In Andy Muschietti's new film, IT: Chapter Two, audiences are reintroduced to the band of nerdy, endearing children they met two years ago in the 2017 installment of IT.
Now, Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain), Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy), Richie Tozier (Bill Hader), Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa), Eddie Kaspbrak (James Ransone), and Ben Hanscom (Jay Ryan) are all grown up—encumbered with old tensions, unresolved childhood trauma, and new secondary sex characteristics—and they're back in Derry, Maine to face Pennywise the dancing clown for the second and final time.
Before we go any further into the cinematic universe, it's important we get one thing out of the way. Now that both movies have come out and the onscreen saga of Pennywise is complete, one thing is abundantly clear: Andy Muschietti's films do not do the book justice. I know, I know, that's an inexcusably insufferable thing to say when asked about a movie. But if there's one thing you can count on every horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing, millennial journalist to spout as readily as climate change facts from a half-read The New Yorker article, it's the phrase, "The book was better." In this instance, I humbly count myself among them (my glasses are more of a Cynical Harry Potter shape, though) and ask you to trust me that it's a relevant observation.
In Stephen King's 1986 novel, IT, the group of children portrayed are so vividly real—in all of their terror and joy on the brink of puberty—that adult readers are forced to remember their own childhoods through an uncomfortably accurate lens, rather than the sunshiney, carefree one our culture falsely assigns in retrospect. King reminds us that childhood is, above all else, fraught with an intensity of experience, both good and bad (scary clown or not). King brilliantly weaves together the parallel stories of the Loser's Club as children and adults, switching between the two narratives from chapter to chapter, subtly showing that childhood fears never really die and that life is often a series of patterns repeating themselves. Contrary to popular belief, IT isn't really a book about a murderous clown; it's a book about the horrors and complications of growing up.
Unfortunately, for all the ways Andy Muschietti's 2017 film is at least a semi-worthy tribute to these aspects of King's book, IT: Chapter Two is not. It's possible that the second installment was always set up to fail because—while the childhood portion of the book managed to stand alone in the film—the story of the Loser's Club as adults is simply inextricable from the parallel story of their disrupted youth. Without a side-by-side view of their shared childhood, the story falls flat.
Perhaps most strikingly, IT: Chapter Two manages to feel longer than the 1,100-page book. A nearly three-hour run-time for any movie is self-important, but a three-hour run-time for a horror movie is just exhausting. Sure, they had a lot of ground to cover, but they managed to pack about a half hour's worth of story into three badly-paced hours. There were plenty of funny and sentimental moments as the adults revisited their childhood haunts and dynamics, and it was an excellent choice to insert the child actors from the first film in gripping memory sequences, but the first movie seemed to do most of the work for the second.
Let's answer one of the first questions you ask a friend who's just seen a horror movie: "Was it scary?" In this case, the answer is complicated. Admittedly, the images that Muschietti and his team pulled from King's imagination were often inventive and terrifying...at first. But, perhaps because of the length of the film or because it lacked the guidance of someone experienced in crafting horror, each monster was left onscreen too long. Soon, familiarity took the edge off each grotesque spectacle, and eventually subsumed it all together until the monsters felt downright silly, something King never allows to happen in the mind's eye of his reader and something that should never be allowed to happen on screen.
This is a particularly blatant problem at the end of the movie when the Loser's Club fights Pennywise (in all his various forms) in a lengthy, eventually tiresome battle sequence. Before the movie premiered, many diehard King fans doubted that the mysticism and nuance of the book's ending could be translated effectively onto screen, and they were right. While no one can blame the screenwriters for excluding the group sex scene between the children (yes, that really is in the book), the story's end is decidedly oversimplified and drawn out.
In the book, the theme of good vs. evil comes to a head when the Losers venture into the alternate dimension Pennywise is from and speak to his antithesis, a "turtle" who embodies the forces of good both within the children and in the world at large. It's a powerful, complicated ending worthy of the saga that precedes it. Unfortunately, Muschietti managed to turn it into a limp, anti-bullying PSA. In the film, the Losers shout at Pennywise, verbally belittling him and causing him to physically shrink until they easily rip out his heart, leaving the audience with questions like, "That's it? Why didn't they do that before?" and "So...Pennywise was just the Losers' insecurities…?" and "I paid $17 dollars for this?" It's a cheesy cop-out clearly designed by a movie maker who's scared to delve into the ambiguities and complications of King's original ending.
Still, not all differences between the book and the movie are bad. In King's novel, a romantic connection between Eddie and Richie is only vaguely implied. In the film, Muschietti solidified the implication, showing Richie (Bill Hader) carving "R+E" into a bridge after Eddie's death. In fact, Hader offers many of the movie's best moments, giving the film's most fully-realized performance. Unfortunately, his cheeky one-liners often fall flat thanks to a cast that struggles to capture the same juxtaposition between lightheartedness and terror that the child actors in the first movie nailed.
In the end, perhaps it's unfair to blame Muschietti or the cast for Chapter Two's failure. Maybe there are just some books that don't translate to film, and maybe that's okay. God knows that won't stop studios from continuing to try, and it will continue to give insufferable nerds like me the opportunity to say, "The book was better" every chance we get.- Don't Trust the Elderly in the "It Chapter Two" Trailer - Popdust ›
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Stephen King's Tweets: Why We Need Fewer White Men Voting for the Oscars
The king of horror doesn't understand his own implicit biases.
Stephen King 'Good Morning America' TV show, NYC
Today, Stephen King—one of the most beloved and prolific authors of all time—joined the ranks of celebrities who have made an ass of themselves on Twitter.
King is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body of people who vote to determine the outcome of the Oscars. Apparently, adding his two cents to the conversation surrounding the very white 2020 Oscar nominations, King began tweeting:
And then, more than two hours later, King added a seemingly contradictory sentiment:
Many people on Twitter took issue with King's tweets, responding with accusations of white privilege, among other things.
King is a historically progressive voice on the Internet, often tweeting critiques of Trump and other conservative leaders; he is also a noted philanthropist and activist for a variety of progressive causes. But, given the nature of racism in America, Twitter users who critiqued his tweets are right in their perception that he was being ignorant, and it shouldn't come as a surprise.
First, to say that the issue of diversity "did not come up" in his voting process is essential to claim color blindness, something that has been proven over and over again to be a way to allow subconscious bias to continue to exist unchecked. As The Atlantic puts it, "They [sociologists] argue that as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of colorblindness. But they fear that the refusal to take public note of race actually allows people to ignore manifestations of persistent discrimination." Essentially, just because King did not openly discriminate against films made by and starring people of color, that does not mean that his choices were unaffected by racial biases.
He then goes on to say, "I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong." While this is a common argument against practices like affirmative action, it is also deeply flawed. This kind of egalitarianism would be admirable in a world in which art made by POC and white people existed on an equal playing field, but thanks to centuries of systemic racism and oppression, it does not. We are culturally programmed to see white art as the only legitimate kind of art, particularly in the case of films, because, until relatively recently, filmmaking was a particularly inaccessible medium for POC.
Of course, King ultimately backpedaled (or clarified his point, depending on your perspective), stating, "The most important thing we can do as artists and creative people is to make sure everyone has the same fair shot, regardless of sex, color, or orientation. Right now such people are badly under-represented, and not only in the arts." This tweet suggests that what King was trying to say was that as long as POC and other marginalized groups have the opportunity to make art and therefore be in the running for awards, then they should be judged by the same criteria applied to white art. Unfortunately, this is still an optimistic and privileged point of view. The fact of the matter is, while explicit racism is becoming less and less acceptable in modern America, "aversive racism" still affects as many as two-thirds to three-quarters of white Americans. John Dovidio, a professor of psychology at Yale, explains "aversive racism" as: "Instead of feelings of hatred, it's more like feelings of avoidance and discomfort. That's where the name aversive racism comes from."
Considering the fact that as recently as 2012, Oscar voters were 94% Caucasian and 77% male, it's safe to say that there is a lot of aversive racism and sexism at play in Oscar voting. The Academy has supposedly attempted to diversify since then, and they now have 7,902 voting members, a group that is supposedly made up of more women and POC than in previous years. But still, the Academy remains predominantly white and male; and as long as that remains true, it's unlikely we'll see much of an uptick in the diversity of Oscar nominees. Essentially, acknowledging your implicit bias as a white person is very important, but there is only so much you can do to overcome it because most of the time, you're certain you're being completely fair.
While this kind of bias confrontation is important work, as Dovidio puts it, aversive racism "...usually happens when you can justify a response on the basis of some factor other than race. So, there may be like two people that you are interviewing – one white and one black – and you shift your criteria for the job in a way that actually favors the white person without actually directly discriminating against it. So the problem is every time we look at our behavior and monitor our behavior, we behave in an egalitarian way. And it's only when we're not paying attention that we discriminate."
All of this being said, one has to ask: Should King have voted for films made by POC just for the sake of diversity, even if he didn't think those films deserved his vote? Not necessarily. But what he should have done, and what all white people should do on a daily basis when put in the position to judge and critique art made by and for POC, is interrogate our opinions and our biases.
Here are a few of the questions we need to ask ourselves in those kinds of situations:
So maybe King should have voted for POC movies for the sake of diversity. Maybe he should have acknowledged that, as a white man, he was inevitably going to gravitate towards movies made for and about white men and reacted by casting his votes for films he knew were important to and celebrated by POC. Does this seem like a completely fair way to determine the recipient of an award? No, but neither is being a POC in America.
At the end of the day, the only way to actually address the inequality in Hollywood is to make room for POC to take up space. In this case, that looks like diversifying the Academy until it truly represents the reality of our diverse, multicultural country. And that starts when white men (and white women) admit their implicit biases, confront them, and ultimately move out of the way to give POC and women a chance to make their opinions heard.