Christopher Schroeder

Author: Christopher Schroeder

  • Wanting and Waiting

    I decided after listening to an actor interview to see The Life of Chuck but left the movie theater frustrated and confused.

    This movie uses reverse chronology to tell Chuck’s life story from losing his parents and unborn sister in a car crash as a young boy and later his grandparents who raised him to his death from a brain tumor before his fortieth birthday. Between these events, he learns to dance first with his grandmother in her kitchen and later in middle school in an after-school club, follows his grandfather’s advice and becomes an accountant, and recalls just before his diagnosis his love of dance, a recollection he later shares in the hospital with his wife as the tumor consumes more and more of his consciousness and ultimately his life.

    I generally agree with other reviewers about the gimmicky structure, the unrealized dread, and the clichéd plot. To these, I would add the central theme seems forced, which makes it ultimately unsatisfying.

    This problem begins with the title, which misrepresents the focus of this film. This movie is less about Chuck and more about how humans should live as its structure suggests.

    The first act, which is the conclusion of Chuck’s life, suggests the end of the world. No one seems to know why it is ending. The second act, in which Chuck remembers his dancing passion, consists of a series of interactions while he is attending an accounting conference first with a street-corner drummer and later a jilted young woman. These three spend several hours performing and later reveling in, and reflecting upon, their spontaneous intimacy.

    The final act, which spans Chuck’s childhood, features a debate about how to live, and what his experiences suggest. Here is when Chuck’s grandfather Albie offers an argument that ultimately conditions so much of Chuck’s life.

    Chuck has already been recognized by his peers and the after-school club teacher as the best male dancer and has agreed to dance with the best female dancer at the upcoming school event. Dance not only allows him to be seen and to connect at school but also connects him to his late grandmother, who would dance with him in her kitchen while she cooked.

    Albie urges Chuck instead to follow his lead, and to have a life of numbers, which according to his grandfather is one of greater honesty and also with artistry. Numbers don’t lie, Albie insists, and yet can be creatively used, which his how he saved others’ businesses and livelihoods.

    The second act — the accountant who remembers his lost artistic self — had already framed this debate as a predictable head-heart conflict. The performances suggest the characters’ infectious joy, yet the setting and the scenario do little to offset its predictability.

    The problem is that it also establishes that Chuck has followed his grandfather’s advice, and that he later in this encounter with the street-corner drummer and the jilted woman, found something missing in his life, something he had lost or hadn’t maintained. His life in other words has been one of objectivity, and predictability, and one without passion or imagination, which is difficult to reconcile with his grandfather’s claim about the superiority of numbers.

    This problem is exacerbated by the realization that the end times from the first part is in fact the end of Chuck’s world, or the subjective, imaginative one he has constructed. Chuck as a child has been told that he is varied and vast — that he contains Whitman’s “multitudes” — but seems to have forgotten at least until that fateful accounting conference day when he meets the drummer and the lover. Or maybe he hasn’t as he has been repeatedly thanked for thirty-nine years, which is obviously the length of his life.

    Albie in other words has claimed that numbers don’t life and can be artfully deployed. That suggests that life as an accountant would be the best of both worlds, and a more reliable one for Chuck Albie adds than a world of dance where earning an income is difficult if not impossible. This more reliable life however has been dissatisfying or at least incomplete, Chuck has realized just before his life with the terminal diagnosis begins its end.

    Neither Albie nor Chuck though can address, not then and not ever, the visions Albie sees in the cupola of his house, which only adds to the inconsistencies and incompleteness. Can Albie foresee the future because his numerical facility enables him to create or at least challenge it or because the cupola, which he claims is haunted, gives him glimpses of it?

    Does Chuck regret his accounting choice? He seems in following his grandfather’s advice to have lost something. Nothing from his nearly four decades has enabled him to add, or at least retain, artistic aspects, or at least enough to prevent him from longing for his past, which includes his finger-waving grandmother who listens to rock and teaches him to dance while pursuing her own cooking passion.

    The movie appears to reject Albie’s, and Chuck’s, choice in the way the world dies as Chuck does. At the same time, it insists near its end that Albie was right, or at least that Albie did use numbers, which don’t lie, in ways that enabled his clients, such as the funeral home family that handles his wake and burial for Chuck, to retain their businesses.

    Maybe the movie means to suggest that life is a mystery. Chuck’s wife after all seems not to object to his marriage-long lie about the scar on his hand, which is a regular reminder to him that he reveled in his middle school suggest alone under the stars. Chuck is, as his wife acknowledges, a person of secrets.

    If so, this secret could be one this movie is keeping from itself. It aspires to a great truth, something about the reconciliation of numbers and images or scientific confirmation and artistic imagination, and in so doing comment on a larger and longer cultural conversation. However, its inconsistencies and oversimplification — the head-heart binary for example — inhibit its efforts to arrive at any insights about math and art or objectivity and subjectivity or intellect and emotion.

    Some certainly have been moved. One I observed was sobbing as the house lights reappeared, which was a reassuring reminder. I just couldn’t find any satisfaction in it for me.

  • A Better Response?

    WBEZ as was predicted held a pop-up fundraiser this week.

    This station and National Public Radio have been citing the $1.1 billion loss to their member stations. This money had already been authorized for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and included in member station budgets, but Congress at Trump’s request eliminated this funding as a part of its recent recision.

    In response, too many public media representatives are talking about losses by focusing on the economic effects. Too few are offering inspiring, imaginative, and innovative visions of the way that public media will continue to exist.

    The problem isn’t acknowledging the economic effects, which is understandable. Rather, it’s that only doing so is failing the public at the time it most needs public media.

    These cuts have been threatened for years. This attempt increasingly seemed likely to be the one when conservatives withdrew public funding.

    Public media representatives in other words have had ample opportunity over many years to envision alternatives, and the worst has happened, which is actually an opportunity. Now is the time to offer an independent and bold vision for the future of public media not just to reassure existing donors but also to attract new supporters.

    I would actually welcome a forceful articulation for full public funding (e.g., McChesney 2008). At the very least, I encourage public media leaders to offer bold reimagings of public media today.

    Such an approach would transform what the current administration and congressional Republicans expect to be a devastating cost into a potential catalyst for greater independence. As such, it would announce that public media will no longer be dependent upon political whims.

    These observations come from a strong public media supporter. My biggest donations for example go to WBEZ, and I switched newspaper subscriptions after Chicago Public Media announced its new partnership with the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper.

    That explains my dismay over a recent Sun-Times subscriber survey. This request asked for feedback about which scenarios, such as fewer publication days or less opinion writing, would cause us to cancel our subscriptions.

    These seemingly fearful responses offer the wrong, and opposite, message. Public media are needed today perhaps more than ever.

    Facts are increasingly threatened. The information environment is increasingly polluted. Reason, deliberation, and other democratic, and American, values are endangered species.

    Leading in good times is easier. Leading in challenging times however offers good leaders chances at greatness.

    These public media leaders must speak to all of us, including existing donors and the general public. They must encourage us to imagine with them a better public media tomorrow.

    That is how I hope we endure the challenges confronting public media today.

  • Play Ball

    Baseball begins again today.

    The All-Star break for many fans is the unofficial halfway point in the season. The actual midway point at least for the Chicago Cubs came fifteen games earlier.

    The Cubs entered the break in the NL Central first place. This team also has the second-best NL record, and the third-best of all MLB teams, and three Cubs players were chosen for the all-star team.

    Most teams know by this point whether they’re sellers or buyers before the trade deadline later this month although the current wild card format can complicate such conclusions. Regardless, all teams have a few more days to lock their rosters for the remainder of this season.

    These all-star breaks always surprise me. Teams have had occasional off-days, so that isn’t the issue. Rather, it’s the accumulative five days total that seems so significant.

    Days one and two require me to find something else to structure my days. Day three or four usually finds me thinking beyond baseball, and the days after the season ends.

    That for most teams usually comes in September, which always feels too soon. Some teams will play into October, but the rest are storing equipment, washing uniforms, and doing whatever else must be done, including spending their days somewhere besides baseball stadiums.

    All teams will be done, and dormant, by the middle of November as the Midwestern air carries a consistent chill, the mornings bite a bit, and summer shorts are also washed, folded, and shelved. Halloween will have given way to Thanksgiving, which is followed by the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

    The next two months are usually barren, fallow times. Little pulls my attention beyond the walls of warm buildings, where I spend most of my time.

    My mind will eventually return to baseball. At some point, I’ll count the weeks until pitchers and catchers report, which I will dutifully report.

    That and more I know is soon to come. For now, the season resumes, which will be enough.

    Players return to diamonds and roadtrips. Some, like the Cubs, will count every win and loss, which will be compared other teams’. Others, such as the Chicago White Sox, will count the number of games until the 162 merciful conclusion.

    Only a few teams will amass enough wins — that once was 100 but often fewer will do — to get into the playoffs. At that point, most bets are off, or at least must be reconsidered.

    And once again I’ve been reminded that all this ends, that this too shall pass, and that baseball season one day at least for me will never begin again. I might not know when that will be but can be confident that it will occur, which is a useful reminder, especially this year as I consider an encore career or complete retirement.

    This break reminds me that none of this lasts forever, and that today is all that matters. That is terrifying yet invigorating, somehow melancholic and beautiful at the same time.

    And I can root for the Cubs again today, return to Wrigley once the days cool, and this year reclaim my hope for October baseball once more.