The Life of Chuck: Unpacking the Meaning of Charles Krantz’s Multitudes

This article contains spoilers for The Life of Chuck.

Early in The Life of Chuck‘s final third section, an idealistic teacher tries to inspire her students with a bit of verse. She stands in front of the unruly class and reads some famous lines from Song of Myself, the epic poem by Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

It’s not the first time those lines have been spoken in the movie. We hear them in the first third of the film, there read by schoolteacher Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to his slightly more attentive class. Yet even in repetition, it’s not clear how Whitman’s words relate to the movie’s themes. So we viewers appreciate it when young Chuck Krantz (Benjamin Pajak) asks his teacher Miss Richards (Kate Siegel) what they mean. Miss Richards answers the question by placing her hands on either side of Chuck’s head and asking him, “What is in between my hands?” A confused Chuck guesses his head or his brain, but Miss Richards goes further, insisting that in between her hands is everything he’s thought, everyone he knows, everyone he will know or meet or see. “In between my hands are multitudes,” she concludes. “You contain multitudes.”

While Miss Richards’ seems to clarify part of the movie’s meaning, it’s only partially so. For the rest, we have to look a little deeper into the Whitman poem that she and Marty Anderson love so much—and into the film it shaped with all its contradictions.

Songs of Chuck’s Selves

The Life of Chuck‘s emphasis on Whitman makes a lot of sense given its own literary pedigree. The Life of Chuck is based on the Stephen King novella of the same name, which was released with three other stories in the 2020 collection If It Bleeds. Similarly,The Life of Chuck is adapted by writer and director Mike Flanagan, whose long florid monologues in The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass have become his trademark.

They also make sense because Chuck himself (played by Tom Hiddleston) is something of a writer, imagining all of the characters we see in the first third of the film. As Chuck lies on his deathbed, the world ends for these characters, including Marty, ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan), and her co-worker Bri (Rahul Kohli).

For readers encountering Whitman for the first time, Song of Myself initially seems arrogant in the extreme. Whitman writes it as an epic, a form usually reserved for vast tales of heroes and battles. But his epic is literally all about him. Whitman uses long, ecstatic sentences to describe how he smells himself (“I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it”), how he spends time with animals in nature (“I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out”), how he can embody people of any race, nationality, or gender (“Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion”).

Song of Myself is, quite literally, a poem about egoism. Whitman worked in the American transcendentalist tradition that was popular among authors of his era. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville, Whitman feared the homogeny that began to coalesce as his nation turned 100 years old, and sought freedom through a selfhood that couldn’t be reduced to a single category. Song of Myself is excessive precisely because he’s trying to exceed notions of selfhood and all of their limitations.

The Sign of Democracy

We can see how Chuck Krantz seeks his own type of freedom in The Life of Chuck. After the sudden death of his parents and younger sister, the young Chuck only finds joy after he begins regularly dancing with his grandmother (Mia Sara). He continues the practice, even after her unexpected death. He even continues to pursue it after his more practical-minded grandfather (Mark Hamill) tells him that the world “likes dancers” but “needs accountants,” setting him on his future career.

The figures in his head—Marty, Felicia, Bri, etc.—are all manifestations of the life he lived, the life he could have lived, the life he should have lived, and so on. They are his multitudes. But Miss Richards also explains that he carries in his head the memories of people who knows, even people he sees in passing. Indeed, after we leave “Act Three,” we see actors from that section reappear as different characters. Ejiofor plays a teacher whose classroom is next to Miss Richards, and whose only interaction with Chuck is a brief congratulations after his performance at the dance. Gillan also appears at the dance, playing a chaperone who says nothing to Chuck. In the background of a street scene, we see Rahul Kohli as a man sitting at a table, drinking coffee and reading his paper.

Again, this might seem like the worst type of egoism. Chuck seems to be turning real people into characters in his own personal story. He may contain multitudes, but those multitudes consist of other people he subordinated into supporting characters in his own imagined main character syndrome. However, another, less oft-quoted set of lines from Song of Myself reveals that’s not what he’s doing. In section Twenty-Four, Whitman declares himself “no stander above men and women or apart from them.” Instead, he states, “Whoever degrades another degrades me, / And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.” Rather than placing himself above other people, he insists upon the opposite:

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

In other words, Whitman declares that everything he’s claimed for himself, all this about multitudes and excessiveness, can also be claimed for everyone else as well. His Song of Myself is egoist, but it isn’t selfish. It understands that every other person is just as vast and wonderful and worthy of praise as him. Those lines make explicit something implicit in Chuck Krantz’s multitudes. Yes, he’s made everyone who has ever existed into supporting characters in the world in his head. But he too is a supporting character in their stories. He’s part of the multitudes that they, each and every one of them, contains. And each of their deaths will be tiny apocalypse for the versions of him that live inside of their heads.

Many Multitudes

The standout sequence of The Life of Chuck isn’t a bit of poetry. It isn’t even one of Flanagan’s famous monologues, many of which here replicate King’s distinctive prose. It’s a dance sequence in “Act Two: Buskers Forever,” in which the adult Chuck gets inspired by drummer Taylor and dances with a stranger named Janice Halliday (Annalise Basso).

Chuck, Taylor, and Janice have never met one another before and they go their separate ways after the day of dancing. But it’s clear that the interaction, minor as it is, has lived in each of their lives. We see how the dancing connects Chuck to his grandmother and to the life he could have lived, as well as to his grandfather. We can see how the dance informs the multitudes of his inner life in “Act One,” in part because Marty finds comfort during the apocalypse by watching the Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth dance picture Cover Girl, which Charles watched with his grandmother.

We don’t see what the interaction meant to Taylor or Janice. But we can guess that it’s just as significant. We can guess that Taylor and Janice each have their own multitudes within them, multitudes that grew richer when the three of them paused their lives to make art together. Moreover, the very fact that Chuck Krantz is insignificant, a dull accountant with mundane failures and triumphs, means that it takes nothing special to contain multitudes. Every character onscreen, from significant figures like Taylor and Janice, to the unnamed members of the audience watching them dance have just as much complexity.

The life of Chuck Krantz isn’t extraordinary. It’s just one of many lives. And yet, he contains multitudes, just like everyone else’s. All because Whitman accepted nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

The Life of Chuck is now playing in theaters.

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