The Wheel of Fortune Keeps on Spinning

In Michael Winterbottom’s extraordinary 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, Tony Wilson’s passion project Factory Records seems to be on its last legs. Just after a disastrous meeting at Factory HQ, the film cuts to Tony (Steve Coogan) hosting Wheel of Fortune. He strikes a rather more philosophical turn than longtime United States Wheel host Pat Sajak ever has.

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In 2018 I gave a keynote at a conference in Cologne, Germany. Today, I wore the same outfit that I wore that day to an interview for a job at a grocery store. So spins the wheel of fortune.

I come from a working class background. My mom kept us barely treading water working the night shift doing data entry at a medical laboratory, the phone ringing off the hook with creditors calling throughout the day. She did that until about a week before she went into the hospital with complications from cancer, which killed her. 

Some of my friends have parents with money. Houses and property. People they can turn to in failure if need be and ask for help. People from whom they stand to inherit some wealth someday. Of course, a lot of Americans also don’t have that at all. I’m one of those who doesn’t have that at all. As heroine Holly Sykes says in David Mitchell’s urgent and thrilling novel The Bone Clocks, “Being born’s a hell of a lottery.”

Society has a way of making class distinctions feel like natural law. They’re not. They’re bullshit. For a while, I got lucky. Got to stop doing coffee shop and call center work and become a so-called professional writer. Even though I know class distinctions are bullshit, there was still always part of me, the part that had internalized society’s bullshit, that felt like I had cheated destiny by breaking out of this life for a while. That part of me now gloats, pleased to see the universe correct itself as I’m returned to my rightful place.

But here’s what’s actually true. The people who are doing those jobs that our culture deems “better”–they’re there because they’re lucky, too, like I was lucky for a while. I’m not saying that hard work and perseverance are never a factor. They certainly were for me. But so much of all of it is down to privilege and circumstance. Impostor syndrome was a constant problem for me in the circles I’ve moved in for the past several years but I know now better than I ever have before that I’m way, way more than competent enough to do any number of jobs in and around the games industry. I don’t know what my failure to find such a job now is about–Being too trans? Being too political? Just plain bad luck after a run of good luck?–but I know it’s not that I can’t do them. 

I acknowledge that part of it probably has to do with certain limitations of mine. We all have our limits, and there are certain kinds of writer that I just can’t be. I can’t be the kind of writer who churns out stories like The Best Starter Pokemon of All Time or Ranking All the Snakes of the Metal Gear Solid Series, because I just don’t care. I don’t think along those lines. That’s not at all how my mind or heart works in relation to games or cinema or anything else, and if I tried to contort myself to fit into that mold, the results would be forced and terrible. If that is what the market values now, then this must be where the market and I part ways. In a 1999 interview with Charlie Rose (which for whatever reason has stuck in my head since I first saw it all those years ago), Johnny Depp says that if he was forced into being a purely commercial, leading man “product” who could no longer make the kinds of creative choices he wanted to make, “I’d rather go back to pumping gas.” I’d really love to keep writing about games or writing for games or working in games in some other capacity entirely or doing any number of things rather than working at a grocery store or a call center or wherever I end up, but if my choices are to churn out pieces of a sort that I fundamentally don’t see any value in or to pump gas, well then, I guess I’m pumping gas. There’s certainly no shame in it, and I’m not entitled to do work of a different sort, at least no more and no less than anyone else is. But I sure wish it paid a little better. 

I’m really scared. So far this decade is shaping up to be far more uncertain, unstable and unpleasant for me than the last. For the whole planet too, maybe, and I know that the problems of one little person don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world but still, it’s my life. It’s the only one I’ve got. And I’m terrified. 

Earlier in 24 Hour Party People, Tony passes a man on the street who asks him for money. Tony gives him a bit and keeps walking as the man shouts after him:

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To which Tony says:

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And then again, after a moment:

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I know.