It's no secret that It has been one of the most important books I've read in recent years. I first picked it up in the summer of 2017 and have read it each summer since. The reason why is complicated, and though I think I understand why It matters so much to me, I always feel my explanation is lacking. I've written a good 40 pages by hand about It as I've done my last two read-throughs, so I don't know if I really want to retread that ground here. Suffice to say, It moved me in ways that literature almost never does, and certainly not horror.
Lest the complications aren't clear, I should point out that, normally, I try to avoid books saturated in violence, swearing, and explicit sex (though I've more than a fair share that break from that norm). It's something that I've often thought about, but I'm no closer to understanding the permissiveness of my base impulses when it comes to literature or video games, but if it's in cinema I'm instantly disinclined to watch the thing. Example: I thought The Joker looked…like a movie I wouldn't really want to see, probably (I don't much care for the Joker as a character, especially stripped of the context that comes through the dichotomy of Batman); when I learned that it was rated R, I decided it wasn't for me, based simply on the rating. And then there's It. The first film came out in 2017 (that was one of the reasons, incidentally, that I started reading the book, since I couldn't see the allure of a horror movie and the trailer of It gave me nightmares for three days), but it took some time before I finally decided to watch the movie. I was, as a matter of fact, pretty impressed with that film. The score was fantastic (I love the theme song for its mixture of whimsical lightheartedness and menace; I think it's brilliant), except for all of the screechy violin parts that are part and parcel of a scary movie, I guess. The CGI wasn't particularly frightening, but the practical stuff--especially Bill Skarsgård's wonderfully rendered Pennywise--was enjoyable and the story remained surprisingly faithful to the source material. There are abundant questionable things about that book that they skipped over--in part due to time, and in part because of that whole part in the sewer is just…nah. (Oh, and I'm going to be talking about plot points that are nagging at me from here on out, so if you're interested in the films or book and would prefer not to have spoilers, then that's cool; I won't hold it against you if you close the tab and do something more uplifting than read about a horror movie.) However, though there were plenty of changes from the book that I was kind of disappointed in, the turning of Bev's character into a damsel in distress for the six boys to rush off to save was…disappointing. Like, majorly disappointing. Let me step back a bit: One of the things that the first It movie absolutely nailed bang on was the chemistry among the friends. The way that the Losers' Club fuses--and why they come together--is one of the primary reasons that I love the book. I've written about this before elsewhere, but it came crashing in on me (again; this time, it was whilst reading Les Misérables) that there's no shortcut to getting genuine buy-in from an audience: We simply have to spend time with the characters if we're going to care about them. They can be foulmouthed and neurotic (Eddie, anyone?), but so long as we can start to understand where they're coming from, we can go along with their story. By showing us a character's past, traumas, difficulties, and resolve--to make us care about the characters--we have to be able to see the character fully. And, as far as writing goes, this sort of experience only has weight if the book does, too. (This is another problem for a would-be professional storyteller like myself, as aspiring authors have even worse odds of making a debut if the book is too long--a topic that I'll have to return to at another time.) In the case of It, the book allows the reader to spend a summer with the self-proclaimed Losers' Club, to get to know them and their trials in intimate (and sometimes excruciating) detail. This gives a lot of heft to the kids' section of the story. The movie allows this to happen because the chemistry of the actors is spot on, and I honestly just thrilled to watch them go through the experience. It: Chapter One captures--as best it can, all things considered--the reason why I'm drawn to It (the book). But It: Chapter 2…is lacking that. Oh, yeah, the characters are still there--and the casting choices for some of those adults was impeccable (Eddie, anyone?)--and they're going through really similar sorts of things. But the adult cast didn't feel…genuine. That's probably too strong a word. They did pretty good jobs, for the most part, of feeling like grown-up versions of the kids… …until it got to Ben. I know that Ben Hanscom goes through a major physical change with puberty and all that--he goes from the pudgy kid to a buff guy over the course of nearly three decades. It wasn't that young Ben and old Ben don't really look at all alike. He just…didn't fit. Every time I saw him in one of the shots, I thought, Yeah, he doesn't fit in here. His relationship with the others feels the least connected, too--and that comes from narrative decisions. Ben's time on screen is significantly lower than everyone else's (I thought, anyway), and that was fine with me. I'll have to chew on it some more, but I didn't like Ben--at all. And that's sad, because I really like his character. The quiet, shy bookworm who feels like retreating into his own head is the best way to spend a summer? Yeah, that sounds about right. Here's the thing: I remember reading somewhere that Flynn Wolfhard, one of the main characters in Netflix's Stranger Things and Richie Tozier in It, was having a hard time getting his work with It: Chapter 2 done and Stranger Things. I'm not sure of the details, but the point was there was some conflict. I remember thinking, That's weird. He's not really in the new one…is he? After all, though the book snaps between the present and the past with a fairly regular groove, the films don't take the same approach (just like the miniseries, as I understand it, which I own but haven't watched yet). Wisely, the split the story into the two distinct chunks that allow the audience to see first what the kids did, then what the adults did, to stop Pennywise the Dancing Clown. However, It: Chapter 2 requires a bit of retconning--which is funny because it shouldn't be necessary for a movie that's based on a single novel to have to do that sort of thing--to get some of the memories that the adults had lost back into place. Therefore, there were a lot of moments where the child actors needed to be back on set. Every time the Losers' Club was together again, I was happier. Those were the moments that I paid to see--the kids. When I watched Chapter 1, I felt it was too short because I wanted to spend more time with the Losers' Club. (Ironically, the second movie is almost three hours long, which means that the two It movies are actually longer than the TV miniseries that's so beloved by so many.) I wanted to see them build the clubhouse, to smoke themselves into the distant past, to relax and be kids together. It was really great to see that happening on screen, so getting another (albeit weaker) dose of that action in the flashbacks was appreciated. Don't get me wrong, though: There were some great nuances for the grownups, too. Perhaps the biggest one was having Richie crush on Eddie. I thought this was a good move, especially considering the way the movie opens with the death of Adrian Melon (in both the film and movie, he's beaten almost to death by homophobes before being eaten, in part, by Pennywise, if you recall). Sure, Richie's straight in the book, but the way that he and Eddie bounce off of each other, the way they tease each other, has a flirtatious undertone that really serves the film well. It also introduces one of the really important themes of the book--that Pennywise is only a monster; it is the hatred in humanity that is the real horror--and though the film doesn't try to put too much emphasis on the point, the ending with Richie on the bridge, carving in the letter E, brought a thematic closure that felt natural and fitting. There's a bit of a running gag throughout the movie about how Bill Denborough's books all have unsatisfying endings that felt a bit meta. This is a problem (I guess; they say write what you know, after all) with some of King's fiction: He frequently has writers as main characters. Bill ends up being King's stand-in for a lot of the story. (He has Bill stand up for commercial fiction, for example. In the film, to drive this point home even more, Stephen King cameos as the pawnshop broker who sells Bill Silver for three hundred bucks.) And the ending of It has some problems. There are a lot of problems, actually, and the movie sidesteps the biggest ones and lands in others, instead. Essentially, the question of how to stop a town from being haunted is one that the book and film are asking, yet the answer ends up being somewhat underwhelming. (Hey, at least there isn't the Turtle in the films.) King writes with such a hyperrealism that it becomes somewhat jarring when the mystical takes place. Pennywise operates off of a soft magic system that also follows Brandon Sanderson's Zeroeth Law, save it being applicable to horror: Err on the side of SCARY. So Pennywise has certain limits that we as readers can't anticipate--which, of course, heightens the fear--but it also means that when it comes time to end the story, Sanderson's First Law (scroll up on the link above) comes into play: We don't know the magic system well enough to understand how they're defeating It. Honestly, the film does a slightly better job of establishing the rules that will be needed to defeat Pennywise, if only because cinematic storytelling has ways of imbuing significance in objects (like the tomahawk that, I accurately predicted, would end up saving the day against Harry Bowers) or phrases more pointedly than novels tend to. The result of this is that, though there are some unexpected detours, we get to the same kind of ending that I rather kind of expected: They have to rip out the clown's heart. Okay, so the spider thing is less kitschy in the 2019 film than the '90s-era made-for-TV miniseries, and it honestly looks a lot better to me than what I imagined as reading the book, if only because having It just be a giant spider is a bit of a let-down. Seeing a multi-legged Pennywise, complete with his frightening makeup as he moves around the inner sanctum was a satisfying experience. The movie decided not to blow up Derry--which very well could have been a financial decision, rather than anything else--and I wonder at that. Derry is a character in and of itself--not as potent as a character-location as, say, Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books, but at least as important a character-location as the river is in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--and letting Mike drive away from it, the spirit of It exorcized at last, is fitting…but also kind of disappointing. I think there's a lot to be said about how Derry can't really exist as it did when Pennywise is no more, because Pennywise is Derry. The town is more than just its haunting (hunting) grounds, it's a manifestation of the evil that he represents. And maybe there's something else about how Derry feeds Pennywise…and Pennywise feeds Derry. The first part is pretty straight forward--Derry's children (usually) are being fed to the monster under the ground. That's a feeding. But it also has the implications that it's the hatred and fear--the inhumanity of the citizens of Derry--who respond to Pennywise, too. They're human, yes, but some actually get possessed by Pennywise through the course of the book, allowed in, as it were, because they like what they get from the evil that he emanates. The second idea, however, is the concept that good can come from evil. This isn't something that's particularly explicit in the text, and it's explored even less in the second film, but the adult Losers are anything but. They're all successful, mega-rich people who've built a fantastic life outside of Derry--forgotten, unwanted Derry. The only Loser who doesn't have a seven-digit bank account is Mike…the one who stayed in Derry for his adult life. None of them has kids (a point that's brought up but isn't really explained by the ending of the book). It's almost like the evil that they confronted in Pennywise when they were eleven years old had the benefit of putting them onto a path that would led to immense success later on--though at a cost. I don't know about this concept--that from evil comes good--but it's certainly everywhere in my life. Not just in a horrorbook (King's words), but in Paradise Lost and my own religion. So maybe that's some of what is so difficult for me when I grapple with It. My wife most definitely doesn't understand what I get out of this book. The movie was gruesome and had so much more profanity than I was expecting (though, in all honesty, if a monster dancing clown was trying to eat me, I think I probably wouldn't be using my squeaker language; still…it was excessive); it had shocking and uncomfortable moments, as well as head-scratching ones (what was with the music change when Eddie was getting puked on? So weird, right?) that make the film unsettling for other reasons. In other words, it (and It) goes very much against my normal expectations for what I want in the fiction I consume. I'm not a complete prude, but I have some standards…almost all of which are flouted in this franchise. It is, to put it in yet another way, not something I ought to seek after. And yet. Yet I keep returning. I know there are more reasons, some of which are so intense and personal that I don't know if I'll ever write them anywhere other than my personal notebooks (which, in no small part, have become treasures of my soul that would be one of the things that I would try to save if the house were burning and I could only grab one thing). But the fact I return stems, I think, from the way that this story--this grotesquery--touches on things I've chosen to believe in as being of supernal source. I'm not saying God inspired It by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that there is more to the book than a sewer-lurking clown. (I talked about another angle of this same issue here.) Did the two films manage to capture it? Some. Not all. And that's good, because that means there are reasons to approach the story in the three ways available (film, miniseries, or book) and try to glean as much as possible from that variety. As far as the movies go, I can think of a couple of ways that they could have tightened the story a bit more, given more context for the decisions of the characters. On the whole, though, I think they do a pretty good job with it. |
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