Month: April 2021

I’ve been particularly lucky when it’s come to my writing career — not only in the types of writing work I’ve been lucky to get, but also the outlets I’ve been fortunate enough to write for. For whatever reason — I think it’s some mixture of skill and good luck, personally; a small amount of the former and a lot of the latter, if you ask me — I’ve managed to write for mainstream outlets like The Hollywood Reporter, Wired, Time and many more across the years, making sure that anything close to a bucket list of places to write for has been kept relatively minimum.

That said, there still is a bucket list.

Some of the list is literally impossible — either outlets that no longer exist at all (1980s official fanzine Marvel Age, for example) or exist in the format that I initially fell in love with them, like Entertainment Weekly, which I’m not even sure has a print component at all anymore. Others are simply unlikely, because of personal experience. (There are multiple outlets I’ve pitched to on more than one occasion, with no luck or even a response; such is life.)

The one thing tying them all together is the fact that each of the outlets I still dream of writing for are ones that I was in love with as a reader, long before I thought about becoming a writer myself. I can remember poring over copies of Wired in the library of my old art school, for example, or picking up (far too expensive) copies of Entertainment Weekly in the U.K. even though they referred to things I didn’t really have any first hand knowledge of. Marvel Age was the first time I’d seen writing about comics, when I discovered it at age 11; each one seemed to be a window into something new.

Given all of that, it’s understandable that I’d want to be part of that even now that I’ve seen (and been) behind the curtain myself. All I need now is a time machine and even more good luck to make it happen.

I found myself rewatching If… and O Lucky Man for the first time in decades recently, and the experience left me particularly nostalgic for the first time I saw the two movies, way back in the 1990s.

Watching them now, I still found all manner of things to enjoy, not least the sly surrealist humor that’s thread through both movies to greater or lesser extents. (If… is the angrier of the two, and O Lucky Man the more broadly comedic in its satire, but the two share the same DNA just as the share the same actors, directors, and characters — although, of course, neither is actually a sequel to the other.) Lindsay Anderson’s meandering direction remains a thrill, as well, feeling as if it’s ahead of its time in terms of later European directors.

This time around, though, I saw both as movies, as opposed to… whatever they were the first time out, for me. Back then, you see, they were more than just films; they had some power that I can’t explain even now, with years of hindsight.

Both movies came from the era that inspired Britpop, which was the dominant culture in my life at the time; but, as opposed to the self-conscious irony that was the underlying theory for Britpop in general, If… and O Lucky Man are heartfelt almost to a fault, sincere in their arguments even as they try to make jokes about the situation their characters are in — and that sincerity was something that I found particularly affecting, at the time.

In terms of subject matter and targets, they paralleled other things that I was into at the time — Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles most of all, unsurprisingly; Morrison has talked about their love for both of the movies, which was one of the things that drew me to them in general — and acted as a signpost that there was more out there than people keeping subjects at arm’s length or more interested in style points than actual points.

If… and O Lucky Man introduced me to things like Terry Southern, Lavinia Greenlaw, Deborah Levy and more, art that made my world bigger. (Not bad for movies more than a quarter century old even when I discovered them.) I feel as if I need more of that, even now.