Dinner for one, party for one

Here is a quote from the movie Charly:

Charly Gordon: "I was wondering why the people who would never dream of laughing at a blind or a crippled man would laugh at a moron?"

This is the punch line for all the jokes in the movie Dinner For Schmucks. In order to be promoted, the candidate has to bring an idiot to dinner. The stupider the guest, the better. One condition is that these dinner guests never know why they have been invited. They are to believe they have been invited only because of their uniqueness and their various talents. By the end of the movie, these people still are who they are, but at least one “normal” person has suffered the pangs of consciousness and regained his sense of decency. There are many times, and in many places, where I have felt this “schmuckiness”

The problem for Charly in Charly is not that he is no longer a moron, but the fact that now he realizes how and why people always treated him the way they did, and not only that, it is that knowledge which brings with it the feeling of pain, the pain of being laughed at, disregarded, and ignored. In the movie (and the book by Daniel Keyes upon which it was based Flowers for Algernon) this knowledge is gained by seeing how the people in the restaurant laugh at a man who is probably retarded, and he is able to see not from the subjective viewpoint of himself as a “former moron” and who had been treated this way (which would have fostered resentment) but from the viewpoint of an objective observer. Because nobody knows he is not what he looks like on the outside, they feel neither guilt nor remorse at laughing at a mentally-challenged human being. Charly sees someone else suffering the same indignities he had once experienced, but now realizes the true scope of what he had had to endure, just to be “liked”, to be “accepted”. He learned what “…pulling a real Charly Gordon” meant.

Charly showed humanity and society in a not-so-favorable light, and that although heroics and nobility are not teachable qualities, they are inherent in the human personality and can be developed through exercise. The story also shows that logic and intellectual attainments can sometimes interfere or even run contrary to these inherent human qualities. Dinner for Schmucks is a movie which, in the guise of entertainment, allows people to laugh at the “schmucks” of the world without ever having to face the consequences of acting like insensitive buffoons.

Incidentally, in Ben Stiller’s movie from a few years ago, Tropical Thunder, there were people outside the theater actively protesting the portrayal of “A Retard” by Stiller. They were protesting because of the helplessness of the learning or intellectually challenged and their inability to defend themselves. In Dinner for Schmucks, Barry is not a “retard” or a “moron” he is an IRS agent who is in deep emotional denial. His pain, loneliness, and anguish are the fuel for the audience’s laughter. Therefore, he deserved what he got and he wasn’t a defenseless person because he “chose” to be so dumb.

In the movie Charly, Charly’s scars bought him to the state of awareness but his scars were only the remainders of a temporary surgical solution. He finally grew smart enough to see that his growth would be only short-lived, and that he would end up even more of a moron (The term was used correctly in the story line because Charly’s I.Q at the start was below 60, and at the peak of his intellectual attainment, was well over 160)) than when he had started. In Dinner for Schmucks, the schmucks stay schmucks, but it is the normal people who can make the change so as to live out their lives happily.

In the book The Four Agreements, Don Ruiz points out that deep wounds heal first on the surface, and the rest of the healing proceeds downward, but the scars protect the wound and prevent the actual healing to take place. The only way to heal these wounds is to dig down, consciously, through the scar tissue to the level of the injury, and then the wound must be healed from that point outward, ending at the surface tissue. The wound remains open until even the skin is healed.

There really is hope for the socially challenged, the aesthetically challenged, the emotionally challenged - the people who are un-liked, ugly, or un-lovable. The first step is to find the prime source of humanity – love, and to give it and to not expect any in return. For me, I look at it this way:

If people see only the scar tissue, they may never love me, they may never look at me or acknowledge me, but I can still love them. I want to love. If I love from my heart outwards, then the deepest part of the surface wound will logically be the first to feel this loving energy that comes from inside me, and the last place will be the skin, which is the first part of me that other people see. Regardless of what they see, that inner love will always be there.