Let’s start with a confession: I cried at the end of It: Chapter 1, or whatever the official title for the new movie is. For most of its two-plus hour runtime, I was enjoying It in all the ways I had hoped, delighting in the relentless assault of monsters and mayhem, in the gorgeous compositions captured by director Andy Muschietti and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, and in the exceptional performances by the young cast as The Losers Club and Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise. But I never, ever, in a million years thought that I would walk out of that movie with tears in my eyes.
In trying to parse out the exact why of why that happened, you have to go back a ways.
No horror story has ever affected me the way that It did when I read it in middle school, and still does, if my weepy disposition at the movie’s end is any indication. Any story worth the reading is going to leave its mark, but It left scars. No other Stephen King book or story, no other horror story from any author, period, has ever hit as hard as It (I swear to the turtle I am not trying for rhymes here, they just sort of naturally occur).
Which is especially odd given that, much as I love It, I would not rank it as my favorite King novel. Hell, it might not even crack the top five. Like many of his novels that near or top a thousand pages in length, the biggest weakness and biggest strength of It is that the book is so huge and so sprawling, it is simultaneously about everything, anything, and absolutely nothing. Anyone reading the book can pretty much cherry pick whatever moments or plot threads work best for them and ignore whichever ones do not.
Which is what I’m going to do in a few paragraphs. But first, let’s talk a little bit more about the nature of It.
OK, so this is going to be a bit of a tangent, but I figure I might as well just get all this down while I have the chance. And, if nothing else, talking through my issues with the book will hopefully help you understand where I’m coming from when I talk about why the book and movie hit so hard despite my frustrations with some aspects of same.
It is an odd beast, highlighting as it does King’s relative strengths and weaknesses. In the strengths column, you have King’s unparalleled ability to build sequences of suspense and terror, something that he gives himself many, many opportunities to indulge in given that his villain is a shapeshifting, child-eating monster that has been in existence since literally the beginning of time. The nature of the monster, ‘It’, allows King to tackle pretty much every conceivable taboo there is to tackle, spotlight every malicious piece of American society in turn (racism, homophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism, they all get turns at the bat), and every kind of violence that can be dreamt up.
But It’s real triumph, like many of King’s work, is in his eye for character. Each member of the Losers Club feels like a real and complete person both as a child and as an adult. They are each immediately empathetic to us, the reader, and you can feel King’s love for each one of these poor, lonely kids in every page. In fact, King might do too good a job in this, making the Losers so believable and so distinct that his later choices don’t really work. We’ll come back to that.
Like I said at the top, this is not my favorite Stephen King book. But It might be the most Stephen King book, laying out all his favorite themes, topics, fetishes, subjects, and cultural touchpoints. The only reason this book is not the end-all, be-all summation of King’s work is that none of the Losers ended up with a booze problem in the adult side of the story.
But with those strengths come King’s weaknesses.
For me, the central flaw of It is that King frequently seems to be trying for an allegorical story while using a style that is the exact opposite of how allegory functions, and this results in major choices in the story falling completely flat (if you are waiting for this article to address the pubescent sewer gang-bang, here we go).
At times, It plays like King’s riff on Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, a novel and author he has long spoken of with admiration. Both novels deal with children in confrontation with ancient evil entities that arrive in their town to spirit away/kill townspeople as part of a recurring cycle of terror and destruction.
The key differences between the books, besides length, is that Bradbury’s characters are broad types. The two main kids in Something Wicked are such startlingly perfect embodiments of Americana innocence that it’s a wonder they don’t leak apple pie juice out of their fucking pores. The characters exist as broad symbols for opposing forces of Good and Evil, Youth and Age, Innocence and Experience. In that book they defeat the evil warlock by literally hugging him to death and no I am not kidding. But it totally works! In Bradbury’s fable, a hug killing a demon (and laughter and song bringing someone back from the dead) is totally fair game because that’s the world it takes place in.
It takes place in our world. King devotes many, many, many, many words to etching every inch of that world in explicit detail. And while his characters frequently begin as broad archetypes fulfilling specific and largely symbolic roles, King lavishes so much attention on even the most disposable of characters that they all become full-fledged people that live and love and bleed with hearts that can’t help but recall our own.
So when the novel shifts back to allegory, that’s when you get into trouble. The flourishes that may have been justifiable were the characters intended/received as blank-ish archetypes for us to project onto instead come off as absolutely baffling and horribly misguided (See: gang-bang, sewer).
There’s more I could say on this subject and others that nag me with regards to It, but I think there’s been enough (OK one last one: King’s climaxes frequently drop the ball on various characters and subplots but sweet Christ is it a bummer that most of the adult Losers end up being completely fucking irrelevant in the grand showdown with It). Instead, let me get to cherry-picking the part of the book that resonates strongest and lingers longest.
I am a big brother.
For pretty much the entirety of my life, that’s been one of the defining traits of who I am as a human on this earth. I became a big brother before I was even two years of age, with the full weight of that responsibility really starting to settle in when I was around ten or eleven and suddenly was able to appreciate the experience of watching a personality, a person, emerge.
To love someone that much is an exhilarating feeling, but it’s also a terrifying one. It’s terrifying to know that you love someone so much that not only would you die for them, you would kill for them. You would bash in the skull of anyone who dared lay a finger on their head or cause them harm. You would burn the earth to the ground rather than let it eat away at them. You would do anything, sacrifice anything, to keep them safe.
But you can’t. The world is not a safe place. It has teeth.
And that’s why the death of Georgie broke me the first time I read that passage in the book. It’s why that scene is seared into the grey matter of my brain, over a decade since I first read it. In only a few short pages, King etches a specific fraternal dynamic that will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever enjoyed time sharing a hobby with a sibling. There’s a connection there that exists beyond what words can describe, and when that cunt clown Pennywise severs that connection along with poor Georgie’s arm, it is devastating.
Georgie’s relative importance waxes and wanes throughout the novel, but the new movie places it front and center. With the simple change of having Pennywise drag Georgie bodily into the sewer (a detail that I believe originated with Cary Fukunaga’s draft), suddenly the entire axis of the story is re-centered. The Losers aren’t hanging out in The Barrens and the sewer because they’re…you know…children, but because Bill is clinging to the hope that his brother may yet be alive. (There was apparently some scuttle on the interwebs because vaguery in an official plot synopsis led some to worry that the movie would spare Georgie, which would fundamentally alter/break It. The actual opening makes damn clear that Georgie is dead, which only makes Bill clinging to this hope all the more heart-wrenching.)
This explicitly reframes It as being Bill’s story (and, yeah, Bill’s the lead in the novel, too, but the book goes so long and so dense on each one of the non-Stan Losers that It reads like a true ensemble piece, which makes it all the more frustrating when the climax telescopes back into being Bill’s story. Hell, some of the adult Losers have their fates happen off-page, written out of the story with a hand-wave) even if It spends considerable time with every kid. The filmmakers cut through all the other possible interpretations of the tome and narrow in on It as a meditation on the need for acceptance of loss and emotional catharsis.
Because Bill cannot get Georgie back. Bells do not get unrung and hurts do not get scrubbed out. Bill’s need to accept this is given the most literal shape possible, as It and It force him to hold a gun against the head of the image of his younger brother and pull the trigger.
We don’t see Georgie’s corpse after Pennywise’s defeat. We don’t need to. Bill finds a scrap of his brother’s raincoat and weeps over it. That, in and of itself, didn’t start my own waterworks. Those came right after, when the other Losers wordlessly join Bill and comfort him, sharing in his grief and letting him know that even in this, the worst moment of his life, he is not alone.
And that’s really all you can hope for, right? You cannot keep the people you love safe from the world. Sadness and sickness and death, these things are going to happen, one way or the other. Horror, as a genre, serves the very important function of reminding us of that. But while you cannot avoid these bleak moments, you can survive them (that’s the other important function horror serves). Even at your lowest, you are never alone, and it is in those connections and in those moments of joy we steal and savor that we find our salvations.
And so I watched It in the theater with my little brother, with whom I have been talking about this story for the better part of a decade, ever since the little bastard stole my copy while I was away at college and read it even after I told him not to. And I cried, cried because It reminded me that there is so much of this world I wish I could spare him from, and I will fail in that. And I cried because It, both the movie and the experience of going to see it with him, reminded me that even knowing that, I don’t regret being a big brother. I don’t regret one single fucking second of it.
Not one.