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| Title: | The Life of Chuck |
| Year: | 2024 |
| Genre: | Fantasy Drama |
| IMDb: | link |
| RT: | link |
NOTE: This is a fairly short and spoiler free review of The Life of Chuck (2024) and its origin, the novella "The Life of Chuck" by Stephen King. It is then followed (after a strong warning) by an analysis of both works that is deep, about as long as the full novella, and reveals every possible spoiler about both works. As can be seen from the star count given to the film, I didn't particularly like it, but I found it fascinating to analyse, and, if anything, readers should consider my analysis as a form of "warning" regarding what the work (particularly the novella, not the film) hides under its innocent-looking facade, as I believe that this is, at heart, a rather insidious work. Enjoy!
Officially a 2024 release, Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck, based on a short story by Stephen King, only graced Australia's screens in late 2025. Despite critics gushing over this film, bestowing it any number of superlatives, and, at least on the review website Rotten Tomatoes a strong audience response, this film failed to connect with wider audiences, earning only $19 million worldwide (of which less than $7 million domestic) on a $25 million dollar budget. By the time it opened in Australia, it was already known to be a dud, explaining both the delayed release and the complete lack of marketing. If anyone reading this review actually saw the film in a theatre, I would be surprised.
What little marketing the film did receive did not help. It was built up to be this magical, life-affirming masterpiece starring Tom Hiddleston, and the marketing folk did their best to convince that it should be mentally slotted right next to that other famous Stephen King novella adaptation, The Shawshank Redemption. That, alas, was all a lie. To begin with, the film is neither magical nor life-affirming. It is, in fact, a meditation on mortality, and if any King comparison should be made I would pair it easily with this year's The Long Walk, which made me come out of the theatre in a similarly contemplative mood, still trying to make sense of the film's themes, intention, and overall meaning. (The original "The Life of Chuck" by King, despite being packaged with 3 other stories as has become tradition for Stephen King novellas, is not even a novella, as far as I can tell. Despite its elaborate structure, it's a very short short story, qualifying as a "novella" only if one squints really hard and puts all one's stock on the fact that it follows the life of a protagonist. In fact, as will become plain later on in this analysis, part of the problem that makes The Life of Chuck (2024) fall somewhat short of the mark is that the original story already stretched its premise as far as it can go, and trying to expand it any further inevitably exposes the cracks in the narrative.)
Lastly, it does not even "star" Tom Hiddleston in any conventional sense. The man only acts in less than 19 minutes of film, and there are multiple others who appear in it for considerably longer. I can certainly see why audiences would feel cheated and disappointed by the marketing.
Ignoring expectations, though: is it good? Well, it's original; that's for sure. In fact, much of the fun in the story is to try and figure out what is going on and why, and the more the twists and turns surprise you, the more you will enjoy it. For this reason, I will keep this part, the spoiler-free part of the review short, not discussing any part of the plot, themes, or anything else that had me pondering as I left the theatre. All of that will have to wait to the analysis in the spoiler-full part. Trying to even summarise a basic plot, or even much less, is in this film a major spoiler.
What I will say is that I have a soft spot for original narratives, and—even though I will certainly nitpick every flaw that a film has, particularly if I like it—an original narrative will make me forgive its flaws and accept them as endearing. This was original, and it gave me a lot to think about, both huge plusses in my book.
The problems are two-fold: there are problems in King's original narrative, and there are problems in Flanagan's adaptation of it; and they are of two very different kinds.
Flanagan's adaptation tries to be slavishly loyal to the original, so much so that you can be forgiven for thinking that this is the visual equivalent of an audiobook. In retrospect, my thinking is that Flanagan never really understood what the story is about, much less what made it work to begin with, so chose to stay as close to the source material as possible "to be safe". This did not work for me. He often kept verbatim stuff that needs to be changed, and often changed stuff that can't be.
An example of the former is his view on dialogue. This story is in parts extremely dialogue-driven, which is highly uncharacteristic for King. In a story, you use dialogue in order to speed the pace up. In a film, the same dialogue can't simply be imported as-is. First off, in celluloid dialogue is what slows the pace down: if one had wanted to, much of the dialogue could have been replaced whole-hog by a single montage, and the whole thing could have been cut down to under a minute. Especially in a story that relies on the reader not figuring anything out before the big twists are revealed, a fast pace is important, and in Flanagan's telling I had plenty of time to "get it" and then be annoyed that the build-up to the big reveal is still ongoing.
Second, dialogue used in this way in film runs afoul of the cardinal sin of "show don't tell". Here's a little secret about The Life of Chuck: they worked with zero budget. It's often hard to tell this by looking at the screen, because it's filled wall-to-wall with big name actors, but the reality is that this was an independently made film that was shot at the same time as when all studio films were embargoed due to the big writers' strike. All actors were 100% available, and were willing to work for peanuts. (This moment of serendipity boomeranged back on the production when at the time of its release the actor's guild was on a separate strike, and none of said big-name actors was allowed to promote the film.)
But where the appearance of famous actors can momentarily fool you into thinking you are watching a major production, the tell-don't-show attitude snaps you back immediately to the realities of the production. There is just no way you can hear the following dialogue between two characters:
Q: "What happened?"
A: "[A] [s]inkhole opened up at the intersection of Main and Market. [...] Got to be twenty cars at the
bottom of it, maybe thirty."
which, I stress is real dialogue that really appeared in both story and film, and not ask yourself, watching this in theatre, whether they were really so strapped for cash they couldn't even pretend to show this... and unfortunately this is far from an isolated incident.
On the flip side, there are bits that Flanagan changed, which he shouldn't have. Not every change is bad. Flanagan's additions, for the most part (though not entirely), are consistent with the tone of the story and do not seem foreign to King's original prose. Some are even Flanagan's attempts to "fix" a narrative problem—and as we'll discuss the original narrative certainly does have its issues—but the problem is that Flanagan has in this changed the story. Yes, some of his execution feels cleaner, more cohesive, and even more narratively aesthetic, but they introduce a new problem: when I came out of the theatre I was really puzzled as to what the point of the story was. After not being able to figure this out for some time, I went ahead and read the original story. This was for me quite a unique experience, in that it's the first time I've ever read a King story after seeing the film adaptation. (Normally, if it's an old King story, I will have read it years prior; if it's a new King story, I am sometimes happy with having never read it at all.) For this reason, I can say with certainty that the film itself, despite its attempts to clarify, did not include a coherent, consistent, self-explained idea of what it was, in fact, about. I, at least, could not figure it out based on the film alone, and had to return to the source material. King's execution, albeit in parts clunkier, at least makes for a coherent message. It was lost in the adaptation by Flanagan removing the clunky bits (that explained the theme) and adding lots of beautiful moments of closure (that only obscured it). It is literally the case that there were bits of dialogue given by characters that were originally, say, four sentences long and were shortened to three sentences in the script, possibly for pacing reasons, but it's the missing fourth sentence that actually provides that "A-ha" moment that I was sorely missing in the cinema.
Moving on to King's original story, this one is extremely unusual for King, on many levels. Though as far as I know no official word exists on this matter, my head-canon is that this is not a new story. It feels like it belongs to a younger, more experimental King, maybe around the same time as "Cycles of the Werewolf". I can imagine it being written at that time, and then buried in some drawer as unmarketable gibberish by an author who can write so much better than this and knows it. I see it lying in said drawer for decades, only to be dug up by an elderly King, waning as a writer, who needs to fill a quota—in this case: the quota of four novellas for a book. King has dug up many other previously unpublished stories in recent years, beginning with the novel Blaze, so this would not be unprecedented. I see the elderly King looking over said story, recognising its flaws, but no longer able to—or perhaps caring to—fix them, deciding to publish the novel either exactly or essentially as-is.
I say "essentially", because the story generally keeps its influences and inspirations intact, undigested in the narrative, for all to see, often going so far as to name-check them as though making some weird citation, and for the most part these influences are old. But there is one influence that is new... either that, or King came up independently with an idea that would later appear prominently in exactly the type of pop-culture that King loves to quote and does so here so often and blatantly. (This, by the way, is part of the style that Flanagan successfully copied in his extensions of King's story. These extensions are chock-full of very obvious nods to better and more successful sources.)
King famously believes that the worst thing a writer can do is keep a notebook of ideas, because it becomes a haunted house for the ghosts of bad ideas that should have long ago been buried. The good ideas, he maintains, you will not be able to forget. My own take on this is that while I don't tend to forget the good ideas, no single idea is ever good enough for me to say: "This story I will write." To really compel me to engage in the thankless task of putting words to page, what I need is for two ideas to collide and make something better in their fusion. King's "The Life of Chuck" feels to me like it was born of the fusion of three ideas. The story itself is divided into three parts that could have easily worked as three individual stories. The fusion is that together they tell more than each apart... but King, in joining them together, did so without hiding the seams. He wanted the three to be separable.
This is something Flanagan did not keep. Much of the adaptation effort was in meshing the three stories together into one... with mixed results. In particular, the commonalities between the three parts, in the original, form a map that guides the reader to the story's meaning, but in the adaptation this map is marred, overgrown by unrelated, cheap-catharsis moments that carry a different meaning.
In the end, my main gripe against the original isn't that it really doesn't work very well but rather why. Its issue is that it leaves you with a trail of breadcrumbs to follow in order to make sense out of it, but if you actually spend the time and mental effort to follow the breadcrumbs, where it leads you is highly disappointing. It's disappointing whether you want to think of the work as "magical" and "life-affirming" or whether you see it as meditations on mortality. It's just a let-down of a take-home message, in the final count. And that's when you end up feeling truly cheated for having believed in Charles "Chuck" Krantz and his life.
In summary, this is an original, intriguing piece that aspires to a lot more than what it ends up amounting to. King's original narrative is a fable, meant to carry a message, but it's not a very good message. Flanagan's adaptation seems to miss the original message, and muddies the water by trying to "fix" the original fable in various ways, small and large. This makes the narrative even more intriguing, even loftier in its aspirations, but ultimately even hollower. I would still much rather see a work that tries for the skies and fails than one that always sticks to safe shores.
I will say no more here. To actually follow the breadcrumbs and decipher this work, join me after the warning:
WARNING: The rest of this text is less a review and more an analysis. As such, we will be delving into the plot, the themes, the conflicts and their resolutions, and everything else in great detail, discussing not just elements that are light or heavy spoilers, but every spoiler there is. I am aware that most readers will not have seen the film. If you are one of said readers, and if you still plan on going to see the film, and if you are averse to spoilers, please do not continue. Much of the fun of The Life of Chuck is in discovering what it is about, and this analysis is sure to ruin this discovery process.
Here's what we will do. To begin with, I will discuss the plot and structure of the original novella (or short story). This plot and this structure will at times seem a bit wonky, a fact I will highlight and give examples of. We will then discuss how Mike Flanagan did his best to fix these wonky bits, streamlining them in a way that—certainly in retrospect—seems like the obvious thing to do. This brings up another puzzle: why didn't King fix them? (In the pre-spoilers section I hinted it might be because it's a lesser work of a young Stephen King, which the elder Stephen King could not be bothered to re-edit, but I don't really subscribe to that thesis. King at his absolute worst will neither make the "errors" described or keep them in a final text, if they are, indeed, errors.) I will then bring up a second question: what is the film about? What message does it carry? I will show that the film actually carries essentially no message. It poses as though it is full of subtext, but delivers precious little of it. At which point—for my own "big reveal"—I will demonstrate that King's "errors", if kept in place and analysed alongside their would-be "fixes", actually do have something to say. I warn in advance (as I've done in the previous section) that King's ultimate message for the story is a disappointing one, which makes the effort to tease it out so much more frustrating, but I still prefer a story that makes a point I don't like than what we actually got, which seems bland, corporate, and decision-by-test-audience by comparison.
To make the whole thing more tenable, I will begin by considering each part of the story separately, then pull them together.
We therefore begin with a recap of the original novella. As discussed, for the most part the film follows it slavishly, even when it shouldn't, so differences from novella to film will be discussed separately. A casual viewer may not even notice them on first viewing.
"The Life of Chuck" follows the life of Charles "Chuck" Krantz along three key episodes in his life. These are related in reverse-chronological order, where Chuck's first two decades are covered last in what is called "Act I", but his death is covered first, in "Act III".
This order reversal may remind readers/viewers of Memento (2000), but I don't think it is really comparable: Memento is a piece that challenges viewers to assign causes to effects, making its reverse-chronological order very deliberate. Here, there is no simple answer regarding why the order is flipped. My personal theory is that King was following A Christmas Carol in this three-act structure, wanting a "Ghost of Christmas past" before his "Ghost of Christmas present" before his "Ghost of Christmas future". This theory is reinforced by the fact that A Christmas Carol is actually name-checked within the novella itself, and this is something that repeats many times: sources of inspiration for "The Life of Chuck" are repeatedly explicitly named within the narrative. Flanagan does a bit of this, too, in his adaptation, so apparently it wasn't missed on him, either.
In "The Life of Chuck", Act III (the first told part), the vast majority of the narrative is an apocalyptic scenario, a-la 2012 (2009), where the entire world goes haywire and descends into first despair and then oblivion. Its last section is another direct literary quote: it is precisely the end of Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God". Throughout, we are provided with only one clue regarding the cause of the calamity: we keep seeing posters depicting Charles Krantz, a man who, for all the world, looks like an employee of Midwest Trust bank (although people working in the bank don't actually recognise him), distinctive only by a small scar on his arm. The posters all have the same wording, which repeats even in occurrences where Krantz's face doesn't appear: "Thirty nine great years—Thanks Chuck!"
In parallel, we are told a different story, about Charles Krantz lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by his brother-in-law and his son (and, at the last moment, also Ginny, his wife). The big reveal is that the words "Thirty nine great years—Thanks Chuck!" are actually spoken by the brother-in-law, and are the last words Chuck hears, fractions of a second before he dies. This means the entire first story, which apparently spanned close to a week, in reality took under one second.
Mere moments earlier, in a foreshadowing of this denouement, the brother-in-law laments that "when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in." This is now our explanation of what we have so far been seeing. "Thirty nine" turns out to be a reference to Chuck's age at his death, rather than—as we are initially led to believe—the number of years he spent at Midwest Trust before retiring.
Flanagan's first problem with adapting this narrative is that it's all just too short. To make it fit the required 30 or so minutes of film, he had to pad it up quite significantly. Many times when such a thing is done in film, the result is that the quality differences between the original literary work and the new script segments are so vast that the difference is jarring and repeatedly takes one out of the story. This was not the case here. With only one exception, a moment in which one of the characters goes into a monologue that felt many minutes long, where he essentially quotes Carl Sagan's Cosmos verbatim, the new editions did not feel out of place.
In the original, the main character was a man named Marty, through whose eyes the entire story was told. (This by itself is already a major departure from King's typical style, where every character gets its own internal monologue, exposing a complex background and a rich internal life.) Marty is a school English teacher (something that King knows more than a bit about, having been one himself—a fact we'll return to later) and throughout the story we see him interact with many people, although, as the crisis deepens the one relationship that becomes most important to him is his relationship with his ex-wife Felicia, now divorced for two years. The two still care deeply about each other, and still share an intimate relationship. In the original, they even still had an infrequent sexual relationship, but in Flanagan's version that was gone, probably because he felt it distracted from the main narrative, this being Marty's attempts to reconnect with her, ultimately culminating in his saying to her "I love —" just as the world ends.
Flanagan balances the narrative more (although, as we will examine later, "more" does not necessarily mean "better") by elevating Felicia from the get-go to a major supporting character, with quite a few scenes being told from her perspective, and even including scenes where Marty is not present at all. I particularly liked the addition of scenes in which Marty stands outside a door apparently leading to an attic. These are direct cinematic quotes from The Sixth Sense and serve here to foreshadow that something is very wrong about how Marty conceives himself (in preparation for the later reveal that he, Felicia, and their entire world is a fictional construct deep within Chuck Krantz's mind) as well as to connect later with Act I. This is one of several points where Flanagan adds connections between the acts, which create a far more cohesive and satisfying story, but I will argue later that King omitted all these, essentially creating three standalone narratives that barely communicate with each other, on purpose.
Where Flanagan's attempts at fixing King's "flaws" fall flat is when it comes to the pacing. In the original, Act III is less than 8000 words long, much of it, atypically for King, told in dialogue in order to speed up the events. Flanagan extends this, adds scenes, keeps the narration as voice-over, and uses the same dialogue bits in order to slow the action down as much as possible. Some of the narration was even transposed into dialogue: this is still "tell" not "show", and I still found that grating, but done sparingly "tell-don't-show" is a great way to control pacing; here it was done ubiquitously, surely just in order to save on budget, and slows the pacing too much. By "too much" I don't mean here that the events seem to drag. They are told in a naturalistic pace, which I'm sure was Flanagan's intention, but it seems to me that he believed that the big reveal, that these are all fictional characters that live inside a dying man's mind, was at the level of the big reveal in The Sixth Sense (which, again, he quotes directly), and it isn't.
King carefully avoids providing foreshadowing of this revelation, and even the later portions of the apocalypse, which are a little too over-the-top (with too many things going wrong that seem to have nothing to do with each other) are handled as off-hand comments in dialogue. As an example, the dialogue bit "There's a volcano in Germany, for Christ's sake—Germany!" made it to the film verbatim, but instead of lampshading the complete impossibility of such an event, in a film this highlights it. A much faster-paced version which would have not drawn the viewer's attention to the problem would have been if Flanagan had simply used a montage to show a selection of world calamities. Showing stock footage of an erupting volcano while adding a news ticker-tape stating that this was occurring in Germany surely would not have blown the film's budget, would it? Worse, many of Felicia's added scenes demonstrate explicitly that whatever is going on is of a supernatural nature, far before this revelation is made in the original story. Even Marty's long Cosmos-lifted dialogue (another connector with Act I that doesn't appear in the original) is nothing more than a foreshadowing of the subjectivity of time in preparation for the big reveal. In The Sixth Sense many such hints were provided ahead of time, some quite explicit, but the revelation was so outrageous nobody could work it out. Here, I knew what was going on before Act III was even half-way over, spoiling for me the entire experience.
By contrast, King, until quite late in the game, only gives a single hint that something is very wrong in the fabric of the world that Marty and Felicia inhabit. This hint is in the fact that, digressing from King's normal style that is imbued with proper nouns and concrete references, we are never told where the events of the story take place. King's geographies are always extremely explicit, even when fictional. Here, however, we only know that Marty and Felicia live somewhere in the United States, and it isn't in any of the specific states that are mentioned explicitly as places where the calamity is more advanced than where they are. For regular King readers—and perhaps also for others—this lends everything about Marty's story an air of unreality the precedes the explicit reveal without ever spoiling it.
(As a reminder, I saw the film adaptation before reading the original story. When I came in to see the film, I did it "cold", without having any idea what was coming. So, the surprises were not spoiled for me beforehand, and questions of whether or not the revelations were too telegraphed are ones I can comment on from authentic experience.)
In fact, in order to maintain its fast pace, Flanagan this time cut out a portion of the story, a sub-plot in which Chuck reminisces about how he used to dance with "Little Sister", the younger sibling of the lead guitarist in a band that Chuck used to be the lead singer of while in his junior year in high school. (She is repeatedly called "Little Sister" because Chuck can't remember her actual name.)
When we get back to analysing the story's overall themes and meaning, I will show that this sub-plot was actually quite meaningful. However, I cannot deny that the faster pacing this time, unlike in Act III, was able to deliver the surprise in the story's twist. I, personally, did not see it coming that this Stephen King adaptation will feature quite so much dancing. And yet, despite it being barely foreshadowed earlier, from this point in the narrative dancing becomes the main focus of Chuck Krantz's life, and the main focus of the story.
Act II kicks off, much like Act III, with narration. Both share the same narration style (and in the film also the same narrator), and after Act III we already know that this all-knowing narrator is unreliable. Much as in Act III, the narrator begins by introducing the main characters. We will do so in the reverse order to what is done in both story and film. First, of course, we have Charles "Chuck" Krantz. Chuck is in Boylston Street in Boston. (The extremely specific localisation makes for a whiplash-inducing change from the fable-like nonspecificity of Act III, and the two are also different even from a technical, structural standpoint: while Act III is divided into five sections, where section transitions indicate switches between Chuck's real world and his imagined internal world, Act II has no section separators at all—it's as though the two don't belong in the same story.)
Chuck is an accountant for Midwest Trust, there for a professional conference—he does not live in Boston—but he is taking his lunch break out in Boylston Street, away from the conference, to get away from all the other accountants. He doesn't seem to like being associated with them. This is an image of a person dissatisfied with what his life turned out to be, wishing he could be more, knowing that at one time he had in him the power to be more.
Second, we have Janice. Janice is a young woman (twenty-two) who was just jilted by her long-time (sixteen month) boyfriend, who did this the modern way: by text. She is angry, hurt and frustrated, and is trying to walk it off, before going to her apartment and drinking it off, crying it off,... and, bizarrely, she also thinks of dancing, dancing it off, dancing her way back to happiness. That part of it felt, to me, unearned in the original story, and I think it was cut from the film altogether.
Enter our third and final character: Jared, a busking street musician. Jared is a Juilliard dropout, now playing drums on street corners. In the film adaptation, Jared's character was gender-swapped to Taylor, a black, female drummer (played wonderfully by the real-world drummer Taylor Gordon). Of all the changes made by Flanagan—and he didn't change much—the switch from Jared to Taylor is the only one I think truly improves the story in the way that I think King originally meant it.
Presumably, the change was a consequence of Taylor Gordon's availability (she has the drumming abilities, the look, and, surprisingly, even the acting chops to pull the part off) and the producers' wish to cast an adequate number of Afro-American actors. In the story, Chuck is a Jewish boy, from a Jewish-American family, living in a Jewish-American neighbourhood, so Act I does not naturally lend itself to many black characters, but in Act III, and mostly also in Act II, the race of the characters is never mentioned, so the casting directors were free to do as they will—and they made some inspired choices, among which are Chiwetel Ejiofor as Marty, Carl Lumbly as a mysterious elderly man encountered late in Act III, and now, in Act II, Taylor Gordon. (As mentioned before, the film was very lucky regarding the availability of actors, and made perfect use of it. Among the white actors worth mentioning are Karen Gillan, Mark Hamill, Mia Sara, Nick Offerman, and, of course, Tom Hiddleston and Jacob Tremblay, as two of four actors playing Charles Krantz at different ages—that alone is a line-up to die for.)
However, it is not the race of the drummer that I wanted to mention but rather the gender swap. In the original story, Janice is the only female around, and positively everything about the story, from her interactions with Chuck to her interactions with Jared, the male drummer, sounds just so seedy and unseemly to me: it's two guys soliciting an isolated and emotionally vulnerable woman, compelling her to do things she is likely to later regret. Changing Jared to Taylor lends the scene which I am about to describe an air of friendliness and respectability that the original lacks, and which I think King was aiming for—but which I nevertheless am not sure it deserves; like Janice's passing thought about dancing, it does not feel earned... but more on that later.
Beside the out-of-the-blue focus on dancing, another surprise that was pulled off as well in the film as in the original story is the introduction of Chuck. Unlike in my description here, in both film and story, Chuck is the last of the three characters to be introduced. Having now spent all of Act III with Marty and Felicia, and being just now introduced to Taylor and Janice, we, the audience, are ready for another segment where Chuck is an absent presence. Actually encountering him here in the flesh, and having him described in surprisingly ordinary terms—a boring and bored accountant—comes out of nowhere, which is quite a feat in a film literally titled The Life of Chuck.
I suppose that may have been King's original reason for a male drummer. With both a male and a female character introduced, the audience is even more surprised when Charles Krantz's name comes up. But I still think on the whole having a Taylor instead of a Jared is a major improvement. Worse yet, if that was the intention, then the implication is that the order of the character introductions is flipped just like the order of the acts, and once one restores the introductions to their natural order, as I have done here, it is clear from the get go that the idea is to pair Chuck up with Janice. This is an implication that we, as an audience trained on decades of Hollywood RomComs, have been conditioned to expect... but it's also an implication I find quite disturbing: Chuck is a man married for almost two decades and Janice, at basically half his age, is clearly on the rebound. This isn't something we should be rooting for.
The plot itself is, as is standard with King's stories, deceptively simple, with most of the importance placed not on the physical events themselves but rather on how they are perceived by the characters. Where this is conveyed in dialogue, the film adaptation follows religiously, but the deepest insights into character are never spoken out loud, and Flanagan struggles to present them any other way. Many times, he dilutes character motivations, simplifying them to something easily explained and understood, but by this loses the core of the story.
Physically, this is what happens: the drummer starts playing; Chuck, who happens to be walking by the same street corner, begins to dance to the music. He dances well, and a crowd begins to form. Janice is attracted by the crowd to see what is going on. Chuck sees her. He thinks of her as "a pretty young woman" and immediately transfers his feelings towards "Little Sister", his old dance partner from junior year high school, to this complete stranger. The actual text is:
Chuck holds his hands out to her, smiling, snapping his fingers. "Come on," he says. "Come on, little sister, dance."
With a bunch of the male onlookers now beginning to chant "Dance, dance, dance!" and the drummer egging them on, Janice relents and joins the dance. Again, looking at this scene with any level of perspective, it feels remarkably iffy. And again, unlike in Act III, Flanagan wisely kept this act as quick in the film as it is in the story, so there is no time to think in real time about the implications of such coercion on an emotionally vulnerable woman; the audience is expected to take it as "all in good fun".
When the dance ends, Janice says "I need to get home", but once again the drummer coerces her to stick around a while. This time, she finds herself in a van belonging to the drummer's boss, Mac, so that in the original story she ends up alone in a van with three guys she's never seen before. The optics are slightly better in the film, and, in both cases, the scene transitions super quickly to another, one where all three of our main characters are sitting in Boston Common (in the film, the location was slightly adjusted) and the drummer is splitting the revenue of the day with Chuck and Janice. Chuck, the respectable accountant, at first politely turns the offer down, but ultimately takes the money, as does Janice.
The drummer asks Chuck why he started to dance, but Chuck doesn't know. In the story, we are led to believe that there is something sinister lurking under the surface here, in Chuck's unexplained motivation. King never gives a satisfying explanation, but we will try to delve into it later. Flanagan tries to give, again, a simple explanation, invoking a memory of Chuck dancing with his grandmother, but, again, this reworking of the story falls flat: if one rearranges the acts chronologically, memories of his grandmother (or the rest of his dancing history explicated in detail in Act I) would not be some sublimated secret, buried in his subconscious. This is stuff that Chuck knows about himself, and remembers well. Again: the fix doesn't fix, and what seems broken really isn't.
In any case, the three main characters ultimately part with a group hug that is described thusly:
Chuck knows they can smell his sweat—this suit will have to be dry-cleaned before he wears it again, and strenuously—and he can smell theirs.
... Nothing to see here...
After which Chuck and Janice walk a little further together—in the story, unlike in the film, we are told that Janice did not originally mean to walk this way at all, but is doing so anyway now, presumably to spend a little more time with Chuck.
It should be mentioned that by this time Chuck has thought about and has mentioned his wife and child several times. As he starts to dance, he thinks that they would have been embarrassed to see him like this. He mentions them to Janice, too, in an "Oh, by the way, did I tell you I'm married" kind of a way. Still, she walks along with him and thanks him for the dance.
After she departs, he thinks about his wife again, this time in an "Oh, by the way, do you still remember that you're married" kind of a way. He is afraid she will find out about the dance. (The way he rationalises this is that videos of the dance were taken, and if this becomes viral it might find its way to her. This is hardly a rational expectation, and it makes him sound awfully guilty about the whole thing.)
In the film he gets a headache somewhere about midway through the dance, and this is never mentioned again beyond a passing reference. In the original story, however, the headache begins after the dance, is part of a set of recurring headaches, and Chuck has a hunch of what they might mean. He also wants to use his earnings to buy himself a glass of wine, but given the headache he makes the sensible choice of going for Evian mineral water.
The act ends with the narrator telling us that nine months later Chuck would already be dead (of glioblastoma, now manifesting through recurring headaches), but before that, when everything else in Chuck's life will be in total collapse, it will be this moment, this one dance, that Chuck will remember as the thing that gave meaning to his life. Based on the descriptions of his thoughts King gives us during the dance scene itself, we can conclude that it's the happiest Chuck has ever been and ever will be.
Once again, we are in for a surprise, because the act begins with "Chuck was looking forward...", making us think that we will soon see Tom Hiddleston again, or, in the story, the Chuck we're now finally familiar with, but no: we begin with Chuck as a very young boy.
I will not go over the entirety of the plot of Act I, beat by beat, as that is not the purpose of this analysis. The important bits are the following.
First, there is death. Lots of it. In the very first paragraph Chuck loses both his parents and his unborn sister to a traffic accident on the I-95. (Chuck was not there.) Notably, this sounds like a concrete place reference, but (a) it's the only one we get throughout the entire act, and (b) I-95 is a highway that crosses the entire eastern coast of the United States and goes all the way from the Maine-Canada border to the southern tip of Florida. We literally have no idea where the entirety of the plot takes place, other than that it's somewhere on the U.S. east coast.
I should also mention that not only is the geography muddled, the timeline is also a bit muddled. We are told at the end of the story that Chuck, upon finishing high school, left the house of his grandparents, where he grew up after his parents' death and went to study at the University of Illinois. We know that he sold the house, and with the proceeds bought a place for his new wife and himself, and that at that time he was a new hire at Midwest Trust. Did he get the job during his university studies or after? And if after, at which point did the old house get sold? And if during, how does that square with the fact that we are told, in the first paragraph, that during his college days he had, for one semester, a girlfriend?
This non-specificity is so bad, in fact, that it permeates even the language used. At one point, Chuck asks his grandmother what she was like in high-school, and she answers:
"I was a kusit, But don't tell your zaydee I said that."
This is an American Jew speaking, using the Yiddish term "zaydee" for "grandpa". But "kusit" is not Yiddish. It is Israeli slang and no old-school American Jew would ever use it. It's just the wrong language.
Now, admittedly, this is a one-off, and I may fairly be accused of jumping on shadows on this one. But understanding the nuances, intricacies, dynamics, meter and other specificities of language is a writer's stock trade, and King is one of the best in this business. I refuse to believe that something like this would simply slip past him. It's about as credible as an American submarine captain in a Tom Clancy novel saying "I believe that on my boat the crew should all be comrades."
Ignoring all this, let's go back to the main theme: death. So, after the death of Chuck's immediate family he goes on to live with his grand-parents. During the 15 or so years that follow, both of them die as well, several years apart. Where the death theme really kicks into high gear, however, is when Chuck realises that the authentic Victorian house he grew up in is actually the world's most convenient haunted house: only one room is haunted (the attic, not some in-use space) and it's haunted in a most consistent, helpful and non-threatening way. Namely, the room shows anyone entering it an upcoming death. This death may be days away or many years away—the room does not provide an attached calendar—but while it is never insinuated that the room in any way facilitates any deaths, the person who actually experiences its haunting, Chuck's grandpa, finds the knowledge oppressive. He says to Chuck: "It's the waiting, Chucky, that's the hard part."
This is perhaps the closest the story comes to an overt conflict: death itself is the oppressive force, and we feel that Chuck's grandfather, adopting an attitude of waiting for this inevitability, has by this lost the fight against it.
Opposing this force of death is the force of life, concertised here by the power of dancing. Dancing is how Chuck's grandmother gradually returns to active life after the trauma of losing her son, her daughter-in-law, and her unborn granddaughter—Chuck's immediate family—dancing is how she connects with Chuck and teaches him happiness, and dancing is where Chuck's happy place is throughout the story.
The story of dancing culminates with the Fall Fling, a dance where Chuck wows the audience by dancing spectacularly with Cat McCoy (not only the school's most talented dancer and Chuck's frequent dance partner, but also a girl he clearly has a crush on, despite the fact that she has a boyfriend, Dougie Wentworth, who is such a jock he doesn't even consider Chuck a threat).
In the film this part is beefed up quite a bit, with Chuck facing this dance as a major "What if they'll all laugh at me" crisis. In the original, nothing of the sort happens. The only direct connection of the dance itself to the rest of the story is that here, exactly as in the dance of Act II, the audience chants for an encore from the dancers and they are smart enough to quit while they're ahead.
Where this story connects with the main theme is in an event that happens immediately after the dance: Chuck is outside, under the stars, deliriously happy from his success, but as he swings up his hands in joy, one hand strikes a chain-link fence and cuts him, resulting in the scar that remains with him throughout the rest of his life, perhaps a reminder that all good things have a price, or that dancing can only make him happy momentarily and ultimately life will find a way to bring him back down.
There is a coda to this story, a flash forward to Chuck six months before his death, where we learn that Chuck has told his wife a lie about his scar. As he told it, he was cavorting with Cat McCoy and was pushed by Doug Wentworth onto the chain-link fence. Now, knowing he faces imminent death, he wants to come clean. His wife asks him why he had lied in the first place about something so inconsequential. The lie doesn't even make him look better.
Chuck doesn't know. In the film, his explanation from the book is edited and shortened to the point that all we get is that because of his illness, he is unable to think straight. In the original, the story is more complicated. Chuck knows that the scar is part of another story, and that is a story he can't and won't tell his wife, even on death's doorstep.
This connects the Fall Fling story with the climax of the death story arc, but while King does his best to smooth this transition over, it still feels wrong. While for us the two scenes are told one immediately after the other, making us associate the scar with both of them, for Chuck four years pass between the two events, and there is no reason for him to associate the scar, specifically, with the later event. The inevitable conclusion is that Chuck's scar hides another secret, one we are never told.
To get to the climax of the death story arc, however, which is the conclusion of the story as a whole, we must detour through another scene that seemingly has no purpose other than to justify the fore-last paragraph of the story. In English class, Chuck is taught Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." (The young King was a well-known Whitman fan, adding to my belief that this is an old story only now published; in the film, Act III begins in Marty's class with a recitation of a Yeats poem, also a King favourite albeit never mentioned in the original story.) After class, he asks his teacher what Whitman means by "I am large, I contain multitudes", and she responds by telling him it's everyone and everything he sees, knows, or remembers, and he extends that by thinking about the baby sister he never got to have.
At the very end of the story, Chuck walks into the haunted room inside his Victorian house—now truly owned by him—and sees his own death in hospital. (The only connection to the scar in the story is that he recognises himself in the hospital by his scar, which I think is far-fetched.) In the film, unless I missed something in the dialogue, it seems like Chuck feels that now his own waiting begins, but that is a strange way to end this film, as it means the conflict at the centre of the narrative is resolved by Chuck merely immediately giving up, adopting his grandfather's stance.
The majority of this ending is, in fact, delivered in voice over by the narrator, which, perhaps, is the reason why they kept this narration in the first place: because they needed it here, at the very end, not having come up with any better way to organically convey Chuck's reaction and imbue it with a sense of closure.
In the original story, again, things are more complicated. Chuck does briefly contemplate the waiting, but his ultimate resolve is in a spirit of defiance: "I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes." (Words that not only quote Whitman, but are almost identical to his thoughts as he swung his hands deliriously in joy under a star-filled sky, only to hit into the chain-link fence.
In this section, I will present the simple solution. This solution, in fact, could not be simpler: the various strange artefacts in the story are due to it having been written by a young and inexperienced King, who saw the problems well enough not to publish the story, but didn't know how to fix them. They were kept in by an older King who needed something to publish in order to complete a quartet of novellas for his next publication, the older King not caring about such trifles. They were then cleaned up, as much as possible, by Flanagan as he made the film.
Consider, for example the reverse-chronological structure of the narrative. Flanagan understood that the only reason to tell a story in this order is because we want the audience to learn "What?" but want to know "Why?" He does his best to delay such reveals of causes.
When, in Act II, Chuck is asked to explain why he started dancing, for example, he says he doesn't know, but Flanagan gives us a hint (not in the original) that this is because of something that we will discover in Act I. King, conversely, gives us no such hint, and we are left to speculate that Chuck's dancing may be some early symptom of his disease.
Most audacious, however, are the connections Flanagan adds to Act III. Specifically, the faces of everybody in the apocalyptic world of Act III are ones we meet again. This begins in Act II, when, on the street in Boston, Chuck sees a girl on skates, this being the last person Marty meets on his journey to Felicia at the end of Act III. Later on, everybody from Act III has a cameo in Act I. This tells us that these are real people, whom Chuck has incorporated into his inner world.
My favourite "fix", however, is Flanagan's complete omission of the explanation by Chuck's brother-in-law, at the end of Act III, about the internal world that every person has. This leaves the audience wondering "Why is all this happening?" The answer finally comes in Act I, when young Chuck's English teacher explains to him the Whitman poem. I can just imagine Flanagan asking himself, unbelieving, "Why oh why did King have to put the same explanation twice?"
Indeed, it seems that King's three stories have nothing to do with each other on a physical level, except for the re-occurrence of Chuck Krantz in every one of them. If his character had been renamed in each act, there would have been very little to indicate that these three stories belong together. Each is written so that it works as a standalone piece. The only real connections between them (and we'll get there, I promise) are the thematic ones.
If we accept this idea, that Flanagan "fixed" the flaws in the story and that the filmed version is the ideal version of it (or as close to it as we can get), the question becomes "What is this story about?" In Flanagan's hands, it's a fairly anaemic story. I mean, yes, it's ruminations on mortality: the common ground between all stories is that Chuck must face his own future death, and we observe how his reaction changes, but here's the thing: it doesn't actually say anything about mortality.
More to the point: stories told back to front are tricky in that they need to make narrative sense both back to front (in the experience of the reader) and front to back (in the experience of the characters). Chuck's answer that he doesn't know why he started dancing, in Flanagan's interpretation, makes sense to the audience, but not to the character: Chuck is well aware of his dancing history.
Nowhere was this clearer to me, when viewing the film, than at the very end. As mentioned, in the original story Chuck confronts his own death, at the end of Act I, defiantly, essentially vowing to live his life to the fullest for as long as they last. This is as opposed to the defeatist attitude I got when watching the film (where it's quite possible I missed a line of voice-over narration). There, it seemed to me, Chuck is resigned to the same fate of waiting that his grandfather was imprisoned by. But the thing is that neither is a satisfying solution. Flanagan's solution is a downer even in the experience of the viewer, but both solutions are unsatisfactory when considered front to back. You see, we know what happened to Chuck later on. We know that he never danced after college beyond his ten-minute-stint on Boylston Street. We know he got the world's most boring job and stuck with it till the day he died. We know he got married and stuck with that same girl, "scrupulously faithful" to her, till the day he died. It doesn't matter what he thought upon seeing his own future death. For better or worse, we've already seen how this fight ends.
So, that was the simple solution: an inexperienced young King writing, a tired old King not editing, an overwhelmed Flanagan desperately trying to fix the problems, all trying to retell the same bland, emotionally inconsistent, thematically muddled tale. And you can believe that if you want to, but I find it unconvincing: we have seen the young King and what he was able to do; we have seen the old King and what he can write. Even if you want to be a conspiracy theorist about this and ask "Well, what if somebody else, not King, wrote this?" my answer would be "They would have done a better job." You don't ghostwrite a writer by making such a departure from his usual writing style, not to mention genre, to begin with. So, come with me, and let's go deeper down the rabbit hole to—
Once one begins thinking about "The Life of Chuck" as a parable, many things immediately click into place. Take, for example, the "three acts" structure, which on first viewing seemed so lop-sided (not just because each "act" deals with a completely different time scale, but also because the first two acts presented—"Act III" and "Act II"—don't really have a plot arc of their own: each deals with only a single event in Charles Krantz's life, with the former only extending its word length through progressive escalation; from a reader's perspective, these feel less like "acts" and more like prologues, leading up to the main event, which is "Act I"). Now, this structure makes sense both from Chuck's perspective and from the reader's perspective.
For Chuck, these are the culminations of his two major arcs from Act I: Act II is the completion of the story of Chuck's dancing, while Act III is the completion of the story of (Chuck's) death. In fact, these now feel less like real moments in Chuck's adult life, and more as a projection of his thoughts, his dilemma, when seeing his own death in the haunted room (which, this being a parable, we now understand as Chuck contemplating the idea of his death, with no need of a supernatural facilitator).
We have seen Chuck asking about the meaning of "I contain multitudes" in Walt Whitman's poem, and, given Chuck's young age at the time, it is natural to assume that he would, at least momentarily, imagine this idea interpreted literally. (Moreover, such a literal interpretation seems very much like a "What if" scenario that King himself would have been likely to contemplate.)
So, Chuck's dilemma of whether death is something to be waiting for or something to rail against with the power of vitality is embodied by Act III and Act II, respectively.
From a reader's perspective, it is also now clear why we need the temporal order reversed. If we had seen the acts in their chronological order, Chuck's dancing in Act II would not have surprised us, and we would not have shared so much in his delight at cutting loose in this manner. In Act III, if we had known that this is an embodiment of Chuck's mind, we would not have experienced the devastation of that collapsing world, and would not have witnessed the weight of this one, singular death—and by extension (if this is the weight reserved for the death of this most bland and boring of creations) of any death at all.
Finally it makes sense, why King needed two separate explanations for the richness of the inner world within each of us: the explanation in Act I is for Chuck, so that we can see that Chuck understands the gravity of his decisions; the explanation in Act III is for us, the readers, to let us know what we have witnessed and feel the weight of Chuck's death. King does not want us to have an a-ha moment about Act III while witnessing Act I (as is the effect in Flanagan's interpretation). He wants us to grieve, viscerally and in the moment, when Chuck's brain finally gives out and his end comes.
But if the entire story of "The Life of Chuck" is a parable, what is its moral? That is the central question, and I've delayed talking about it long enough.
This is the true dilemma of Chuck's life, and is the theme lurking behind every one of King's decisions, especially those that Flanagan "corrects". Perhaps most glaringly, we can see this in the identity of the person sitting next to Chuck at his death bed. Flanagan "corrects" this to be his wife, Ginny, which would have been the expected (and, indeed, cliché) choice, but in King's story it is his brother-in-law. Why would King make such a strange choice?
In fact, it is the brother-in-law who says "Thirty-nine great years. Thanks, Chuck." Think about that for a moment. Imagine that you are a reader who has already figured out that Act III is an embodiment of Chuck's death. Perhaps you've even figured out that these words, which reverberate throughout Act III, are the last words Chuck ever hears. What is the scene you are now expecting? I would guess it is almost identical to what Flanagan ended up filming: the tear-eyed wife and child sitting beside their dying loved-one's hospital bed; the kid asking "But why this young? He's only had thirty-nine years!", at which point his mother leans in to kiss her dying husband's forehead, whispering: "Thirty-nine great years." Pause for one dramatic tear to roll down her cheek. "Thanks, Chuck." Not a dry eye in the audience. And yet, King doesn't do any of that, and we need to ask why.
King is a fiction writer, this makes him a professional liar, and the one thing he will avoid at all costs is anything that will take a reader out of his story, anything that will jeopardise their suspense of disbelief. A choice such as this, placing these loving last words in the mouth of the brother-in-law, while the wife sits there without any line at all and without any apparent emotional reaction, this choice, sure to cause readers a double-take, is one he would never have made unless there was a good reason.
This is the first clue that leads us to look at how Chuck's wife is presented in the story, and what their entire relationship looks like, and once we do several things pop up immediately. First, we note how absent she is throughout the story. In the entirety of "The Life of Chuck", she is mentioned by name a grand total of 6 times: 5 times as "Ginny" and one last time as "Virginia". Compare that with Janice, who is mentioned by her name a full 16 times. Or with "Little Sister", a name Chuck uses for both Janice and his rock-band-time dance partner whose real name he forgot, which is used 13 times.
Even when Ginny is mentioned, whether by name or not, she is "off-screen" somewhere, away from Chuck. In Act III, her only "on-screen" appearance is at the very last moment of the "Act", and it is the first time her name is mentioned in the story at all and the only time it is mentioned in Act III. It is in the following paragraph:
Ginny, Brian, and Doug stand beside Chuck Krantz's bed, their hands joined. They wait as Chuck—husband, father, accountant, dancer, fan of TV crime shows—takes his last two or three breaths.
The expected reaction of the reader upon reading the first of the two sentences in this paragraph is "Who?" We have had at this time plenty of introduction to Brian and Doug. We know exactly who they are and what their relationship to Chuck is, but Ginny is mentioned here almost as an afterthought. It is only the second sentence in which the reader is finally given the information of who this Ginny-person is, and even that is worded so that it would take much mental effort to parse.
In Act II, Ginny is never present; the entire "Act" takes place while Chuck is on a work trip, away from her. Finally, in Act I, aside from one flash forward which we will get to in a second, her only appearance is, again, at the very end, and, again, it is the introduction of a new name for her, making us, again, ask "Who?": it is the first and only time in the entire story that she is ever referred to as "Virginia". That paragraph is:
Grandpa left him everything. The estate, once quite large, had shrunk considerably over the years since Grandpa's early retirement, but there was still enough to pay for Chuck's college education. Later on, the sale of the Victorian paid for the house (small but in a good neighborhood, with a lovely back room for a nursery) he and Virginia moved into after their honeymoon in the Catskills. As a new hire at Midwest Trust—a humble teller—he never could have bought the place without Grandpa's inheritance.
Not only is it a blink-and-you'll-miss-it mention, and not only is her identity again requiring some mental gymnastics, the juxtaposition of the mention of his marriage to Virginia in one sentence and his hire to Midwest Trust in the very next is instructive: King's writing creates multiple parallels in the text. I'll expand on this in a moment, but for now we see the wife and the job portrayed as parallels, and once we see it, we can't unsee it: both span exactly the same parts of Chuck's life (almost half of it); both are essentially never seen "on screen"; Act II represents Chuck taking a break from both of them; and regarding neither of them does Chuck ever show any form of attachment, emotional or otherwise.
To drive this last point home, consider Ginny's single on-screen appearance in Act I, in a flash forward to six months before Chuck's death. Ginny only appears there in two paragraphs, quite far apart in the narrative. Here is the first:
"What actually happened?" Ginny asked, not because it was important to her but because it seemed to be important to him. She didn't care much about whatever had happened to him in middle school. The doctors said he would probably be dead before Christmas. That was what mattered to her.
And here is the second:
"Why would you lie about that?" Ginny asked. She was smiling as she picked up his hand and kissed the scar. "I could understand it if you'd gone on to tell me how you beat the big bully to a pulp, but you never said that."
So, given that this is the one and only opportunity King gives us to get to know Ginny, what do we learn about her? We are not told her hair or eye colour. We have no indication that Chuck even looked at her. We have nothing from Chuck's side at all. From Ginny's side, we know that she cares about Chuck's life, but even that one display of warmth ("She was smiling as she picked up his hand and kissed the scar") gets twisted, because it is not Chuck she kisses but rather the scar, which is a symbol of death. This rhymes well with Ginny's Act III appearance, where the first thing we hear about her (without her name being mentioned and while she is "off screen") is that she pulled out Chuck's life support and is off in the hospital's chapel, praying for his soul. Ginny, in other words, cares about Chuck, but it is an abstract and distant form of caring. In reality, we are told, Ginny is actually killing Chuck: in Act I she is doing so metaphorically; in Act III—literally. (And as for the parallel between wife and job: Chuck self-describes as "an industrious ant working in that hill known as Midwest Trust".)
Compare this to how Janice is portrayed. Their entire joint dance is so brief it spans only three paragraphs, but it is absolutely steaming and completely full of innuendo. Here goes:
Janice breaks into a what-the-hell smile, tosses her purse down beside Chuck's briefcase, and takes his hands. Jared drops what he's been doing and turns into Charlie Watts, hammering like a soldier. [Chuck] twirls the girl, puts a hand on her trim waist, draws her to him, and quick-steps her past the drumkit, almost to the corner of the Walgreens building. Janice pulls away, waving her finger in a "naughty-naughty" gesture, then comes back and grasps both of Chuck's hands. As if they had practiced this a hundred times, he does another modified split and she shoots between his legs, a daring move that opens the wrap skirt to the top of one pretty thigh. There are a few gasps as she props herself on one tented hand and then springs back up. She's laughing.
"No more," Chuck says, patting his chest. "I can't—"
She springs to him and puts her hands on his shoulders and he can after all. He catches her by the waist, turning her on his hip and then setting her neatly on the pavement. He lifts her left hand and she spins beneath it like a hopped-up ballerina. There must be over a hundred people watching now, they crowd the sidewalk and spill into the street. They burst into fresh applause.
And what is Chuck's reaction to this? He is worried that Ginny might find out, and works through a plan of how to head off this news (never mind how unlikely it is that Ginny will ever hear of this—Chuck is just behaving like a person with a guilty conscience). In fact, this is another common theme in mentions of marital life: in Act III, Marty is lying to Felicia, telling her a white lie with the hope that it will make her feel better (and we are being told that while wives may have a sixth sense about their husbands, they don't always catch everything); in Act II, Chuck is contemplating how to hide his encounter with Janice from his wife; and then in Act I, we are told that Chuck has been keeping secrets from his wife. (He fesses up to the fact that he had made up a story about how he got his scar, but never tells her about the haunting of the Victorian house he grew up in.)
Grandpa left him everything. The estate, once quite large, had shrunk considerably over the years since Grandpa's early retirement, but there was still enough to pay for Chuck's college education. Later on, the sale of the Victorian paid for the house (small but in a good neighborhood, with a lovely back room for a nursery) he and Virginia moved into after their honeymoon in the Catskills. As a new hire at Midwest Trust—a humble teller—he never could have bought the place without Grandpa's inheritance.
demonstrating that Chuck's wife and his job are both symbols of domestication and death—indeed, for Chuck domestication and death might be synonymous. But the same paragraph also poses Chuck's grandfather and the haunted Victorian house he raised Chuck in as more parallels of the same, and, indeed, both are reminders of the haunted room, which literally shows Chuck his death.
In fact, "The Life of Chuck" is crowded with such parallels, from which we can learn much. For example, recall that Ginny, Chuck's wife, in one of her only on-screen appearances, asks Chuck: "Why would you lie about that? I could understand it if you'd gone on to tell me how you beat the big bully to a pulp, but you never said that." This is a direct parallel to Chuck's college girlfriend (also only shown once, in a flash forward, also never given any description or any indication that Chuck ever noticed her physically; her name is never even mentioned) who asks him: "what makes you think you're a main character in anything but your own mind?"
What we are told here, in effect, is that steady relationships with the opposite sex mean for Chuck that his life is no longer his own. Any attempt to cast himself as a main character is either a fantasy or a lie.
This is by contrast to Chuck's dance partners. Janice's introduction is "[H]e sees a pretty young woman [...] wearing a filmy pink blouse and a red wrap skirt. She's staring at him with wide, fascinated eyes." Little sister's introduction is "[T]he lead's little sister [...] usually came ditty-bopping down the stairs in her Bermuda shorts. She'd station herself between their two Fender amps [and] waggle her hips and butt in exaggerated fashion." And Cat McCoy's is "Cat was not only gorgeous, she was four inches taller than he was—but he loved to dance with her, and the feeling was mutual. When they got together, they caught the rhythm and let it fill them. They looked into each other's eyes [...] and laughed for the joy of it." All three are described very physically, very much as objects of attraction.
And all three dance partners are parallels of each other, a fact that is driven home for example by two of them being referred to by Chuck as "Little sister" and by the fact that both Janice and Cat McCoy have one stormy dance with Chuck after which the excited crowd calls for an encore, but Chuck and his dance partner are "smart enough to know when to quit" (Cat McCoy) and "gotta quit while [they're] ahead" (Janice). King is literally telling us that the only passionate relationships in Chuck's life are those that are purposefully kept as one-time events. It's as literal an advocation of one-night stands as he could have written.
But is it true, you may ask, that Chuck views these relationships sexually? King is not shy about this. Chuck's one dialogue with "little sister" looks like it was lifted straight from the book of awkward teenage flirtations in a will-they-or-won't-they Hollywood RomCom meet-cute:
LITTLE SISTER: "Just between you and me, you sing like old people fuck."
CHUCK: "Like you'd know, monkeybutt."
LITTLE SISTER: "I like to watch you dance, though."
For the other two, King is equally explicit. He does so by using the old trope that anything denied too often is invariably true. When Chuck meets with Janice, the all-knowing-but-unreliable narrator says "He has a wife to whom he is scrupulously faithful." When describing Cat McCoy: "Chuck didn't expect romance."
I don't mean to insinuate that the narrator is lying to us here, and that Chuck actually had not be faithful to his wife. The narrator has been shown to lie to us before, but this was signalled by vague geography. Here, we are in Boston's Boylston street, as concrete an address as we're ever going to get. This is the one place in the narrative that feels real. King is telling us that apocalyptic scenarios are made up and that haunted houses don't exist, but (he says) there may come a day where, away from your wife on some work trip a pretty thing half your age will look at you with "wide, fascinated eyes" and will literally fall into your lap. That can happen. And then (he says) the question becomes: "What do you do about it?"
In King's original, the situation, on the face of it, while quite different is nevertheless equally bad: we may believe that Chuck doesn't love any of the people around his death bed and doesn't spend a moment's thought about them, but what about everyone in Act I and Act II? Why are Chuck's grandparents never mentioned? What about his parents and his unborn sister? (When the English teacher asks Chuck who he thinks "I contain multitudes" refers to, these three are the first his mind jumps to.) And what about Cat McCoy? Or Janice Halliday? Surely, some of these people should have made an appearance in Chuck's fantasy-land. But they don't.
Here, I believe, the true solution is the meta-narrative. It makes no sense for the world of Marty and Felicia to be Chuck's inner world. King makes so much of a point throughout the narrative that Chuck is a boring accountant. We should find it incredulous that he would invent a world as rich as this. Marty and Felicia are not Chuck's inner world, they are King's—King the writer, who is flexing here by showing that he can invent an entire world for this purpose, without re-purposing any of the characters from anywhere else in the story.
This, as demonstrated, is a parable, and King has populated it with many of his own avatars, including Marty, the young Chuck, and young Chuck's English teacher. The parable is clearest and most explicit when King is pulling the strings directly. We can see him doing this with Chuck: Chuck is not a real person; he is a marionette in the hands of King. This is the real solution to the question "Why did you start dancing?" in Act II, which Chuck himself does not know how to answer. It isn't because of his impending death. It isn't because of anything from Act I. It's because this is what King wants him to do, against everything that defined him for the 20 years prior to this impulsive act.
So, no, the narrator probably isn't "lying" when it comes to the Boylston street scene. Chuck himself clearly stays faithful to his wife, because that's the kind of guy he is. He is the kind of guy who wants wine, but chooses to order Evian because that's the prudent and responsible thing. King, meanwhile, who got Chuck to dance in the first place, is delivering to us the moral of the story: "Take the goddamn wine," he says. "What does it matter? You only have nine more months to live, and in the end this is the only thing you will think ever made your life worth living."
And while none of us knows how much longer we have to live, King's point (exemplified in Act I) is that there is always a number. It's always a certain number of months. Do you really need to know the exact number in order to allow yourself to live a little?
This, ultimately, is why King chooses to end the story where he does, with young Chuck, having faced his death, thinking "I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes." This is precisely what he was thinking after dancing with Cat McCoy, before a chain-link fence brought him down to earth and reminded him of his mortality. This time around, even with the clearest reminder of his mortality, Chuck does not back down: I deserve to be wonderful, he thinks. I deserve joy.
Young Chuck is here a stand-in for King himself, and Act II Chuck is a stand-in for the reader. King wants to end the story on a reminder that Chuck, before his domestication, before the inevitability of his death held a foothold in his soul, once believed himself to be wonderful and deserving of happiness.
As mentioned, King makes no secret of the fact that his story is structured like A Christmas Carol. It is a cautionary tale: all three of the acts are warnings for the reader to not fall into the traps that Chuck has fallen into. And just like in A Christmas Carol, King's ultimate bid is that it is never too late to change, never too late, in Chuck's case, to break free of your domestication, and have the goddamn wine. You deserve it, is King's parting shot for the reader.
This is the theme that runs through the entire story, beginning all the way in Act III, with the narrative about Marty and Felicia. Marty's quest in the story, becoming increasingly desperate as the act progresses, is to reach Felicia in time to tell her that he loves her. But he is too late, because he did not do it until the world was in truly dire straits. So, from the get go this is what King is telling us: do not waste your life until it's too late, thinking that opportunities will always come again. When opportunity knocks, take it. And it is this message that he carries through Act II and straight to the very end of the last act.
Flanagan's answer is clearly a cop-out, giving no answer at all. King's, meanwhile, is a much more intricately crafted answer... but ultimately rings hollow: while the reader may associate getting the scar with the events inside the haunted room, for Chuck these two events happened four very busy years apart, and I just don't buy the connection.
But I think King left us with more than enough clues to tell us Chuck's real reason.
For this, we need to discuss something else that happens in Act I, which we so far didn't mention, although in Flanagan's Act I it is the main plot. Whenever dancing is mentioned in Act I, we repeatedly hear how short young Chuck is. This makes his dancing a bit awkward, because he is paired with dance partners who are much taller than he is. No one, including Cat McCoy and including Chuck himself, makes a big deal out of this in the original story. Cat merely offers Chuck some technical solutions, and he uses them. Flanagan clearly saw that something was off here: it's a plot thread that just peters out and is never mentioned again. He had the option to cut it out, but instead made it a central pivot: Chuck must muster his courage in order to dance with Cat at the Fall Fling.
Cute though Flanagan's solution is, it's a conflict completely removed from all other conflicts in the story, and its inclusion makes no narrative sense. So, why is it there? Well, it's because it does have a payoff: Chuck's diminutive stature is the reason why Cat's boyfriend Doug is so blasé about Chuck's free-spirited dancing with Cat. He simply never sees Chuck as any form of competition. It never occurs to him that Cat would be interested in Chuck for anything romantic, and rightfully so.
Suddenly, Chuck's lie about Doug pushing him into the chain-link fence makes perfect sense: Chuck has been making a power fantasy for himself, but unlike the power fantasy that Ginny alluded to, Chuck has no interest in assaulting Doug (whom he describes as "a cheerful enough galoot"). What Chuck wants is for Doug—and by extension Cat herself and other dance-worthy girls—to see him as a romantic contender. Chuck knows he can get the girls that he wants for a dance, but he wishes he could make that dance into something more.
This not only answers the question of why he lied, and why his "coming clean" was no more than a half-truth, it also puts into new perspective his encounter in Act II, with a girl who looks at him "with wide, fascinated eyes" and ultimately changes completely her plans for the rest of the day just in order to spend the evening with him. Chuck is at this point no longer the "seventh-grade midget unworthy of notice" that he was at the Fall Fling. His wish has now been granted. The girl is interested. Now, the choice of what to do about it is his.
Names in stories are important and carry meaning, but they cannot be too on-point or the effect is diminished. I think there's a lot to be said, for example, about why Chuck, the human marionette, is called "Chuck", a word that as a noun means a piece of meat and as a verb means to throw away, discard or give up. Or why "Felicia", literally meaning "happy", is the object of Marty's quest for happiness. I leave it to the reader to decode other names in the story, like "Janice Halliday", or like my personal favourite: "Cat McCoy".
But I think King has been holding himself back a little with some of his naming choices. My personal head-canon is that somewhere, in an earlier draft of the story there are better names for the characters, which King decided at some point to step back from, because they would have been too on-the-nose.
What first made me think this is the name "Virginia" for Chuck's wife. On its own, this is a very reasonable name for this character, projecting the lack of passion that Chuck feels towards her. But then I saw how every time she is referred to, she is referred to as "Ginny", except for the one final time, at the very end of the narrative, where she is called "Virginia". It is as if this full name is meant to be some great reveal, some great twist—but it isn't.
My head-canon is that "Ginny" was originally "Vicky". With this change, the big reveal at the end is that Vicky is "Victoria", which would make her a kissing cousin to the haunted, death-displaying Victorian house in which Chuck grew up. We mentioned previously that Ginny and the house are both parallels, both symbolising death and domestication, much like Chuck's job, and I believe King wanted this name reveal to be the final gut-punch to deliver this message... But, again, perhaps it was too on-the-nose, and he decided to step back from it.
A more confusing question is why "Doug" is both the name of Ginny's brother and Cat McCoy's boyfriend. On the face of it, there is absolutely no reason for two characters in such a short novella to have the same name "by accident", especially in a work where so many of the side characters are unnamed. But what reason would there be to connect them? One is a melancholy intellectual, brother of the wife that Chuck is faithful to but doesn't want; the other is a cheerful galoot, boyfriend to the girl that Chuck wants but can't have. They are, if anything, complete opposites.
My best explanation here—and it's admittedly a shot in the dark—is that Doug (Ginny's brother) and Brian (Ginny and Chuck's son), two people who are only ever seen together, originally had their names reversed. It makes sense to me that Chuck would want to call his son Doug, after the cheerful galoot who he always wanted to be, the one who gets the girl. It would also connect the son as another parallel, like the mother, in the theme of death and domestication. I mean, consider this paragraph, describing Chuck at the beginning of Act II, from which I previously quoted a brief portion but which I am reproducing here in full:
Now his sensible Samuel Windsor Oxfords are taking him for an afternoon walk. Not very exciting, but quite pleasant. Quite pleasant is enough these days. His life is narrower than the one he once hoped for, but he's made his peace with that. He understands that narrowing is the natural order of things. There comes a time when you realize you're never going to be the President of the United States and settle for being president of the Jaycees instead. And there's a bright side. He has a wife to whom he is scrupulously faithful, and an intelligent, good-humored son in middle school. He also has only nine months to live, although he doesn't know it yet. The seeds of his end—the place where life narrows to a final point—are planted deep, where no surgeon's knife will ever go, and they have lately begun to awaken. Soon they will bear black fruit.
In typical King expert fashion, he weaves his themes together into a single tapestry, and does so within the confines of a single paragraph: it begins with Chuck's domestication, continues with his faithfulness, his wife, his son, and then onto his death. All five are, for King, one.
I suspect King opted early on not to call the son "Doug". There are too many reasons against. For one, why would a mother name her son after the bully that scarred her husband? For another, the son, hearing the brother-in-law wax poetical about entire worlds within each person, parallels the young Chuck, hearing these same truths from his English teacher. (And both the son and young Chuck are parallels in other ways as well. For example, both witness the death of older Chuck.) Adding a parallel to Cat's boyfriend would have been too confusing, perhaps. Having said that, all four of young Chuck, the English teacher, the son and the brother-in-law are avatars for King himself, so for me naming the brother-in-law by this name, rather than the son, doesn't makes the confusion go entirely away.
Whether there is any truth to these crack-pot theories I don't know, only that they make some sense. It's the kind of thing that one tries in early drafts and rejects later. But now, let us take off our tinfoil hats because I want to discuss a more serious topic.
To such an audience, infidelity would have been a tough sell, which explains, in part, why King works so hard to hide it deep in the subtext. But knowing it to be a tough sell he plants the seeds for it early, for example by easing us into the idea of extra-marital sex via the example of the fictional Marty and Felicia, who, we are told, have relations, albeit infrequent, despite being divorced.
Not only that, Act III has various almost-imperceptible jabs at Christian religion. Ignoring the very fact that our main protagonist is divorced, something that may irk some Catholic readers, Ginny is shown pulling the plug on Chuck's life support, while at the same time praying for his soul, and, it is implied, getting the blessing of the local priest to do it. (In fact, it is insinuated that she may be praying more for her own absolution in this matter than for her husband's soul. The entirety of the pulling-the-plug subplot, much like other parts of the conversation between Brian and Doug which we have skipped here for some semblance of brevity, is, of course, entirely absent from Flanagan's script. There, there are no moral dilemmas, no conflicted spouses, and no jabs against religion, only pure saccharine, and these tonal differences are quite jarring against Flanagan's almost word-for-word reproduction of King's original tale.)
My favourite jab about religion in Act III must be, however, the very last word of it: "Black". Chuck's world literally cuts to black upon his death. Whatever concern Ginny showed to Chuck's soul in her prayers at the chapel, whatever assurances were given by the local priest, there is no bright light, there is no afterlife, no angels are singing. It's just cut to black. The world has ended.
All this, I assume is very much intentional. King, as said, knows his audience. A religious jab that I am not so sure was actually meant is in Act I, where we are told that Chuck's father was Jewish but Chuck's mother wasn't. In Jewish tradition, religion follows from the mother. So, Chuck is not Jewish, but he is raised in the Jewish home of his paternal grandparents. This makes him a man without religion. He answers to no god.
Either way, it is clear that King is not ignoring the religious implications of the infidelity he is advocating. He is just promoting here a secular point of view, one without heaven or hell, and tells his readers to do what is right for them without fear of divine retribution.
It is interesting to note that the genre King is most known for, the horror genre, typically structures its stories as morality plays (evil is unleashed due to some original sin, but is defeated due to the protagonist's redemption), but here, in order to reject divine retribution and even many secular ethical constructs, King also chooses to abandon the horror genre in favour of telling a dark fable, where the supernatural, like the natural, is merely oblivious, rather than a manifestation of a vindictive god.
Still, I cannot fault King for having a message, however unpopular, sticking to his guns, and writing an extremely well-crafted piece to carry this subtext without preaching it, or even exposing it to any degree that may illicit backlash.
As can be seen, in the choice between the option where this story was written by an incompetent or uncaring author and the option in which this was a clever author leaving us breadcrumbs to unravel a hidden subtext, I am squarely of the opinion that the odd structure of this narrative is too well explained by the latter, to the extent that I refuse to believe that this was all some big coincidence.
I cannot say the same for Mike Flanagan's film adaptation. I do not know whether Flanagan was truly unaware of the original subtext or whether he saw it and decided to sanitise the tale. Given how religiously he adheres to the rest of the text, it feels to me more like he did not understand its beating heart, so decided to mess with it as little as possible. He just "cleaned out" those bits that seemed "off" or "superfluous". Either way, he created an end product that carries no message.
Though King's message is one that rubs me, personally, the wrong way, I still think his deliberateness in weaving it in and his craft in doing so elevates this story in a way that the sanitised film isn't.
I am a fan of originality, and fully endorse King's freedom to put in his stories whatever message he wishes. I have done here my best to "de-fang" the story, to allow people to read it, and even enjoy it, without needing to be ambushed by its subtextual propaganda.
Whether this analysis helps in that or not, I will let you be the judge.