‘The Life of Chuck’ and the end of all things

How do we live, knowing this all ends?

Mike Flannagan’s The Life of Chuck, a new drama based on a short story by Stephen King, is proving fairly divisive among my friends and fellow critics. Some see it as a transcendent, beautiful meditation on life and death. Others see it as sentimental hooey, an inch-deep puddle of treacle that at best traffics in platitudes and, at worst, is agnostic hogwash that affirms life without exploring its deeper meanings.

But The Life of Chuck was the movie I needed right now, in this time and place. Just as King’s original short story got under my skin when I read it five years ago, this telling also moved me. Is it because it feels like we’re perpetually living at the end of all things? Is it because, despite my faith in a life after this, sometimes I still can’t help but wonder what really happens when the lights go out? Is it because I’m aware that we too often climb ladders leaning against the wrong walls, intent on securing legacy and building fortunes when our deepest self is telling us to shut up and dance?

I’m still processing it. But I found The Life of Chuck to be honest about our fear of the end, as well as a celebration of what we do as we anticipate it. The waiting doesn’t have to be the hardest part.

Life at the end of the world

The Life of Chuck is told in three acts, and it starts at the end – the every end. Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a high school teacher trying to hold his students’ interest as it becomes apparent that the world is falling apart and likely ending. There are daily reports of civil unrest and natural disasters. The internet glitches and then goes down; it won’t be long before TV stations and phone networks follow. Suicides are up – although divorces are down and marriages are up, likely because, as Marty and his ex-wife (Karen Gillian) agree, no one has the time to file for divorce and they’d prefer to meet the end with someone familiar.

For his part, Marty isn’t sure how to respond. He keeps teaching, even as evidence of the end of things piles up on the news and in conversations with his neighbors. He tries to ignore it by changing the station to rock and roll or watching old musicals late at night. But he can’t avoid what’s coming any more than he can ignore the billboards and ads that mysteriously pop up featuring photos of an unassuming, nerdy man (Tom Hiddleston) and the slogan “Thanks Chuck,” celebrating his “39 great years.” Who is this man? And why is he at the center of what Marty calls “the world’s last meme”?

In act two, we meet Chuck – nine months before he dies of a brain tumor, the movie’s narrator (Nick Offerman) informs us. He’s an accountant who used to dabble in a rock band. He’s married and has a kid. You wouldn’t give him a second thought. He’s on break from an accounting conference when he passes by a drummer on the street. And at that moment, for reasons he can’t answer, he stops to dance. And it’s not just a quick bop – it’s a moment of pure joy for Chuck and the young woman he selects to dance with him. It draws a crowd. It means something, even if it was just an afternoon respite.

The third act flashes back even further, to when Chuck is growing up, played as an 11-year-old by Benjamin Pajack and as a 17-year-old by Jacob Tremblay. Orphaned after a car accident takes the lives of his parents, he lives with his grandparents (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara). After their grief subsides, they grow into a close family. Chuck discovers his love of dancing from his grandmother, while his grandfather instills a love of numbers, from the art of accounting to Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar. His teacher introduces him to the poems of Walt Whitman, and the phrase “I contain multitudes.” And, because this is based on a Stephen King story, there’s a cupola with a locked door, behind which are ghosts and secrets that alter Chuck’s understanding of life and death.

Waiting for the end

Perhaps to be expected from a horror writer, Stephen King’s works have often dealt with death, as well as the end of the world. The Stand is one of the great American post apocalyptic stories, and he’s long mused on mortality and what might lie beyond to disturbing effect, such as in his scariest story, Pet Sematary, as well as the book with his bleakest ending, Revival. But there’s also depth and wisdom in his works; a near-fatal car accident in the 1990s altered his perspective on many things. And as he’s gotten older, much of his writing has centered on aging and mortality, but with an older man’s peace and acceptance.

Throughout The Life of Chuck, the characters are waiting for the end of the world – whether that’s on a macro level or just the end of their own existence, be it by global cataclysm, brain tumor or whatever waits for us. We don’t always know when it’s coming, but we know it’s there – a terminal stop. How is it possible to live without obsessing over it and giving in to terror? What are we supposed to do with the waiting – which, several characters say, is the hardest part? Do we soldier on in denial? Rage against the dying of the light? Just accept it and sit in our chairs waiting for the curtain to fall?

I’m firmly entrenched in middle age. Death is often on my mind. I had a medical emergency in my early 20s that still stands as a reminder that there’s an expiration date on all things. I lived pretty untouched by death most of my life – it wasn’t until just before my 40s that I lost two of my grandparents and an aunt. But my parents are getting older. My father-in-law passed away earlier this year. I have young kids and a wife – what happens to them if something happens to me?

I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m depressed or overly morbid. I don’t fixate on death. I don’t ruminate on my passing or that of others. But I’m aware of it. I know it’s coming, whether soon or several decades from now. I believe there’s a life after this, but I’d also be lying if I said that sometimes doubt still creeps in. What if I’m wrong? What will death be like – what if it’s not like being carried into a next room but a total cessation, lights out? When I stop existing, will this inner life, with all my memories, hopes, dreams and imaginations? And even if my faith proves right and there’s something awaiting, there’s still a loss, isn’t there? A goodbye to relationships as they exist, experiences I can only have here, everything I’ve previously known.

Again, I don’t fixate. But I’m aware. Sometimes, it keeps me awake.

It’s act three of Life of Chuck – the film’s earliest passages given its structure – that might resonate with most audiences. It’s here, as the citizens of an unnamed town await the end of the world, that we get a mirror of our current reality. Day after day, we get news of political unrest. Natural disasters are increasing. We don’t speak much of it publicly, but the threat of nuclear annihilation still lurks in the back of our minds. It often does feel like the end of the world, that the center cannot hold. Some days, it feels like we’re all waiting for the end.

I saw The Life of Chuck in the midst of another week of political turmoil, back-biting, storms and disasters. I have some friends who post several times a day about the president and his atrocities on social media, scarcely taking time to hit send before sharing the next news article, hot take or meme, seemingly unaware that they’re preaching to choirs or yelling at walls. Sometimes, we can only sit, watch the news and despair. Other times, there’s a sense of resignation and the question of “what’s next.” How are we to go about life at these times?

There’s a hint as we watch Marty navigate his day to day. He switches off the news to listen to music. He flips the channel to watch a musical. He spends his last evening sitting with the woman he loves. It’s the lesson we watch Chuck learn in young adulthood when faced with knowledge that should keep him haunted and declare that he’ll live fully instead. It’s in the heart of the movie, a middle act lacking any apocalyptic elements or ghost stories, but the crucial turning point – and creative high mark – nonetheless, as Chuck breaks from routine to dance. When he’s thinking back on that, just nine months ahead of dying from a brain tumor, the narrator informs us:

“Later, he will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife’s name. What he will remember — occasionally — is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.”

The waiting doesn’t have to be the hardest part. Sometimes, the most spiritual and healing thing we can do is stop and dance.

I’ve heard some criticisms that this is just a trite emotional ending and that, as Christians, it might give way to thoughts of narcissism – after all, the world doesn’t end when we die. I’ve heard some suggest that it gives in to the same “get busy living, get busy dying” platitudes King with which filled The Shawshank Redemption, feel-good wishes that say nothing. I’ve heard that it excuses us of our responsibilities to each other and fails to wrestle with the need to get involved, push back and dig deeper.

Maybe, but I don’t think this movie has to provide an exhaustive answer to the meaning of life or that it encourages us to fritter away our days blissfully unaware of the end. Chuck doesn’t spend nine months dancing – he has a few minutes of transcendent joy and then goes back to his life and his family, but it’s a moment he returns to on his deathbed. Marty turns the channel and listens to rock … but he also counsels his ex-wife when she’s spiraling, continues to do his work, and never loses sight of the gravity of the moment. And sure, this is a movie that ignores Christian responsibility or faith – it’s made by a man who is a self-described agnostic; why would I expect that? This may not be a New Testament film, but I think there’s a lot of Ecclesiastes 2:4 in there.

But I also think there is truth in the importance of stepping away from the gravity of it all just to dance or enjoy “the little moments,” as trite as some might say that is. Sometimes, the secret is just that simple, and any analysis ruins the moment. Sometimes the stuff that makes life worth living just needs to be felt, like rhythm, and entered into, like dance. I fret about the world. I occasionally worry about my death. I try to resist where necessary, pray often and contribute where I can. But the things that keep me going? It was fresh air after a week in the hospital. It’s my kids’ faces when they’re happy. It's catching my wife’s eye during an unguarded moment. Seeing my dog with a goofy grin and a tennis ball in his mouth, ready to play. Watching a movie that makes me laugh deeply or cry over a moment of beauty. Those are what keep me going; that’s what I hope to think of on my deathbed (hopefully a long, long time from now). That’s not the only reason God made the world, but it’s part of it.

I get that that sentimentality is too much for some. I understand that this will just bounce off others. I understand their critiques¹; I disagree with some of them, and others just don't bother me. Movies sometimes meet us in our moments. This was the movie I needed at this time, and I’m glad it exists.

1. I realize after more than 2,000 words that this isn’t a review; it’s a reaction, a processing. There are other reviews out there – I think both Matthew Zoller Seitz and Steven Greydanus hit on why this worked for me. I appreciate the words of both Sarah Welch-Larson and Jeffrey Overstreet, for whom this didn’t work. Personally, I get easily bored with movies that are all-hit/all-miss, and I’ve loved reading the discourse on this one.