Bill Nighy Vs. Letter Openers

The Case For Letter Openers

Anyone who's worked in an office of a certain vintage has had the experience of opening a supply closet and being transported into the long, long ago. Older offices never seem to divest themselves of equipment, regardless of whether it was purchased in a year beginning with "195," and looking at this stuff -- way back behind such modern items as toner cartridges and Post-Its -- can give one the curious feeling of having been hurled backward in time. Reinforcements? A two-hole punch? When even that shiny fax paper that comes in a roll is the sort of thing you expect to see in a segment on I Love The '80s, Liquid Paper seems like an artifact that might be unearthed at an archeological dig.

In the last office in which this commentator toiled, a coffee mug full of pens and such had been left behind, and in it was a letter opener. It may have been the first time I ever handled a letter opener, but since my job involved opening all the office's general mail, I spent at least a half-hour every day wielding that bad boy as I expertly sliced through envelopes of all sizes, weights, and new-to-recycled ratios. In time, I could no longer think of it as a relic of a bygone age, but came to appreciate it as an indispensable tool.

Then I left that job, started getting a normal amount of mail, and never even thought about the letter opener until...well, earlier today, frankly. But that letter opener and I -- we had some good times.

The Case For Bill Nighy

Not being British -- and therefore missing his work in such projects as Kavanagh QC and something called Indian Summer that isn't about a decrepit camp and doesn't feature a fetal Kimberly Williams (pre-Paisley), we came late to the Bill Nighy party. When he was suddenly all over the TV spots for Still Crazy, about an aging rock group, he seemed both so alien to us and so completely desiccated in the Ron Wood mold that we weren't sure it wasn't a documentary about some British band that was big in the early '70s but that we'd only kind of heard of: "Is it about Motor...Oyster...Finger?" But, turns out Nighy was just a really good actor. (A British guy in his fifties, and a good actor -- what are the odds?)

Still Crazy may have been a turning point in Nighy's career; by the time he played a variation on it in Love Actually, he'd managed to fit in an irresponsible father in a quaint British period piece (I Capture The Castle), a flamboyant celebrity hairdresser (Blow Dry), and some kind of vampire overlord (Underworld). Now he's delighting culty Anglophiles in Shaun Of The Dead and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, portraying buttoned-up diplomats both principled (The Girl In The Café) and villainous (The Constant Gardener), and...playing a vampire overlord again (the current Underworld sequel). We're not quite sure what playing "Davey Jones" (locker, not Monkee) entails, but since he's doing it in the Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels, we're keen to find out. Suddenly, it's as though Bill Nighy is everywhere you want to be. And, also, in Underworld.

The Decision

Two choices stand before us, and make our task a challenge: both are elegant, classic, thin as knife blades.

It's true that a letter opener can be a beautiful and handy implement in the orderly disposal of mail. But in the normal course of events for an average person, it's not strictly necessary. Unless all your correspondence is being saved for you in your carefully catalogued private archives, it's not that important that your used envelopes remain unmangled: if they're just going in the recycling box anyway, go ahead and wreck them by sliding your index finger under that little bit of the fold that never quite gets stuck all the way down. We all do it.

Much as we were never aware of the utility of a letter opener until one showed up in our path, so did we fail to appreciate Bill Nighy until he either quit making so many British movies, or we started watching more of them. We may be able to manage envelopes if letter openers were to get wiped off the face of the earth, but there are so many poor performers who blunder into a movie and, being all thumbs, make an irreparable mess of it that we need a Nighy to show up in a scene and slice through it cleanly.

The Winner

Bill Nighy