As a writer and as a critic, there are times I wonder what the point of writing and critiquing is when [gestures vaguely at the world] is on the march, with no sign of abating. Writing stories and reviews in the hopes that someone will enjoy them, or take something away from them that is beneficial, can feel like you’re a member of the dance band on the Titanic, plucking and thrumming away while everything around you is sinking ever more quickly, right before you drown and your corpse is crushed by the water pressure. To quote an old meme, we had the misfortune of living in the one apocalypse where we still have to go to work. The fact that I drove to the theater to see The Life of Chuck in a massive rainstorm that seemed to appear out of nowhere only heightened the mood. This film is based on the namesake novella by Stephen King, and directed by Mike Flanagan.
There are three interrelated portions of this film. The first is about the slow end of the world, an exaggerated version of the existential dread felt by those of us who follow the news (and also a solid piece of evidence in favor of the idea that ignorance is in fact bliss). The second is about an accountant who, while in another town on a business trip, decides spontaneously to dance to the music produced by a busking drummer in a public square. The last is the coming-of-age of a boy who loses his parents in a freak car crash, grows up with his paternal grandparents in a home where he is absolutely forbidden from entering the uppermost room, all the while learning how to dance. Running through all these is the story of Charles ‘Chuck’ Krantz, the axle around which the wheel of this film spins.
The first section, the one involving the end of the world, is one that is equal parts completely unnerving and deeply relatable (and a good chunk very, very funny) by how familiar it is. It is, to quote a Bluesky post from around the time of the Los Angeles fires, selfies taken in disaster areas closer and closer to you until you are the one taking the selfie. The characters in this segment are on some level resigned to the whole thing, the casting away of the accoutrements of quotidian society feeling almost inevitable, for we have all planned for it, fantasized about it, dreamed of it even, as we try to numb ourselves from reality. The first thing that heralds apocalypse is the loss of the internet. There’s one particular scene, where two men commiserate about how they no longer have access to PornHub, that filled me with an emotion that I have a hard time describing (but I’m certain there’s a seventeen-syllable German word for it). It’s the humor that arises when you see that people will always be like this, but also despair at how we will never change.
The second part is a celebration of human joy and spontaneity. The businessman, for no reason that even he can ascertain (and he himself admits this), starts dancing to drums in public. He puts down his briefcase, but doesn’t change his shoes (I can attest to you that dancing in business shoes is a massive mistake - he would be sore for a week afterward, if his experience is anything like mine), and he just starts going at it. He is joined by a young woman whose boyfriend has just dumped her via text, and had the brazenness to ask if they could still be friends afterwards. They both are jolted out of day-to-day numbness, or worse, and in their wild, raucous, jubilant dance, they bring a similar jolt to the drummer, and to the crowd that is watching them. It likewise brought a jolt to me, for reasons I will explain soon.
The third part is the most meaty. This boy, who grows to be a young man over the course of years, spends his time asking ‘why?’ He asks it of his grandmother, his grandfather, his teachers, his crush, and of the world. Some of it is asking questions about injustice, some of interpretation, others arbitrariness. This kid has seen a lot, starting with losing his parents and his sister-to-be in his mother’s womb. He is also struggling with questions that his grandparents refuse to answer. Who is Henry Peterson? Who is the Jeffries boy? And why is he not allowed in the cupola of his own home? In the light of all of these, he pushes on, trying to make something of himself, trying to find joy. He finds joy in a dance program after school, and it gives him the strength to carry on in spite of loss and mystery.
I’d like to take a bit of a detour and talk about how the film portrays the act of dancing. Since college, I have been an avid ballroom and swing dancer. I credit learning to dance these dances as being the thing that dragged me out of the purposelessness and depression of my high school and early college years. Without dance, the world was cold and gray and joyless to me. With dance, life was warm and full of color. As such, my heart surged when I saw the two characters in the second part dance with such aplomb, such buoyancy, to those drums that filled a town square. My heart soared when I recognized their steps as coming from cha-cha and from lindy hop.
My heart absolutely leapt out of my body in the final section when this boy was being taught in his class by a teacher who proudly calls herself the ‘dance monster.’ She taught them cha-cha with steps that I recognized, and then she said words that are inscribed on my heart, a simple “rock step, triple step, triple step.” That is the way of counting the basic steps of six-count lindy hop. Those are the first steps any swing dancer learns, and they unlock a world of excitement, a world of joy, for those who persist in following that route. Those words are not simply steps to me; they are my second heartbeat. I swear to you, I cried when I heard them, and saw this kid inelegantly repeat them, his teacher drilling them, but doing so very accurately.
I have been deliberately coy about the actual supernatural element of this film, but I assure you it is there. The first part is the most obviously supernatural; it uses that supernatural conceit to make you very nervous, absolutely on edge, by virtue of not giving you a single explanation for it (one can detect a tonal similarity to the more cosmic, existential SCP articles). The world is ending! There is a mysterious man on a billboard! His image keeps appearing on a variety of surfaces! All of this culminates in an otherworldly scene that I am almost absolutely certain Stephen King cribbed from Arthur C. Clarke’s story The Nine Billion Names of God. This whole film absolutely feels like a Stephen King story, where the bizarre, the strange, and the otherworldly are found hiding in plain sight, poking around among the everyday as if it were always there, waiting to be found by someone in thrall to the mundane.
The end result is a film that is unabashedly humanist and unashamedly existentialist. It reminded me of Kevin Brockmeier’s novel The Illumination, which likewise has a deeply strange alteration to the world, and asks us to find meaning in it. The man who dances to the drums in the second part of the movie says that that particular incident is why God put him on this Earth. In light of the cruelty, the arbitrariness, and the despair that have ensnared us, the movie tells us to make our own beauty, our own meaning, our own light, because those are what make life worth living. It tells us to push on, to keep fighting and to keep dreaming and to keep dancing and to keep creating, as that is the beauty of the whole thing to begin with. As odd as it is to say about a film based on a Stephen King story, it’s beautiful.
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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
