We Contain Multitudes
This weekend I watched The Life of Chuck, and it stuck with me. The kind of movie that makes you think long after the credits roll, apparently enough to have me awake at 6 a.m. on a Sunday writing about it. More than anything, it sparked one of those deep, lingering movie conversations with my wife, like we used to have all the time.
The Life of Chuck tells the story of an ordinary man named Charles Krantz, but not in an ordinary way. The film unfolds in reverse structure, revealing moments of a life piece by piece while quietly exploring memory, existence, connection, and what it means to matter. What begins as something mysterious and almost unsettling gradually becomes deeply human, a conversation on how one single life can contain entire worlds.
Every day we interact with thousands of things: sights, sounds, tastes, smells. Even if we never leave the house, we still see dozens of people: faces in movies, strangers in commercials, background figures in photographs, people scrolling past on the news. Most of them barely register, but our minds take them in anyway and keep them.
We are all creators, whether we realize it or not. Every night when I sleep, my brain builds stories out of everything I’ve absorbed. There are thousands of stories and millions of universes living quietly in my mind. As creatives, we spend our lives trying to pull those worlds out: onto paper, canvas, game tables, or screens, hoping someone else might feel them too.
But the reverse is also true.
I exist in countless stories that aren’t mine. Someone passed me on a sidewalk once. Someone saw me through a car window. Someone heard my voice in passing or noticed me standing in line somewhere years ago. In their memories, in their universes, their multitudes, I still exist. I might die a thousand different deaths in those stories, or live a thousand different lives.
In that strange way, we are all a little immortal.
The Life of Chuck understands this idea better than almost any film I’ve seen. It reminds us that a single life isn’t small or ordinary; it’s vast beyond comprehension, filled with invisible impact and quiet meaning. The movie doesn’t shout its message; it lets it unfold gently, trusting the audience to feel it rather than explaining it.
Amazing what a simple movie can do to you.