The Locked Door of Chuck

When I saw The Life of Chuck, I thought that its strength came from its execution, not its ambiguity. Its big ideas aren’t completely original, self-consciously so: it explicitly references ideas from Carl Sagan and Walt Whitman, and has characters deliver lengthy monologues explaining what they mean. I thought that it was a straightforward story, well told, with the fantastic elements and the story structure making its familiar ideas have more impact.

But not everything fits together perfectly neatly. I was having a conversation with my friend Rain where she pointed out how the story didn’t seem to fit the theme: if Chuck as a teenager had a vision of his death, reminding him that life is fleeting and wonderful and we should make the most of it, then why did he choose an occupation that he said bored him?

The middle act, which almost entirely consists of his spontaneously dancing with a stranger, has a definite sense of melancholy and regret to it. He can’t — or possibly chooses not to — explain why he did it. He has brief flashes of happy memories, which we see played out later, but also suggest that he’s all but forgotten them as an adult.

I’d thought that the predominant, overarching theme of the movie is that every one of us, even those of us whose lives seem mundane or unremarkable, contains an entire universe of lived experiences, connections with other human beings, and moments of joy. An excellent message, but it seems to be at odds with the image that we’re shown at the end: a young man ignoring his memento mori moment and instead living a life of quiet regret. The rest of the movie asserts that we shouldn’t be quick to sum up anyone’s life so simply — he’s not “just” an accountant — but the second act devotes so much time to the idea that these moments of expansive joy are rare and fleeting, and that he’s disappointed to be just an accountant.

The locked door to the cupola, which is ominously hinted near the beginning of the movie, and makes up the bulk of the last (first?) act, seems almost superfluous. Honestly, I’d thought it was simply King wanting to insert a supernatural element into the story as a vaguely horror-tinged reinforcement of the idea that “life is fleeting.” And it was a little bit of a shame, since I thought the idea was so much more beautifully and memorably expressed in the first (last?) act. That seemed to say everything it needs to, on a grand, cosmic scale: “even in the face of the end of everything, our connections to each other are most important.” Why follow up with so much story about the cupola, if the characters don’t learn anything from it?

It was starting to feel like one of those “lights out” puzzles, where flipping one switch on ends up flipping another two off. There are three mostly-related but distinct ideas in the story, and settling on any one dominant theme seems to invalidate the others.

But I think it’s interesting that the story¹As I said before, I haven’t read the original, so I don’t know what was changed for the movie, but a synopsis gave me the impression that they’re largely identical. chose to explicitly highlight two themes that are kind of at odds with each other. Sagan’s idea of compressing cosmic time into a single calendar year not only illustrates the vast scale of the cosmos, but also emphasizes how ephemeral we are not just as individuals, but as an entire civilization. Whitman’s declaration that “I contain multitudes” suggests that our existences are vast; we contain entire universes and limitless potential.

So what if the story isn’t just illustrating those ideas, like I’d originally assumed, but is deliberately setting them against each other? Not just repeating the ideas, but putting them in conflict with each other, to ask the audience to reconsider what they really mean?

I suspect that I was too quick to assume that The Life of Chuck was essentially three separate stories, each with a theme that stood on its own:

1. Basically a modern, fantastic, and apocalyptic version of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, showing characters making and re-establishing important connections with each other at the end of the world; i.e. even if our time with each other is limited, it’s the only thing that matters
2. A moment of uplifting joy and genuine connection with strangers; i.e. even the most seemingly mundane life can be filled with unexpected wonder
3. A Stephen King short story about a boy learning about love and loss and what makes him special, meeting the dozens of people who will continue to live on in his memory for the rest of his life, all with a supernatural horror element of a room that foretells death; i.e. life is short, so make the most of it

And I’d been too quick to assume that the choice to present the three parts out of order was a stylistic flourish, a wry acknowledgement that we know how the story’s going to end, because we all know how every story ultimately ends.

But what I hadn’t considered was the possibility that The Life of Chuck wasn’t a case of King taking a break from horror to tell a life-affirming story, but instead using horror to tell a life-affirming story. I think I’d gotten so distracted by the “life is beautiful” and “young boy coming of age” moments that I wasn’t thinking a lot about Chuck’s grandfather (Mark Hamill) and his role in the story.

We do see the locked door earlier, when Marty sees it but passes it by. This plants the image in the audience’s mind and suggests that it’s the big mystery that will unlock the “meaning” of the movie. If I remember correctly, he passes it by in favor of going out on foot to reconnect with his ex-wife Felicia.

Later, Chuck’s grandfather warns him not to go through the locked door, finally accidentally revealing one night what he saw in the cupola. This just makes Chuck even more curious, so he sneaks up one night to open the door while his grandfather is sleeping. He’s stopped by his grandfather, who has the vision himself, and warns Chuck that he just can’t open the door. It’s only years later, after his grandfather’s death, that Chuck enters the cupola and has the vision that ends the movie.

We also see throughout that Chuck’s grandfather is kind, loving, and takes care of his family, but he spends all of his time inside with his accounting books and his alcoholism. I’d taken this to be just a contrast against Chuck’s grandmother, who’s shown to have a more joyful life, teaching Chuck to love dancing. I thought it was a “two roads diverged in a wood” lesson for Chuck, which made it even stranger that he seemed to end up choosing his grandfather’s path.

It doesn’t feel like a horror story in the slightest, since everyone involved is safe, content, and loving, their lives filled with periods of extreme sadness, but ultimately able to rebound into happiness. They just happen to have this weird locked room in the house. (And we find out that the building was eventually torn down, seemingly with no supernatural Poltergeist-like consequences).

So it hadn’t fully occurred to me that going into the cupola leaves a person cursed. Not cursed to die, since it’s strongly implied that it only shows what’s already fated to happen, but cursed to know. It’s one thing to know that we’re going to die; it’s an entirely different thing to be certain of it, because we’ve seen it. They’re not even granted the knowledge of specifically when it’ll happen, but just the undeniable certainty of it.

The curse didn’t kill Chuck’s grandfather, and it didn’t really ruin his life, either. It just kind of numbed it. He wasn’t haunted enough to be driven mad by it, but he did seem to be entirely focused on practical concerns and on preparation for his own inevitable death. He says “the waiting is the hard part,” which is a line that Chuck repeats at the end, after he has his own vision. In the moment, it feels like an ominous underscore of the “memento mori” idea — we all know this is coming, so make the most of your life while you can.

But in the context of everything else, it feels entirely different. It suggests that from the moment they went into the cupola, their lives slightly shifted from living them into waiting for them to end. The end credits play over a peaceful, sunlit view of the empty cupola, which in the moment, after the first act of a coming-of-age story, suggested a bittersweet conclusion: “this is the final missing piece of the story of a good man with a life well lived.” But taken in context with everything else, there’s a more ominous undercurrent: “this was the moment when Chuck’s life changed from living it, to waiting for it to end.”

In effect, it’s not an expression of “memento mori” but a rejection of it. It says that if you spend your whole life thinking of its ending, it doesn’t spur you to live life to fullest. Instead, it causes you to think of it as a story with a finite conclusion. Where everything that happens is leading up to and informing that moment, and you can only make sense of the entire thing once it’s all over.

By starting the story with its ending — and not just the end of one life, but the end of an entire universe — The Life of Chuck is essentially saying, “Yeah, no shit this is all going to end. That’s not the important part.” It’s about living in the moment. Treasuring all the moments of connection we have with other people, not because they’re imparting valuable lessons that will be meaningful at some point in the future, but because they’re meaningful right now.

The signs saying “39 great years!” and “Thanks Chuck!” are a little more ominous in that context. I’d initially taken them as an uplifting send-off, to take the edge off of the existential horror: he’d led a good life, and he was appreciated by the people who loved him. Plus a reminder that there’s so much more going on with people than what we can see on the surface: just looking at a sweet retirement message for a seemingly average man gives no indication that he “contained multitudes.”

But reconsidering them after seeing the rest of the story, there’s a more sinister idea, which is that his life was largely defined by that simple summation at its ending. He was almost entirely absent from his own story, between the moment he saw his own death and the moment he died. All except for that one remarkable time that he chose to live in the moment, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain.

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  As I said before, I haven’t read the original, so I don’t know what was changed for the movie, but a synopsis gave me the impression that they’re largely identical.