Where's the Beef?

In 2007, critics uniformly panned Good Luck Chuck. Critics in 21 reviews gave it an average score of 17 out of 100, indicating "extreme dislike or disgust." Audiences however flocked to the box office making it the #1 opening week blockbuster in both the U.S. and the U.K.

I watched the movie last night with dislike alternating with curiosity. I was disgusted one minute, touched the next. The movie certainly is a mixed-up cocktail. It didn't go down smoothly like the best gin, more like tubá from an unknown street-corner vendor in an unfamiliar Iloilo town.

The movie was based on a short story by Steve Glenn about a thirty-something doctor-wannabe dentist cursed to make every woman he beds fall in love and marry the next guy they meet. The concept sounds like the daytime fantasy of every teenage boy with roiling testosterone levels but surprisingly no one until now has made a movie or novel treatment of it. 

Maybe it's not so surprising after all. The concept is so lowbrow. What can be more disgusting than the teenage male fantasies of female parts taken out of context to feed interminable jerk-off sessions? Civilized people insist we love the person and not just her or his body parts. In our endless attempt to morph our natural instincts to serve our equally ubiquitous yearning for lofty spaces like heaven, society has provided us with a supply of story concepts to mine.

To think outside the box: this is what I think of as creativity. To think outside the box: this is what's missing in my own appreciation of myself. I think and analyze and come up again and again with the same boring mazes that no longer amaze. I feel I'm missing a vital part of myself. Maybe it is the familiar theme of seeking perfection when we are experiencing what Buddhist call dukkha, the intrinsic quality of life that moves from pleasure to disgust as things change. If we didn't have this sense of incompleteness we would have no ambition. Without desire, life is incomprehensible.

I shot Aaron and Scott four times before I got surfeited and stopped processing the images. Last night I came across two folders of images shot by the guys when I gave them a camera to shoot when the other was posing. They took pictures without paying attention to the "rules." Some of the images are really good. I am too much of a law-abider. My images, like my stories, are all hackneyed products of a rational process.

Good art, whether in photography, movies or literary fiction, combines a respectful combination of stereotypes and inventive casting. Creativity is letting go and barging into familiar territories blind to what we know. Fumbling in the dark is uncomfortable but through that discomfort we move to spaces outside of ourselves.