I first read IT when I was thirteen years old. It was summer, and the family just moved from Houston (a place we loved) to Nashville (a place we knew nothing about other than it wasn’t Houston). We couldn’t complete the move, though, as some legal issues kept us from settling into a new house, so my mother, younger brother, and I stayed with her parents deep in the mountains in Buckhorn, Kentucky.
I had awful bronchitis that summer, and spent most of my time coughing and wheezing. I even took to beating on my chest, because it helped make it feel better for a moment. My dad was afraid I was going to crack a rib, but when you’re in pain, you do what you can to make it go away.
Needless to say, I needed an escape, and IT provided just that. That may seem odd, considering it’s about a murderous entity that eats children, but the book was so immersive, so strangely powerful and magical, that I was swept away. In a great revisit to the novel, Grady Hendrix over at Tor.com wrote that the book was “…flawed, strange, by turns boring and shocking, It is one of King’s most frustrating and perplexing books. It’s also his saddest” Revisiting Stephen Kings IT. Hendrix is right. It’s a huge, meandering book that goes off on strange tangents and suffers from some very overwrought language, but King captured something so pure and archetypal, something dredged from the deepest depths of the collective unconscious that the story surpasses—perhaps even elevates—the writing.
In case you don’t know the story, the book jumps back and forth between two time periods: the 1950s and the 1980s. The protagonists are the members of the Loser’s Club: Bill, Mike, Ben, Beverly, Eddie, Richie, and Stan. They each possess some quality that marks them as outcasts in their small, blue-collar town, Derry: Bill stutters; Mike is black; Ben is overweight; Beverly is a girl and of low class; Eddie suffers from an overbearing mother and hypochondria; Richie constantly does bad impressions and tells awful jokes; and Stan is Jewish. They band together out of friendship and a mutual need for survival (safety in numbers and all that). They soon discover that a malevolent entity haunts Derry, living underground and appearing every twenty-six years to feed. It’s favorite meal: children. The group bands together to stop IT and avenge the death of Bill’s younger brother, Georgie, and they almost succeed. To make sure that the job gets done once and for all, they make a blood pact to return if IT resurfaces, which it does.
As a novel, IT contains many themes, but it’s primarily a book about childhood and adulthood: the way we transition from one to the other and what we lose and what we gain in the process. That’s core of what makes this King’s “saddest book,” as Hendrix put it. The book is also about fear and monsters, and the power of imagination. King tends to idealize childhood, but IT takes that reification to a whole other level, and that’s both its strength and its weakness.
Thirteen turned out to be the perfect time to read the book. Although I was a long way from adulthood, I was on my way, suffering through that long, liminal period where nothing quite makes sense, and life seems to change every day. I also identified with the Losers in a very real way. I was a nerd, I had asthma and allergies and whatnot, and for the first nine years of my life, I walked on my toes because my Achille’s tendons were too short. These were my people, so to speak, and just as they had to deal with the almost insurmountable problem of IT, so too did I have to deal with the insurmountable problem of being me.
The book will always be king (no pun intended) but I did enjoy the miniseries. Tim Curry was fantastic in it, and it was a decent adaptation, but it could have been better. Imagine my excitement when I discovered that a new movie was coming out! Maybe I became too excited, though, because the movie was a definite up-and-down experience for me. It did so many things right, but dropped the ball in major ways.
Beginning with the good: the cast was perfect. The actors all did a fantastic job, but Sophia Lillis and Finn Wolfhard practically steal the movie with their performances as Beverly and Richie. Both the script and Lillis’ acting bring a new angle to Beverly that works wonderfully. She takes on a stronger leadership role within the group and she possesses a kind of calm self-possession that I wish I had now just as much as I wish I had it when I was the character’s age. Wolfhard does a great job of making Richie both funny and groan-worthy. His jokes are pretty terrible, but in just the right way that they elicit real laughs from the audience, and both he and Lillis bring a presence that outshines the other actors, as good as they are.
The movie also makes a smart move by bumping up the setting to 1989. It’s a time more relatable to the audience, but it’s still far enough in the past that the key story points still work. During the opening scene where Georgie chases the paper boat Bill made him down the street, I couldn’t help but think that there is no way a modern parent would let Georgie go play in the rain, much less leave his back yard. That doesn’t fly anymore, but it does in 1989, when kids were more free range. The town also feels more isolated due to the lack of cell phones, computers, and the internet.
Bill Skarsgård also deserves credit for creating a truly frightening and menacing Pennywise that’s all his own. Tim Curry is a hard act of follow any time, but his Pennywise was fantastic and seared into the collective memory of those of us that saw the miniseries when it first aired. Skarsgård’s Pennywise is a bit more animalistic and toothy than Curry’s (as Darius Washington pointed out in his review), but is equally frightening and nasty.
Again, the movie does so many things well, but in some ways that only serves to make the missteps all the more glaring. First of all, Mike serves no purpose in the movie. In the book, he’s the one who pieces it all together and figures out the role that Pennywise played in the history of Derry. That job gets placed on Ben, which is unnecessary, because he’s the architect. He’s the one that brings the Loser’s ideas into reality. For the life of me, I don’t know why they changed their roles, but it makes the only lead character played by a person of color useless to the narrative, and that’s both a disservice to the book, and just a plain old shame.
Beverly doesn’t get the short shrift, but the movie makes a move that’s so bonkers that it damn near derails what was working so well. As I said before, Beverly takes on a stronger role in the Losers, acting as co-leader with Bill. She’s strong and smart and not defined by the boys, and all of that is great, but the movie decides to put her in the damsel in distress role near the end when Pennywise kidnaps her and uses that to lure the rest of the Losers down into the sewers. Making matters worse, when Pennywise hypnotizes Bev with its “deadlights” Ben wakes her up with a kiss, just like in a fairy tale. To the movie’s credit, Bev does fight back, but still, it feels like a regression, and a needless one at that. Hell, have Pennywise kidnap Bill and have the rest of the Losers come get him. That would make more sense storywise and not fall under outdated and sexist gender stereotypes.
The movie also suffers in that it pulls details from the book without properly contextualizing them. To ITs credit, that’s an issue I see time and again with adaptations anymore, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that Bill goes around muttering “He thrusts his fists against the post and still insists he sees the ghost” without explaining that this is a tongue twister his mother gave him to recite so he could get over his stutter. I knew that, but that’s only because I read the book. I have no idea what audience members who hadn’t read the novel thought about this strange verbal tick. Maybe they figured it out, but still, context matters.
What I just outlined are fairly objective issues. What I’m going to bring up next is a bit more subjective. Adaptation lives on a tightrope between fidelity and innovation. The adaptation has to embody the spirit of the source material while at the same time give us something new, otherwise we’d just go back to the source material. The novelty of a change in media doesn’t cut it. IT manages to walk this line fairly well, but it does miss out on a key element of the book.
I can sum up what’s missing in two words: “Richie’s impressions.” When the Losers go to confront IT at the house on Neibolt Street, I waited and waited and waited for Richie to bust out his Irish Cop voice. I can forgive him not having a bag of sneezing powder, but the impression was what drove IT away and saved Bill in the book. Again, I waited for that to happen in the movie, but it didn’t.
Okay, I can forgive that change, but the problem is it never came up. Richie never used his impressions against the monster, Eddie never sprayed his inhaler in ITs face and screamed “Battery acid, slime!” and Stan didn’t recite his bird book to drive Pennywise away. These may seem like minor changes, but they all represent one of the core points of the book: that the things that mark these kids as outsiders, the things that make them weak and weird, are also the things that will save them. Their character tics, their idiosyncrasies, make them who they are, and when they embrace that, they become powerful. That is just as important to their survival as banding together. Friendship is important, but so too are the aspects that make us different.
This harkens back to the idealism I mentioned earlier. King presents an idealized view of childhood right down to the magic of belief. A good eighty percent of the second half of the book involves the now adult Losers trying to discover that childlike ability to believe in the impossible, because otherwise they have no weapons against IT. I wonder how the second movie will handle this, because that’s a huge subtext of the story. Again, this is a book about childhood, adulthood, and what we lose and what we gain from transitioning from one to the other. The movie gets so many elements right, but it misses the bullseye when it comes to the story’s core premise. Maybe they’ll get it right in the sequel.
Grade: B-
