Terminally Unlucky Case File #145: The Number 23
Twenty-three was a magical number to me when I was growing up. I was lucky enough to come of age sports-wise during the heyday of the greatest athlete in the history of the universe: Michael Jordan. Throughout my adolescence, Jordan’s #23 jersey was synonymous with everything good in the world: victory, accomplishment, mastery, the city-wide glow following The Bulls’ astonishing six championships, and my beloved hometown of Chicago.
So when it came time for me to pick a number for my Team Onion softball jersey, there was only one number I considered: good old number 23. I’d always considered 23 my lucky number. So you can imagine how surprised I was to learn that 23 is the unluckiest number in existence. The ad campaign for today’s entry in My Year Of Flops, 2007’s The Number 23, went out of its way to depict 23 as history’s greatest monster, worse even than Jimmy Carter.
According to The Number 23, 23 is evil in numerical form. That number will murder your children. It will fuck your girlfriend while you’re away at Bible camp. It will steal your identity, destroy your credit, and fill your computer with kiddie porn. It was the second shooter on the grassy knoll. It faked the moon landing. It green-lit reality shows for every single member of the Kardashian family, even the inbred ones they hide from the public.
Twenty-three is the most evil number in the world. But what about 666? How can 23 compete with the Mark Of The Beast? I hope you’re sitting down and holding onto your cranium tightly, for what I am about to tell you will blow your mind right through your fucking skull and into the stratosphere. What is 2 divided by 3? That’s right, motherfucker: .666. Whoa. Even El Diablo has to get in on this red-hot 23 action.
If I’ve learned anything from two viewings of The Number 23, it’s that any possible combination of 23 is also 23. You can twist and contort and jumble numbers until everything takes on the sinister shape of a 2 followed by a 3. Here’s an example: The Number 23 is the 145th Case File for My Year Of Flops. I began the essay by discussing the No. 1 basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan. What was Jordan’s number when he came back from retirement? It was 45, the next two numbers after—wait for it—his original 23. Dude, it’s like circles within circles within circles of convoluted bullshit.
Jim Carrey, who named his production company JC23, had ample reason to both be terrified of the number 23 and inexplicably excited about starring in The Number 23. According to a 2007 Time profile by Joel Stein, Carrey’s obsession with 23 predated The Number 23 by many years:
[Carrey] brings out a list of talking points—all typed out—that he is going to tell me about the number 23, in which he’s been interested for years (his daughter has a “23” tattoo), whether I want to hear them or not. “Blood takes 23 seconds to circulate the body… Jim Carrey plus Virginia Madsen is 23 letters… Jim Carrey plus Joel Schumacher is 23 letters… I was born at 2:30 a.m.…” I shall spare you the rest. Especially since I’m not sure how his observation that O.J. Simpson wore No. 32 fits in.
According to The Number 23 director Joel Schumacher, Carrey had to be in a good place emotionally in order to survive the stress of a project as intense as The Number 23. Stein quotes Schumacher as saying “I’ve seen [Carrey] really suffer in love. He wasn’t ready to go to the places he goes in this movie back then. He was afraid that if he went to those dark places, his life would be misery the whole time he was making the movie. But now life is good for Jim. He could tear his heart down, then go home.”
Carrey needed to be in a happy place in order to take on the role of a wacky dogcatcher whose complete physical and mental breakdown is brought to you by the number 23 and the letters in a creepy book written by a mysterious figure. Using a wacky dogcatcher played by Jim Carrey as the entry point for a dark psychological thriller is like trying to make a harrowing Taxi Driver-like exploration of mental illness by casting Chris Farley as a clumsy, pratfall-addled waiter. But miscasting is only the first of the film’s problems.