In Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan makes solipsism about as tender and poignant as possible. It’s a joy for the sweetness and the dignity of its portrait of a middle-America accountant, and its lovely choreography.
But it doesn’t make its philosophy convincing enough for me. I think it does matter that the people we meet don’t live just in our own heads, but live and breathe independently of us, who can then be closely bound to us and become both familiar and strange. An ordinary accountant’s death is a great tragedy not because the world inside his head is lost, but because the world outside of his head loses him.
“So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!”
And, of Donne. His rightly famous words invert Chuck’s solipsism:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
