Series: Dance in films
This article contains spoilers
The Life of Chuck (2024) is a film adaptation of Stephen King’s short story by director Mike Flanagan, anchored by Tom Hiddleston in the title role. Divided into three acts that unfold in reverse, from an apocalyptic present to a sad childhood, the film traces the life of book-keeper Chuck Krantz through a collection of scenes of ordinary joy and quiet grief, starting as a mystery and evolving into a tender celebration of what the body remembers.
Hiddleston is no stranger to dancing in front of a camera or on a stage, and in The Life of Chuck, his lighthearted and childlike approach to movement is key to his character: an ordinary yet luminous man, carrying memories and multitudes.
The key to the movie is given at the very beginning, with a student reading Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, particularly the line I contain multitudes. It will come back other times, and finally explained to a young Chuck as the memories we carry, the multitude of people, places, and experiences that we encounter across a lifetime. ‘But what happens to those multitudes when someone dies?’ asks Chuck, and it becomes clearer that the film presents not an alternative timeline (some characters are the same both in the present time and in his childhood, and yet do not seem to know who he is) but actually Chuck’s memories progressively crumbling as he draws closer to death.
If memory melts first, bodily memory seems to last longest: dance memories constitute the centre of the movie, and the whole personal universe of Chuck’s character.
The characters in the third chapter (that is, the one that opens the movie) are emotionally stuck in the wait for the end, and find comfort in the physical acts of sitting next to each other, walking together, or holding hands as the universe explodes in front of them.
The viral dance scene appears in the central chapter, explaining further the idea of multitudes. The man that on the street who looks like an average accountant – and to whom a drum player on the street dedicates a repetitive sound with no groove, expecting him to simply walk past – contains in reality an enthusiastic dancer. Chuck stops near the drums, leaves his bag on the street, and starts first keeping the time with his finger (like the glimpse of a wooden spoon on a pot that appears suddenly on screen), and with his hips.
His movement expands, in the legs and in a fast spin, in a series of kicks and in moonwalks that help him connect with the drummer. She adds groove to the beat, and a woman in the crowd starts responding. Chuck invites her to join him in a mix of bossa nova, chacha and swing, which leads not to showing off their abilities, but to a shared moment of pure joy.
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A luminous insistence that life – however fragile – deserves to be danced
What Chuck offers here is not a performance, but a rupture in the ordinary: a reminder that joy can be radical. A luminous insistence that life – however fragile (a sudden headache reminds us of the sad future awaiting Chuck) – deserves to be danced.
It’s only in the first chapter (the final one, in this timeline) that we find out where his dance abilities come from: music and dancing were his grandmother’s way to get back to life after a terrible accident that had left Chuck an orphan.
Dance was his way to survive grief and escape the path that marked his grandfather’s life, with its haunting wait for the end rather than the celebration of every day. Dance was his way to deal with the not-so-small challenges of growing up: insecurities about his body, his role in the school society, and his identity. Dance was his way to bring together all the multitudes in one, sharing with spectators – and us only – what he feels when he’s dancing: ‘I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.’
In a film preoccupied with endings, every dance scene is a beginning, a fleeting but fierce refusal to let the world close without one last shared moment of grace: ‘Later, he’ll lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping, and enter a land of pain so great he will wonder why God made the world. What he will remember, occasionally, is how he stopped and dropped his briefcase and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums. And he will think, that is why God made the world.’ ●