i am large, i contain unsightly facial hairs
the life of chuck presents an alternative to doomscrolling // materialists attempts an alternative to romanticism
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release and to feature seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck and Celine Song’s Materialists. This newsletter comes out every Wednesday, which despite my best intentions still means Friday.
Apocalypse anxiety is trending right now, as it has been for most of human existence. Historically, the nature of the end has been gatekept by whatever religious authority holds eschatological control over the populace, but in our enlightened era any content creator can pump out their theory of global collapse in an endless stream until Kingdom actually Comes. Ecological disaster, fresh pandemics, geopolitical catastrophe, A.I. takeover, garden-variety Biblical harbingers - we’re living in the Cheesecake Factory of existential anxiety. The Life of Chuck saves you the trouble of picking your poison and mixes them all into an Armageddon Iced Tea. It opens with the revelation, sent through the dying gasps of the internet, that 80% of California has broken off into the ocean. That’s just the tip of the melted iceberg: in the next 20 minutes, we learn that suicides are up, bees are extinct, the heartland is on fire, a volcano has obliterated Europe - if someone has worried about it, The Life of Chuck manifests it. Steven King knows how to get to the jugular, and this time he bypasses the supernatural and heads straight for the CNN newsreel.
The Life of Chuck isn’t supposed to be a bummer, though: it’s a film whose trailer makes allusions to Shawshank Redemption and features triumphant clips of bespectacled people dancing. The second King adaptation of 2025 and the eighth film from sensitive horror guy Mark Flanagan, The Life of Chuck is a reverse-order movie in three parts. The opening Part III centers on a teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and a nurse (Karen Gillen) as they take on what appears to be the end of the world - the aforementioned disasters plus a handful of astronomical indicators that suggest this isn’t just the end of the planet but the universe in total. The only things that offer order to the unraveling cosmos are intrusive voice-over narration from Nick Offerman, repeated references to Section 51 of "Leaves of Grass," and an omnipresent retirement ad for someone named Chuck. As we track backward we begin to realize that things are not as they seem: *the* world isn't ending so much as *a* world is ending, and all of this very much has to do with Chuck (Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, and newcomer Benjamin Pajak) a guy with a lifelong love of dancing and a Victorian cupola with a dark secret. It's all filmed like an Olympics credit card commercial, and it creates good enough vibes that my Friday matinee gave it an ovation like we were the premiere audience at TIFF.
The key to this film’s emotional impact is its reverse structure, which attempts to re-contextualize something awful into a happy ending. Maybe I’m over-reliant on a naïve belief in free will, but I find something despairing about a plot structure contingent on that kind of certainty. I think all the time about Roger Ebert's review of the reverse narrative of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: "Life doesn't work this way." I think he’s right: no offense to the Calvinists or rational determinists who might be reading this, but a definite conclusion strikes me as contradictory to the nature of life. I suppose yes, we will definitely die, and I suppose yes, that goes for all life on this planet, but the whole point of the future is that it hasn't happened yet. The charm of the apocalypse is that it's supposed to come like a thief in the night, not at a set conclusion that was already revealed in an early peak at Act III.
The Life of Chuck suggests that the beauty in life comes from knowing the end and refusing to let it define us. “The agony was in the waiting,” (or something like that) says Nick Offerman as Chuck’s actuary grandpa (Mark Hamill) awaits his mathematically calculated death date. Flanagan wants us to overcome that agony through affirmation. As his film regularly remind us, we are big, we are beautiful, and we contain multitudes. But what's the point of being big and beautiful if you know exactly how your Whitmanesque balloon is going to pop? Living happens in the moment prior to what comes next, and in my opinion that works best when you’re open to the possibility that the following moment might include continued aliveness. That openness is hope: the obligatory acceptance of a glorious future that you can’t be certain will happen. But I don't think Steven King - or from what I know of him, Mike Flanagan - are very interested in hope. Hope doesn’t seem to be very popular in general right now. Despair certainly sells more ad space.
Maybe the TIFF audience that gave this a standing ovation and the Minneapolis matinee that gave it a more smattering one aren't very hopeful either - and maybe what The Life of Chuck distills is exactly the elixir that a certain sort of not-very-hopeful person needs. If that's the case, wonderful - anything that helps you get your head out of the doomscroll dumpster fire is good in my book. If you like Walt Whitman's vibe but don't have the patience to read him - if you experience unrepentant apocalypse anxiety and need an out that doesn't involve Infinity Stones - if what's been missing from your life is an extended Mark Hamill monologue about math - then go see The Life of Chuck. It left me completely cold. If anything it got me shifting in my seat, itching to get out and face whatever fresh hell I'd get to encounter next.
The most remarkable thing about Materialists is that the opening extreme-closeup clearly features Dakota Johnson’s mustache hair. This is a movie where characters regularly allude to the extremes they'll go to manifest an optimized body, and Celine Song starts it off with the off-hand inclusion of a real-life human feature that usually only makes it to screen as a set-up for an Everybody Loves Raymond joke.
What I appreciate about Celine Song, in Materialists just as much as her 2023 debut Past Lives, is that she really is a materialist filmmaker. Not in the pejorative sense that the characters in Materialists use the word, but in the Marx-ish way of emphasizing resource-based reality as it actually exists. Her characters exist in a world with physical limits, and they have to make decisions based on the allocation of their resources. The characters in Past Lives deal with laggy Skype calls, messy apartments, and the air-quality impact of smoking cigarettes indoors. Song limits her script to those realties without belaboring their existence. Materialists, with its upper-lip hairs and its (mostly) realistic New York apartments, takes the same approach to a somewhat less believable story: high-power matchmaker Lucy (Johnson) gets romanced by ludicrously wealthy/handsome hedge-fund guy Harry (Pedro Pascal) and has to choose between him and her ever-present ex-boyfriend, poor/handsome theater actor John (Chris Evans). This is is well-trod territory, and Song knows it; what she brings to the table is honest cinematography, realistic New York logistics chatter, and the frank admission that sometimes, money anxiety is a normal reason to end a relationship. For a movie about a cross-class love-triangle between three of the most exceptionally beautiful people alive, it's about as real-life a presentation as Hollywood has to offer.
The problem with real life is that it's boring. This is a complaint that has beset a certain kind of filmmaker since the dawn of neorealism - why go to the theater to re-watch the mess that I’m already living in? Celine Song wants to affirm the material realities of modern romance, but she also knows that nobody wants to watch two people meet on an app, gradually explore their compatibility, discuss the concept of marriage for a couple years, and finally make the decision to do it when finances seem right. When Song explores that progression in Past Lives, she wisely does it off camera. In Materialists, she puts the marriage story centerstage, and the only way she can pull it off is by raising the stakes and playing by the rom-com handbook. Love of her life or unicorn rich guy: who will Lucy choose? Will she do the obvious thing, or the counter-intuitive thing, or the Broadcast News thing? Our only surefire escape from the tedium of everyday life is narrative, and unfortunately the Joseph Campbell people might be right: we only have so many stories, and there’s not all that much we can do with them.
I guess we keep re-telling these same stories because they’re pretty good. If you're in the right mood, they can make you cry even if you know they're stupid and contradictory to the project they’re supposed to support. I definitely cried during Materialists - which isn't saying much because I also cried during the trailer of The Life of Chuck even though I had just seen it the day before. But these plots are designed to make suckers cry. Analyzing how exactly they pull it off is like analyzing the plot of Win a Date with Tad Hamilton. The interesting part of Materialists is the realist dressing - and subsequently, the discrepancy between that realist dressing and its romantic core. It looks like it’s going to be a rich analysis of material realities in the dating world, and for awhile it seems like it’s going to deliver - but by reverting to narrative convention, it baulks well short of struggling through the resource challenges that actually define human relationships.
Is it time for a new round of cinematic materialism, and if so, what will it look like? In a media landscape that has maybe never been less grounded in the real world, I think we need more celebration of what we can (and can't) do with the stuff that's in front of us. Slop news, slop fantasy, slop documentary, slop prestige - we need more movies where people have to chose whether or not they do anything about their mustache hairs. Materialists isn't anywhere near the materialist manifesto I want it to be, but it at least nods toward a path forward. Not long after providing disparaging commentary over the wedding ceremony of a couple they don't know, John turns to Lucy and says, "When I look at you I see wrinkles, and grey hair, and children who look like you." This is the opposite of The Life of Chuck's backwards life affirmation; it locates love in a future that very well might not happen but nevertheless evolves from the corporal limitations of the present. John knows just as well as Lucy that, odds are, things won’t work out - but he still hopes that they will. Lip hairs upon us, grey hairs ahead of us: Song gets - lost? lazy? nervous? - and falls back on the safe inevitabilities of basic narrative, but she at least hints that she might be comfortable enough with material reality to imagine a future that’s grounded in it.
Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, pledging me money (thanks!), or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. A note on pledges: I’m hitting some technical difficulties with setting up payments, but if all goes well they will be in place within the next week. Thanks to everyone for your support! It means a lot. I’ll be back next week with a review of 28 Years Later.
Wow. So much Waltmanesque wit packed into one column. I'm giving this review a standing O.