The Poppies of Terra #58 - Don't Chuck It Away

It might be the teacher’s story.

Despite its title, The Life of Chuck (written and dir. Mike Flanagan; based on Stephen King’s same-titled novella, available in If It Bleeds), may not be his narrative. The film, like its source material, proceeds in three distinct acts that unwind in reverse chronological order, starting with a world in cosmic collapse, following that up with a memorable middle-aged odyssey into spontaneity, and proceeding to highlight several of Chuck’s formative experiences. The life, unquestionably, is his. 

And yet.

Throughout Flanagan’s elegant and quietly stirring film, as in King’s yarn, we witness excerpts of experience, rather than a linear story, beats of being, rather than a continuous melody of becoming. Flanagan’s carefully constructed scenes, lensed by Eben Bolter in a way that dials naturalism up and down like a color, cohere into a précis of meaning. When our opening ends the world, it’s not the stakes that rise, but significance that accrues.  

As a younger writer King might have expended several hundred pages chronicling a bevy of dramatic incidents in the life of Charles “Chuck” Krantz, stringing them together with a recurring supernatural plot element, and frenzying up the story into a climax in which outer and inner worlds intersected thematically. But as a mature, more reflective, storyteller, King, and by extension Flanagan, is up to something different here. He’s sculpted out key moments for specific reasons. The majority of Chuck’s adult life is absent from our tale, and even his younger years are revealed only through discreet glimpses. The film’s third and longest segment, “Act One: I Contain Multitudes,” collects singularities. 

A large negative space envelops and contours The Life of Chuck. 

It, too, is part of the story.

Chuckwärtsroman

In the typical coming-of-age framework, external events chainlink a protagonist’s gradual growth, and eventually he or she learns to find a place in society. Personal evolution culminates in self-realization, with the trials of adolescence ritualizing the passage from childhood to adulthood. Without giving away the particulars of The Life of Chuck, it’s readily apparent that simply by moving through the sequence backwards, the expected culmination is dismantled before it begins. 

Insights are revealed to us, the audience, retroactively–and not necessarily experienced by Chuck himself. In “Act Two: Buskers Forever,” for example, Chuck is not aware of what drives him to stop and dance in front of a street drummer. Flanagan expertly inserts a split-second shot, at the moment of decision, that seems to show a wooden spoon clacking against the edge of a pot on a stove. It’s a flash that barely registers in Chuck’s mind, but we intuit its potential significance. Søren Kierkegaard famously wrote: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” And yet that’s not what King is doing here either, because understanding is not the tail that wags this dog. This isn’t a spiritual sequel to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) anymore than it is an inversion of Boyhood (2014).

Chuck’s inability to comprehend the root cause of his own behavior in the moment cited above is not a defect. It’s a fundamental component of his humanity. He isn’t a story-creation designed to celebrate epiphanies, whether forward or backward in time, but a fictional signpost pointing us towards the importance of intuition. “Why did you stop to listen, and why did you start to dance?” the film voiceover asks. “He doesn’t know,” it immediately replies, “and would answers make a good thing better?”

In another sequence in Act One, a younger Chuck looks at a place in which a pivotal event he wasn’t there to witness nevertheless changed the course of his life. Again, absence informs. He must rely on someone else for a description of what occurred; for the most critical moments in our lives, approximation is often the best that’s possible. Space, as Chuck stares on, becomes a metonymic echo of fate. 

To exist in the real world is, in a sense, to fall short of reality itself. We may sporadically become cognizant of our human limitations but we cannot, definitionally, transcend them. This does not deduct one iota of merit from being present in the moment. Death is inevitable, but being alive is a choice. Even when all is lost, it does not follow that we should chuck it away.

Part of the film’s textured insistence on the richness of experientially relating to the profound mystery at the heart of the world involves the clever use of the director’s loyal troupe of performers–we might call them talented flanaganistas–in different roles within the movie itself. Returning from previous productions, among many others, are Jacob Tremblay (Doctor Sleep), Carl Lumbly (Doctor Sleep, The Fall of the House of Usher), Mark Hamill (The Fall of the House of Usher), David Dastmalchian (The Midnight Club), Rahul Kohli (The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher), and so on and so forth. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tom Hiddleston–a luminescent Mia Sara–and others working with this crew for the first time, blend in seamlessly. Performances are uniformly engrossing. But it’s the way several cast members resurface from Act to Act, sometimes simply as background figures in scenes, that shines. Even as narratives try to impose order on events, the mind reconfigures itself non-deterministically.  

All of this is orchestrated with temperance. Dialogue scenes are long and sustained, as is Flangan’s wont. These moments are intimate, yes, but stripped-down. Think the opposite of Darren Aronofsky’s approach in The Whale (2022); Steve Arnold’s production design here exists to support and recede, rather than to claim its own place in the spotlight.

The Newton Brothers’ score whispers traces of Vangelis and ripples with Thomas Newmanesque progressions, but always keeps itself understated. Another exercise in restraint: despite Chuck’s fate, this is not a sickness melodrama. In movies like, for instance, Our Friend (2019), character work services the wringing of tears from the audience. Here, the filmmakers instead aestheticize the enigma of our seemingly wayward world, so cruel one moment and so tender the next. The Life of Chuck beautifully evinces that delineating where tragedy ends and beauty begins is an acknowledged impossibility, but one with which we can learn to live. Some call this grace.

I should also mention Nick Offerman’s narration, which as far as I could tell often channels King’s exact words. His droll tone but sharp enunciations, conveying facts that clearly exist beyond the horizon of Chuck’s awareness, further support the film’s–despite what some critics say–unsentimentality. 

The Word for World is Mind

“Everything you see,” Miss Richards (Kate Siegel) tells a young Chuck, having placed her palms on his temples. “Everything you know. The world, Chucky. Planes in the sky, manhole covers in the street. Every year you live, that world inside your head will get bigger and brighter, more detailed and complex.”

This notion is a critical one for Stephen King. “The Body” (from Different Seasons, 1982) begins like this: “The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.” The world within is vast, and can only inadequately be translated to the realm beyond.

The novella “Riding the Bullet” (2000; check out the poignant and underrated adaptation written and dir. by Mick Garris in 2004) trades in similar concerns. In Dreamcatcher (2001), King literalizes memory through “eternity’s own warehouse,” a seemingly endless archive of memories in which the character of Jonesy hides from Mr. Gray. Like in the case of Chuck, memory is the essence of survival; when that world is threatened (by alien possession, or disease), the self teeters on the brink of extinction. The following words from Duma Key (2008) make the identification even more explicit: “...a person’s memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It’s you.” 

The protagonist of Lisey’s Story (2006) recalls her husband saying that “Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people’s heads is none of their smucking business.” The suggestion is clear: our inner lives are so complex and vast even we are not consciously aware of but a tiny fragment of them. I suspect that, at least in part, this idea keeps rearing its head in King’s work because his own mind is so extraordinarily capacious. 

Striking some of the cosmic-amid-the-mundane notes of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1940), while also blending existential wonder amidst small town grace, as in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), The Life of Chuck proceeds serenely. The film carries us along like an elegy, one whose rendition affirms the value of life. Call it a metaphysical pastoral.

Back to Miss Richards. If the mind is an axis for the universe, the fading of thoughts takes on eschatological import. Her words power, as it were, the film’s cosmic inflation.

And so, it might be the teacher’s story. It might be the story not of death, but of the lived interstices we carve around it. Of arithmetic in a world of perpetual subtraction. It might be the story of growing, neither up nor old, but into oneself. It might be none of these stories, or all of them. It might be yours.