Spoilerous.<\/p>\n
# I read my sister\u2019s copy of IT<\/em> over one day and one night of summer break, sprawled on (I think) her bed in a sweltering DC attic, reading until my eyes burned and I was barely taking in words but unable to put it down and go to sleep. I started it sometime in early afternoon, I think, and finally finished in full sunlight the next day. There\u2019s something in IT<\/em>\u2013it\u2019s King\u2019s usual compulsive suspense, the promise of something even worse around the next corner, but there are also some things about IT<\/em> specifically that made me read until my whole face felt buzzy and blank. And this in spite of the worst climax, and oh how I wish that word was not a double entendre, in the King canon! The worst!!<\/p>\n IT<\/em> is about a hometown and about a friendship (so you know I\u2019m already hooked). The hometown is Derry, ME, a place that gets embedded in its children\u2019s flesh like shrapnel they\u2019ll carry with them, hidden, all their lives. Derry isn\u2019t \u2018Salem\u2019s Lot. That story<\/a> is about the destruction of a place with its sad secrets, but a beloved place nonetheless. Derry is a town which has had an evil interstellar entity living in its sewers for the entirety of its history. Every 27 years IT reemerges, like a cicada that eats murder, announcing IT\u2019s return with some spectacular horrific crime and then settling down for a menu of dismembered children and rampant cruelty. Because of this emphasis on historical scope and spectacular crime, in the book Derry quickly becomes a microcosm for the worst aspects of America. Derry isn\u2019t a place where an evil alien clown makes good people do bad things. It\u2019s a place where homegrown evil is heightened, collected, and exposed\u2013the National Museum of American Hellstory.<\/p>\n King always gives these small towns a dual nature, a golden haze over all the memories of cruelty and fear. \u2018Salem\u2019s Lot<\/em> is on one end of the spectrum, with \u201cThe Body\u201d (Stand By Me<\/em>) and then \u201cLow Men in Yellow Coats<\/a>\u201d moving us further into explicit portrayals of the evils of a time remembered still with longing. IT<\/em> is on the extreme other end.<\/p>\n What good memories might be salvaged from this town, where every house is a different kind of haunted house, come from the friendship between \u201cthe Losers\u201d: a group of kids who face violence and contempt at school and often at home, who are all kind of jagged and uncertain of one another, but who come together to find and destroy the sewer thing.<\/p>\n They confront IT. They think\u2013they tell themselves\u2013that maybe they destroyed IT. But just in case, they make a vow: If IT ever comes back, they\u2019ll return to the place they\u2019re all desperate to escape. So that\u2019s the first act of the story. And in the novel, it\u2019s also the ending. This is a point I got from Sean T. Collins<\/a>: \u201cOnly now do I realize how impressive it is of King to place the entire saga\u2019s linchpin scene\u2013the blood pact sworn by the protagonists\u2019 younger selves\u2013at the very, very end of the action, after we\u2019ve seen the entire rest of the story from beginning to end (save the postscript stuff). It\u2019s not just structurally risky for a maker of bestsellers, but emotionally quite beautiful as well.\u201d<\/p>\n Everything we\u2019ve seen from these characters flowed either into or from that moment: the moment when they became<\/em> their friendship, when that too carved its way into their flesh and changed them, made them pieces of Derry but also pieces of one another. One way to think about spiritual friendship<\/a> is that a friendship is as big as the enemy it defeats. Heaven is friendship<\/a> because friendship can face down Hell.<\/p>\n # So now we have a two-part adaptation, about five hours total, from director Andr\u00e9s Muschietti. Aspects of this adaptation are so good. It\u2019s unafraid to flip its wig, I love the wild tonal swings and I think they\u2019re true to King\u2019s work (I agree with Kindertrauma<\/a> here), and it manages to sell both the grounded personal misery and the cosmic horror, even uniting them in the same scene. This thing has heart and its heart is weird.<\/p>\n Aspects are not good! I will start with those basically because I\u2019d rather end on the good things. But okay. For me, the child actors were so consistently better than the marquee-name adults that it was depressing. The child actors aren\u2019t always great but the adults just have a real hard time not sounding like they\u2019re reading dialogue; plus their expressions seem weirdly flatter, like they\u2019re only showing one emotion at a time, whereas the kids tended to be all over the place emotionally, which was intensely affecting and imo true to life. Bill Hader was an exception. Lol and so was Stephen King, actually, in a pleasurable cameo.<\/p>\n The second movie is longer and it\u2019s when you meet the adults, and it\u2019s punctuated by these scenes where we get the kid actors back and you (\/I) remember how much more I liked watching the kids.<\/p>\n This gets at the inherent problem of doing a diptych rather than a miniseries. The novel takes you back and forth in time, folding the deep past, the recent past, and the present into one another. That structure is very hard to split in half, so instead we get the childhood story followed by the adulthood story, which throws off the rhythm, saps some of the power of the scenes where we learn about the past, and means\u2013oh, how I hated this bit\u2013that we end on a like inspirational suicide note????????? instead of the blood pact. That whole idea was bad in itself and becomes so much worse as a voiceover coda. All the voiceovers were bad imho. You don\u2019t have to do this just because you\u2019re adapting a novel!!! The best voiceover bits (\u201cSometimes, we are what we wish we could forget\u201d) you can get into the dialogue.<\/p>\n The movie makes two changes to the way the book depicts social ills, and it can\u2019t quite handle either of them. The town\u2019s racism is hinted at but we don\u2019t get deep into it; we don\u2019t get the story of the Black Spot and there are moments where the movie makes a noticeable choice not<\/em> to bring explicit racism into the bullying Mike gets. Why? Especially why, when you\u2019re marginalizing Mike\u2019s character for the whole first movie? In the second movie he becomes one of the leaders and the camera frequently reinforces his authority; he\u2019s unstable, but in this awful context he\u2019s a stabilizing force, and that\u2019s interesting in itself, a cool thing for your camera to do\u2026 and something we should\u2019ve been prepared for by literally anything in the first film.<\/p>\n Instead the form of bigotry where we really see how others\u2019 experiences in Derry (and the USA) connect to the Losers\u2019 experience is homophobia. One of the Losers is a gay kid, and so much about how that\u2019s depicted is painful, very raw and real, and heartbreaking even in the sweet goofy moments when you see him pestering and delighting in his crush. The second film opens with a violent gay-bashing, probably one of the hardest scenes to watch in this whole adaptation, and that event gives even more context to our gay character\u2019s closeted misery. All of that was, I think, a good choice. But.<\/p>\n Many of these characters have to expose or confront their shameful secrets in order to take the power of that shame out of IT\u2019s hands. This is such a dumb obvious metaphor for what coming out is about that it\u2019s just weird and depressing that our gay Loser never gets to do this! There\u2019s a coyness and also a thwarted quality to his storyline that feels retro in a bad way. I\u2019m not saying the movie is coy about whether he\u2019s gay, he super is, and it makes sense that he doesn\u2019t want to say it, but what is this epic monster-killing friendship if he can\u2019t ever<\/em> just be okay with his friends knowing this about him? I think we\u2019re supposed to assume that they were okay with it offscreen but for something so emotionally taut, so painfully depicted, and so tightly tied in to all the movie\u2019s themes, it has just got to be there on the screen. Lol also please absolutely do not show me the gay tragedy sobbing immediately<\/em> followed by heterosexual happy-ending mermaid romance makeouts. Take a dang moment. (Or switch who dies. You can switch who dies!)<\/p>\n Like many horror films, this movie leans heavily on illness and aging as intrinsically horrific. There\u2019s a fine line between gross-out horror and the culture of death, my friends. There\u2019s also a lot of in-character, but unpleasantly consistent, denigration of and disgust toward fat people. It would\u2019ve been easy to interrupt that pattern.<\/p>\n Dumb structural stuff: In the first movie they get in a big fight and briefly separate, which has no real consequences and feels very Save the Cat<\/a>. A lot of the second movie is a series of fetch quests for significant \u201ctotems\u201d from their pasts, which feels artificial and also keeps them split up, when they\u2019re most fun and touching when they\u2019re all together. Many individual sequences in this bit are great so I\u2019m ambivalent about it, but I did hate being told that we\u2019d now do fetch quests. (That said, Kindertrauma has a point<\/a>: \u201cYeah, I guess it is a little long with its somewhat flabby and redundant midway section but you know the tome it\u2019s based on weighs twenty pounds and features a giant space turtle right?\u201d)<\/p>\n And last\u2026 how they defeat IT. Lol they bully it to death? They all \u201cmake it small\u201d by making it feel small? They chant, \u201cClown! Clown! Clown!\u201d It is imho (imho!!!) very dumb and also isn\u2019t this supposed to be a movie about like friendship and courage and living in truth? The power the Dark Lord knows not turns out to be contempt! Come on now, that is gross.<\/p>\n