A focal point of Stephen King narratives is the motif of a boy and a girl dancing in a US small town, ideally on a sports field, a baseball or football field or a gym where the high school dances take place. From “Carrie” to “Christine” to King’s Kennedy novel “11.22.63,” the image repeats itself as the apex of precarious, but in the moment absolute, innocent happiness. For King, this exists alongside similar visions of small town America where nice people stand by each other and chat on the terrace and garden fences on summer evenings. King’s communitarian utopia seemed conservative in the 1970s, today “conservative“ America deems the friendly family writer Stephen King to be a subversive communist.

There are two similar dance scenes at the center of Stephen King’s short story “The Life of Chuck” from 2020 which Mike Flanagan (“Midnight Mass,“ DR. SLEEP) has now adapted. But at first it’s about the apocalypse. The internet goes down, sinkholes block the streets, California has been ruptured by an earthquake, a volcano has broken out in Germany. There are posters and ads with the words “39 great years, thanks, chuck“ everywhere. Misery brings newly divorced Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his wife Felicia back together. Then Chuck’s story begins, from the end.

This beginning, which shows the end, is contrasted above all by two dance scenes, one between 39-year-old accountant Charles "Chuck" Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) and 22-year-old Janice (Annalisa Basso), and one between 13-year-old Chuck (Benjamin Pajak) and the slightly older Cat (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). Mike Flanagan lays golden evening light over the dance scene between Chuck and Janice, who dance to the rhythm of a street musician, in a pedestrian area, without knowing each other. He focuses on details – the swaying hips, the dropped briefcase, two fingers stretched in the air, picking up the rhythm – and then goes into a wide shot, transforming the everyday environment into the stage of a Busby Berkeley musical. It's a magnificently staged scene.

THE LIFE OF CHUCK, most of all the film trailer, is full of lines that seem “inspirational,” like in a self-help book. Many critics understood the film as an enthusiastic affirmation of life despite all of the suffering and certain death, but it’s not that simple. One idea in King’s story is that a world dies when an artist dies, as was particularly clear recently with David Lynch's death. The extension of this thought is that that goes for every person, also for an accountant who once danced in a pedestrian area. The destruction of these worlds is certain. “The Life of Chuck” is Stephen King’s “Waste Land,” even though Walt Whitman’s optimistic “Song of Myself” is quoted again and again: “I am large, I contain multitudes.“

Against the ruins, King sets his ideal of fleeting happiness and a self-determined community that joins together and sticks together of its own free will. All that remains of life and of the world is a dance, even if it will be forgotten at some point. Mike Flanagan’s adaptation seems more sentimental than it is at first glance. But maybe that’s also just a matter of perspective.

Tom Dorow

Translation: Elinor Lewy