The Life of Chuck, My Dad's Death and I'm Going Away For a Little While
I went into The Life of Chuck and Bring Her Back blind. I knew nothing about them beyond The Life of Chuck being an atypical Stephen King adaptation, in that it tugs mercilessly at the heartstrings rather than aim straight for the jugular, and Bring Her Back being a follow-up to a wildly successful horror debut from the Philippou Brothers, the duo behind Talk To Her.
For the last month or so, my sick father’s impending death has cast a long, dark shadow over every aspect of my life. I did not realize that death, grief, and mourning play a central role in Bring Her Back and The Life of Chuck.
On Saturday night, roughly half an hour before Father’s Day, my father died after 77 great years. Thanks, Dad! He died while I was watching a movie that is about the death of Chuck and the world, as much as it is his life.
It seems fitting that I was at the movies late on a Saturday night, in a nearly empty theater watching an unusually emotional and poignant exploration of the joy, pain, and confusion of being human in an unfathomably complicated world, when my old man passed away, because movies were something we shared. Pop culture was an intense bond between us for as long as I can remember.
My dad would take me to the movies and the video store. Instead of Chevy Chase or Eddie Murphy movies, I watched classic musicals, like my dad’s favorite, Meet Me in St. Louis. I’d play hooky to see movies instead of suffering through the Chicago public school system. He’d always write me a note facetiously attributing my absence to sickness or a family emergency, not an urgent need to continue my life’s work: finding out which movies had boobs in them and which did not.
My dad always took tremendous pride in my career as a writer. I felt bad that, after a certain point, there wasn’t much success for him to take pride in because I struggled professionally the way he did after he left his secure but soul-crushing government job.
Dad understood that movie theaters were a special place. They were sacred. They were a place where I didn’t have to mask or pretend to be neurotypical, where I could be alone with movies, my eternal special interest, as well as big bag of popcorn and a big cup of Cherry Coca-Cola.
The Life of Chuck is a Stephen King adaptation about death, dying, and a slow-motion apocalypse that’s also, surprisingly but delightfully, also about life’s fragility and the life-affirming joy of dance.
King has written his share of non-horror novels and novellas, most notably the novellas that inspired Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, but he’s never written anything quite like this.
The Life of Chuck opens at the end of life as we know it. The internet is down permanently. Rather than inspiring a paradise where humanity rediscovers the simple pleasures of an offline existence, confusion and despair reign.
A world addicted to technology that pushes us further apart while promising to unite us doesn’t know how to deal with an analog world, so it undergoes painful withdrawal symptoms.
As “Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” illustrates, human beings, as a species, tend not to deal well with emergencies and uncertainty.
Sad-eyed teacher Mike Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) copes with the breakdown of civilization and the possibility that he is living in end times by clinging to the comforting ritual of work and repetition.
With the end of the world seemingly imminent, Mike tries to reconcile with his ex-wife Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan). The Life of Chuck originated as one of four stories collected in If It Bleeds, which was released in April 2020.
If It Bleeds was released early during the COVID-19 pandemic and filmed after it had profoundly changed the way we live, in unsettling ways.
The Life of Chuck captures, on a visceral level, the culture-wide sense of dread and confusion that ensued when confronted with a public health crisis beyond our imagination. Would the pandemic ever end? How many people would it take? What would our world look like after it?
Like us, the characters here are cursed to live in a state of perpetual uncertainty, never knowing when it will all come to an end. In the first act of The Life of Chuck, Earth is a science project a vengeance-crazed god chose to end because the results displeased him.
Can you blame him? If I were God, I’d be contemplating a Great Flood-type scenario to punish humanity for its wickedness.
Ejiofor lends an understated humanity that grounds the dark fantasy in human emotions such as grief, sadness, longing, and despair. The world has reached such a sad nadir that it almost feels like God is doing the universe a favor by snuffing out our dim light permanently.
Everything has gone sideways. Stars and planets disappear from the sky. Mighty states crumble into the sea, yet the milquetoast visage of Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), the titular Chuck of the title, can be seen everywhere, along with the words, “39 great years. Thanks, Chuck.”
Chuck is a cipher. He’s at once a bean-counting nobody and the most famous person in the world. He’s a sentient meme in a world where cruel destiny has robbed us of our beloved online ephemera as well as an idea.
The Life of Chuck articulates the joys, pain, and anguish of life through the uncommon story of an ordinary man who represents nothing less than humanity itself.
Hiddleston makes Chuck cinema’s most charismatic accountant. He may look like any other number cruncher, but when the mood strikes, he dances like Fred Astaire. There is a gorgeous set piece where a black female busker pounds out a beat that inspires Chuck to wow everybody with an unexpected burst of fancy footwork.
The joy that Hiddleston takes in movement is palpable and infectious. In a world that is dying and filled with death, dancing is a rebuke to the grim certainty of the grave, a middle finger to the Grim Reaper.
God gave us these miraculous bodies. We might as well make good use of them while we can.
The Life of Chuck has a structure similar to that of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. We begin at the end, with the 39-year-old Chuck dying of a tumor while surrounded by his wife and daughter.
We then skip back in time to Chuck’s tragic childhood years. Our eminently relatable protagonist loses his father and his pregnant mother in a car crash. The earnest young man is raised by his grandfather, Albie (Mark Hamill), and grandmother Sarah (Mia Sara).
They’re a study in opposites. As played by Hamill in an Oscar-worthy supporting turn, Albie is a depressed alcoholic who deals with his grief through excessive drinking. In sharp contrast, the ebullient Sarah is a bright light in a dark world who instills in her grandson a soul-consuming love of dance, which, unfortunately, does not leave him with the confidence to ditch the bland certainty of accounting for the impossible odds of pursuing a dance career.
If Stephen King’s name were not in the credits, I never would have guessed that it was based on his work. I watched Pet Sematary: Bloodlines after this because I needed the distraction. The Life of Chuck audaciously argues that sometimes dead isn’t better. Sometimes life is a goddamn miracle that passes way too quickly if you’re not savoring every moment.
The Life of Chuck reminded me of the quirky, erudite philosophizing of Kurt Vonnegut, most notably in the form of narration by Nick Offerman, which plays a huge role in establishing a tone that is at once wry, sad, and full of humor and humanity.
Yes, The Life of Chuck is a profound and profoundly moving experience, even if your beloved father didn’t die while you were watching it. I’ll always associate The Life of Chuck with my dad and my dad’s death. That’s less melancholy than bittersweet, because this is precisely the kind of movie that made me fall in love with film as a movie-mad boy indulged by a father who understood that movies meant more to me than school or religion.
The Life of Chuck speaks to art’s ability to move us with stories that are at once specific and universal.
Like All That Jazz, The Life of Chuck is a movie about death roaring with life. It maintains a mood of transcendent exhaustion, yet paradoxically overflows with energy, ideas, and momentum.
So THAT was how I spent my Saturday night. I found out my dad was dead on Father’s Day. Losing a parent is a rite of passage, but I’m going to need some time to process the loss and grieve properly. My dad deserves it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve been on quite the emotional roller coaster with me. You guys are special, so I wanted you to know about this unfortunate milestone in my life.
Writing is one of the greatest sources of joy in my life, so I suspect I’ll still be working, but I would greatly appreciate the space and time to grieve, allowing me to return stronger in a few weeks.
You can pre-order my upcoming book, The Fractured Mirror, here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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