A set visit, shocks and discovering there’s no time like the present…
Nev Pierce
July 21, 2024
The Fall Will Probably Kill You (Substack)
Nothing else that is so certain is as surprising as age. This first struck me a few years ago when my eldest child turned 18 and, with spectacular solipsism, I thought: ‘Hang on, if my son is a man then that must mean I’m old.’ None of my own birthdays had hit so hard.
When I was a boy I used to believe – to hope, really – that one day I would, like Tom Hanks in Big, wake up and look in the mirror and find myself a fully formed adult, maybe with a caption saying, ‘10 years later’. Then you realise this is not a hope but basically a reality, as it’s a blink and you’re there (except I’d kill to have Hanks’ abs). As Jose Mourinho told Dele Alli, “I am 56 now and yesterday, yesterday, I was 20.”
I’m clinging to my mid-40s and realising the truth of this, as well as the reality that we’re never really adults – even our parents are not adults. Everyone is busking it. We never really feel grown up. As Martin Amis told Jude Rogers for Word magazine, in a quote she posted upon his death last year, “We’re like children all our lives, because every 10 years we have to acquaint ourselves with a new set of rules.”
The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button deals with all of this, in a fantastical Hollywood romance, and at the time – certainly in my peer group – there was some confusion that David Fincher was interested in the heart rather than another head in the box. The film was grand, sweeping, and sad. Where was the bloodshed?
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Watch the shorts by Nev Pierce, including Bricks, an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation starring Jason Flemyng and Blake Ritson, which David Fincher said about: “A morbid yet classy take on a morbid classic.”
The Fincher Analyst 