between Rob Lowe’s character as the cool musician friend who plays the sax in St Elmo’s Fire (1985), the Tim Capello cameo in The Lost Boys, and this, I’m realizing as I write this that maybe Joel Schumacher has a thing for saxophones?

5. The Flop House is the longest running bad movie podcast still running today. They launched in 2007 and one of the first episodes of the show discussed The Number 23. I listened to it and it is a fascinating document of the earliest days of podcasting. It was a time when podcasts still needed to be synced to an mp3 player after downloading them onto a home computer, and no one really knew how to make them aside from NPR hosts. It’s astonishing that it’s still going strong. Bless those boys for persevering.

In the episode on The Number 23 original cohost Simon Fisher makes the absolutely insane claim that there are no good movies with twist endings, challenging the other peaches to identify five good films off the dome with good twist endings. For the record Simon, while I may be 18 years too late for this challenge, my list is Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), Les Diaboliques (1955), Vertigo (1958) and Citizen Kane (1941).