JeremyOswald.com

Earlier this week I watched Match Point. In a film by Woody Allen, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) becomes romantically involved with Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson). I’m sure there are many themes that I didn’t notice or were way over my head, but one of the dominant themes, and certainly the most obvious of the movie, is the notion of luck and the role it plays in our lives. As Chris Wilton purports in the beginning of the movie, luck plays a much more important part in our lives than people often give credit.

That got me thinking about luck.

My friend Short thinks Tiger Woods is lucky because he’s a billionaire with a supermodel wife and a full head of hair. Does Tiger consider himself lucky? Or, does he think that he put in the time and had the natural talent to get him where he is today and that his supermodel wife loves him for him?

My brother’s birthday is September 13^th, an unlucky number for sure. Sometimes it even falls on a Friday. But I don’t think of him as unlucky. Sometimes I have to feel sorry for him though, like when a deep fat fryer falls on his head, or his car has ants, or he sweats out of one armpit but not the other or the fact that he’s allergic to cola and cheese.

The book “The Luck Factor,” by Richard Wiseman, claims that lucky people just look at the world differently, are more observant, more optimistic and take more chances. They are also more determined because they want something good to happen so badly.

I read a story recently about a guy named Raymond Galusha, who I thought was unlucky. At 41 he had a heart attack. Last year he had a stroke. Before that he was accidentally run over by an airplane. Then, a few weeks ago, Raymond was struck by lightning while his car was stopped waiting for a train.

Lightning bounced off of the train, hit the bumper of a Ford pickup in front of him, bounced off of it and then hit Raymond’s car, entering his body through his thumb and index finger as they were tapping the metal of the car door through the window he had cracked. The lightning gave his body such a jolt that he was unable to move his hand off of the steering wheel. He couldn’t call for help on his cell phone, or even honk the horn for attention because the phone and the horn were fried.

He eventually received help and survived, but after the ordeal, Raymond is quoted as saying that buying a lottery ticket is at the top of his to do list. So lightning bounces off of a train and a pick up and then hits you because your thumb and finger are sticking out of a cracked window, and you think with that kind of luck you’ll win the lottery? But Raymond did not consider himself unlucky because he was struck by lightning, but lucky because he survived.

That’s fine, he’s an optimist. And lightning striking really isn’t all that uncommon. In fact, this Website claims that more people are killed by lightning than any other natural phenomena including floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. And according to National Geographic, Florida is the lightning capital of the world. So maybe Raymond really is lucky for surviving and should buy a lottery ticket.

Match Point encouraged me to think quite a bit about luck, and let me watch Scarlett Johansson while doing so. I liked the dialogue, the freakshow lead character, and the fact that I got a little tense waiting to see how much luck would affect each life and in what way. I didn’t like that the movie was a little long, and that at times the dialogue was not easy for me to understand as the people were speaking British.

Overall, I liked the movie and it seems to me that perhaps Woody Allen is saying that while luck does exist, only a small percentage of people are really lucky. And he should know. He screwed and then married his semi-adopted-almost-step-daughter-that-he-helped-raise and still has a career. And in an interview with Vanity Fair when asked about his almost wife finding nude pictures of his almost step daughter in his stuff and revealing their relationship, Allen replied that it was “just one of the fortuitous events, one of the great pieces of luck in my life.” I guess everyone looks at luck differently.