Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch O Lucky Man!
1973 · Lindsay Anderson · O Lucky Man! on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the film cut away to Alan Price singing in a studio. (sound)
Price and his band perform songs that comment on Mick's story from outside it, in a space the film keeps returning to and showing you being made.
Payoff: The songs work like a chorus, summarizing a moral before the next episode even starts. In the reading: attraction-image. Deleuze calls staging that figures a meaning rather than acting it out an attraction-image, and Price's interludes do exactly that.
Watch for the same actors reappearing as completely different characters. (staging)
Arthur Lowe, Ralph Richardson, and others turn up again and again as different tycoons, judges, and officials across Mick's journey.
Payoff: The repetition suggests every institution Mick meets is really the same authority wearing a different mask. In the reading: the dividual. Deleuze calls a group of figures rendered as one interchangeable body a dividual, and the doubled casting makes the ruling class exactly that.
Watch Mick's smile stay eager no matter what's just happened to him. (performance)
McDowell plays him as an open-faced optimist onto whom the world keeps inscribing its cruelties, never letting the smile curdle into irony.
Payoff: The constancy of the smile is what lets the film use him as a screen for everything happening around him.
Notice each new setting getting its own distinct visual look. (camera)
Ondříček shifts between handheld, documentary-style passages on the road and cooler, more composed framing inside boardrooms and institutions.
Payoff: Each world Mick enters announces itself visually before anything in the plot has to explain it.
Watch Mick rise and fall more than once across the film. (structure)
He climbs toward success, is knocked back down, and climbs again in a repeating cycle rather than one steady arc.
Payoff: Nothing he does actually adds up to progress. The film keeps resetting him instead.
Once you have seen it
Watch exactly what happens right before Mick's final smile appears. (performance)
At a film audition, the director tells him to smile, Mick can't, and is slapped across the face before the real smile comes.
Payoff: Redemption arrives as an actor being physically taught how to perform acceptance, not as a change of heart. In the reading: the gest. Deleuze calls a posture that lays bare a social relation rather than a private feeling a gest, and that slap-then-smile is exactly that.
Notice that the director auditioning Mick is Lindsay Anderson himself. (structure)
The film's own maker appears on screen to cast its protagonist, collapsing the fiction into the fact of its own making.
Payoff: The ending isn't just about Mick anymore. It is the film admitting it is a made thing.
Notice how bluntly each song states the moral just shown. (sound)
Price's lyrics, 'Sell Sell,' 'Poor People,' 'Look Over Your Shoulder,' summarize exactly what the preceding episode argued, in plain, bluesy terms.
Payoff: The songs are doing the film's thinking out loud, in case you missed it the first time.
Carry this in: Watch Mick's smile. Anderson is asking whether it is ever really his, or something the world keeps teaching him to wear.