Number 23

Young screenwriter Fernley Phillips isn’t the one who invented the paranoid idea of Number 23. It appeared much earlier, in the works of ‘futurist and anarchist’ Robert Anton Wilson.

As the film carelessly claims that fate does not exist, I feel obliged to show it does. No, it is not in counting digits and finding those numbers in life events. This is easy and leads nowhere except to the asylum. There are more convincing ‘coincidences’ which do prove.

Fate is in inborn mental patterns which thus can be predicted. Look at Robert Anton Wilson. The 23 idea is heavy and damaging, and who could we expect to develop it? Somebody with a heavy and afflicted Sun.

Right, heavy in itself, Sun in Capricorn is besieged by a very heavy combust Saturn and Mars. He was a writer whose goal was “to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything”. A very nice credo. The film attempts the same and obviously fails - the initial pseudo-mystic attitude is sick, and when it transforms into plain insanity, one feels nothing but relief. Maybe some members of the public will enjoy the colours and good camera work. A well-wrapped mediocrity.

Robert Anton Wilson was not born on ‘23’, but he was buried on the same date as he was born, January 18. And Jim Carrey, who perfectly performed the paranoid character, was born on January 17, with the same Sun in Capricorn, combust Saturn, and Moon in Gemini.

Coincidences?..