This is a draft of a chapter from a book project I am working on. As Common once said, one day it will all make sense.
It’s 1988. A tiny town in southern Indiana, and by southern I mean Southern. The Klan was big back then, and before. I was a relatively normal seven-year-old in elementary school out in the sticks, a town of probably 350 people. Our second-grade class was entirely white, except for me and one Black girl named Jocelyn. I can’t imagine what it was like for her.
When you’re six or seven or eight, when the world starts to become legible to you in a way that goes beyond your immediate surroundings of mom and grandma and tonka trucks and binky, you realize you’re in a game that’s way more complicated. You intuit it in your skin – because you don’t know the mechanisms behind it, but you have some sense that something else is going on.
We do not at first comprehend the things we later understand – what, in the late songwriter John Prine’s words, “a child that’s grown old” knows. We take it as we get it.
I have always been a sucker for bildungsroman stories, about a young person finding their way and developing their identity along a rambling journey early in life – which explains my love of coming-of-age films such as Stand By Me (1986), Edge of Seventeen (2016), and Lady Bird (2017). But what if we turned the picaresque back around, and told the story from the end to the beginning, Benjamin Button-style?
The 2024 film The Life of Chuck accomplishes this feat of storytelling by reverse-engineering nostalgia – a kind of backwards Dorian Gray. Without giving too much away about the plot, it tells the story of a man’s voyage in three parts – childhood, adulthood, and death. It’s based on a Stephen King short story and reaches the levels of dramatic emotion-pulling seen in The Shawshank Redemption (1994). It’s that kind of Stephen King movie.
Spoilers ahead: The first section concerns a public-school teacher who is persevering through what seems like the end of the world, as the Internet fails and parts of California slide into the ocean. The second part is about a normal insurance guy or accountant who randomly takes part in a spectacular dance sequence on the asphalt of a boring California city. The third follows the life of the young Chuck, after his parents die and he’s being raised by his grandparents, Sarah Krantz (played by the terrific Mia Sara) and Albie Krantz (equally great Mark Hamill).
The heart of the film really arrives in the third act, but the first two provide essential latticework for what it is to come. The young Chuck is a sad orphan who has to navigate the treachery of middle school and high school despite having no firm grounding – only his grandparents, who are also besotted in the bottomless swamps of grieving, to give him some ballast. A touching moment occurs when his grandmother, still bereft from losing her daughter, begins to come out of her shell and enjoy life again, cooking in the kitchen and dancing a little bit, a joy that she infects in her ten-year-old charge, Chuck. This moment echoes his earlier scene dancing in Pasadena or Santa Monica when he instinctively unearths his grandmother’s signature moves.
What Sarah Krantz conveys to Chuck is that life is worth living for its small pleasures, like cooking kielbasa and onions for your family while shaking it to the music of life. He takes that on.
Chuck’s grandfather is a different story. He is a bit of a curmudgeon and a drunk, but he gives the boy advice that is either fatherly or avuncular, depending on how you look at it. He pushes Chuck toward a career in accounting, which he ultimately takes up, but he also urges him to look up at the night sky, the stars. Chuck’s granddad tells him:
How do we know how old the Earth is?
How old the universe is, how long people have been here?
Or how to build a bridge or a skyscraper
or how far apart the stars are?
How did we land on the moon?
The stars themselves.
Why they burn, why atoms split and fuse,
and all the rest is just math.
Hey, stars are just math.
When you look at the night sky,
you’re seeing the greatest equation
in the universe.
Heck, your dancing, that’s math too.
I mean, what’s the language of dance?
How do you learn your steps? It’s even in the name.
I mean, they call it “the count.”
One and two and three and four.
What’s a waltz? One, two, three, one, two, three.
Just numbers, just math.
Herein lies the strength of the film – a deep commitment to what is real, whether it’s as seemingly ironclad as mathematics or physics or as subjective as one being’s meaning-seeking in the irrelevant blankness of an endless universe.
As one of Chuck’s ineffectual middle-school teachers says, when they talk after class:
Everything you see.
Everything you know.
The world, Chuck.
Planes in the sky. Manhole covers in the street.
Every year that you live, that world inside your head
will get bigger and brighter and more detailed and complex.
You will build cities and countries and continents,
and you will fill them with people and faces,
real and imagined.
Do you understand?
Don’t stop there.
You fill the whole thing
with everyone you ever meet,
everyone you ever know,
everyone you ever just imagine.
It’ll be a universe.
A whole universe right between my hands…
Isn’t that wonderful?
Now, go on. You were such a good boy.
That comment from the hippie-dippy teacher, so kind and full of hapless compassion, sounds an ominous note in the final moment. You were such a good boy. It implies something has ended.
But the whole film is about things ending. The first act is within Chuck’s mind, his sort of final DMT pulse, as the characters played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Matthew Lillard see the world collapsing around them. The Earth terminating in his mind is the one they all live in, as life slinks away from Chuck’s body. It is a beautiful portrayal of the end times, when the pricks of light from stars and planets dissolve in the sky. Everyone, then, knows it’s over.
There is something bigger going on, though. In the course of Chuck’s life, he experiences many losses and heartaches. As a kid, he is still under the wing of his granddad, who insists that he never, ever, ever look in that upstairs room in the cupola of their Victorian house. Grandpa is clearly haunted by it, and he doesn’t want Chuck to deal with what he had to face up there. He desperately tries to keep Chuck away from it. Not to reveal too much, but the film eventually makes clear why granddad was so determined to keep this a secret.
I am part of that odd group of people who became obsessed at an early age that I would die young – that I would not reach adulthood, or middle age, or old age. It just was something synced into my DNA that I didn’t think I would live very long, since I was seven or eight years old. I’ve since learned that there are others who have this weird mental tic, which makes me feel less crazy.
What The Life of Chuck transmits to viewers is that you ought to enjoy life, in spite of its flaws and fears and embarrassments. Some might see the film as maudlin or overly sentimental, but it still got to me. We really only have one shot at this, and whatever is going on out in space or in the ether or the tony neighborhoods of Heaven, we have to keep in mind Albert Camus’s idea about how suicide is the fundamental referendum of life. Chuck has to take the question head on, realizing in a very literal way that his life is foreshortened.
As for me, I am convinced that consciousness is a rarity and life is the preferred path, unless you are in a situation of nonstop pain and there’s no alternative but to decide to end things. Being alive in this world can be extraordinarily painful, and I understand anyone who accepts a different choice. But the reality for most of us, if we can avoid an excruciating and prolonged illness, is that life is worth it, despite all its scary vicissitudes. As my old and long-lost friend Denver said, shortly before he took his own life, the world ends when you end.