Love handler

Duncan North has one over Freud; he thinks he knows what women want. Overweight, underachieving, a kindergarten teacher living in a bachelor hacienda in the desert outside Santa Fe, North so impressed his friend aspiring filmmaker Jenniphr Goodman with his success with women that she immortalized him in the shrewd independent comedy The Tao of Steve. Written by Goodman, her sister Greer (who also stars), and North (thinly disguised as the film's hero Dex) himself, and directed by Goodman, Steve offers hope to the romantically challenged.

"Jenniphr and I were living together, and at first she wanted to do a documentary about me," North explains at the Nantucket Film Festival, when Tao is featured there. "She had these two friends who were particularly choosy about men, and I was interested in them. She didn't think I had much of a chance; when I did, she was taken aback. That's when I told her about the Tao of Steve."

What is the Tao of Steve? A strategy combining Eastern philosophy and Western attitude by which any guy, regardless of appearance (and North will be the first to admit he's no Brad Pitt), can make it with any woman. It's a multi-step process: you start by being desireless, then you attain excellence (a stumbling point for many) and wind up with the savoir faire of Steve McQueen. Sound unlikely? No one was more surprised than North the first time he made his discovery.

"I made it up when I was 16. It's like gravity; Newton didn't think up gravity, he discovered it. And I discovered this: if you come on strong to a woman, you're going to fuck up. My dad had given me the Tao Te Ching. I liked the part about letting things come to you, not forcing things. And when you're 16, scoring with girls is the greatest issue in the nation. But I was not successful because I was chubby, had bad skin, and wasn't very athletic.

"But I was cool enough to hang out with the cool guys -- and they were all hitting on this beautiful girl. I knew I had no chance. My friends were doing the thing that 16-year-old guys do, saying, `You're pretty,' hitting on her, and I thought, having read the Tao Te Ching, `These guys are forcing it. They're not letting her come to them.' And I thought, `Fuck it. I'm not going to compete. I'm just going to tell it like it is, I'm just going to be myself.' And I got in this big argument with her, and then I left and she came out and gave me her number.

"Then it hit me; I was desireless. And because we were talking about politics, and at that time I knew more about politics than I do now, I was excellent. And because I didn't want to stay in there and see which guy was going to get the girl, I got the girl. It was like: so that's how it works. And, of course, I lost my ambition altogether and turned into a fat slacker and . . . "

. . . and a kind of Steve McQueen himself. Has North incorporated the success of The Tao of Steve into his own seduction strategy?

"I actually found myself once thinking, `How do I let this girl know that I was part of a movie?' And just the thought of it freaked me out. In real life, it's important to know that people like you for the right reasons. If you're trying to work some sort of social leverage with a movie or money or any of that stuff, then your relationship is doomed."

So what do women, and men, really want?

"Romance is the state religion of America: [we believe] that what you do is hook up with the hottest person in the room, and when you find the other person, you'll find personal salvation. I think we have that now without the divine thing beyond that. It's just like the love partner is the final destination. I personally don't want to be a member of that religious group."
-- Peter Keough

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