The "Stephen King's IT" Paradox - Can You Ever Go Home Again?

Though I think of myself as putting my heart and soul into this blog, I generally like to keep my offline persona mysterious. This is why I use a pen name and why you’ll never see a picture of my face on this page. But I’ll pull behind the curtain just a little today and share that … I attended my high school reunion not too long ago. 

         I actually ended up attending this reunion twice simply because the first reunion, our “real reunion,” was planned at sort of the last minute and had rather sparse attendance. And so those of us who made it to that resolved to see if we couldn’t pull off something a little more robust, which we did some months later with much more success. And I honestly didn’t mind going twice over.

         I never actively put any distance between myself and my old pals, but I also never really made any effort to hold onto them after graduating beyond liking their posts on Facebook. And so I wasn’t sure what ten years and two-and-half bitter presidential elections would do to my ability to feel at home with these guys.

    Even so, it was honestly a delightful experience getting to see these people again. I didn’t necessarily feel guilty that my life no longer afforded the same attention to them, but I found it perfectly natural to be in their company again.

But enough with the preamble … today I’m really here to discuss my experience being the last person on earth to realize that Stephen King’s IT is actually a revelation.

       Published in 1986, Stephen King’s IT sees six adults, all in their late-30s, scattered across the United States—Bill Denbrough, Beverly Marsh, Ben Hanscom, Richie Tozier, Eddie Kasbrak, and Stan Uris—who each receive a phone call from someone named Mike Hanlon and some place called Derry. They each recall that, yes, they knew Mike Hanlon back when they were kids in Derry where they were all friends—a group of outcasts who called themselves “The Losers Club.”

         Mike’s message is simple, “It’s come back. We made a promise. How soon can you get here?” Though none of them can quite recall what that promise was, they all feel compelled to honor their agreement. Five of them answer the call. One of them, Stan, is so gripped by fear that he cuts his wrists in the bathtub.

         The five surviving members of the Losers Club return to Derry where the memories they had suppressed return to the surface. When they were kids, they were menaced by a terrifying, shapeshifting monster that took the guise of a circus clown, “Pennywise,” and preyed upon the children of Derry, including Bill’s younger brother, Georgie. They defeated Pennywise once when they were kids, and the promise they made was that if it ever came back, they would return to kill it once and for all. The novel follows two storylines, one in the 1950s when the Losers faced Pennywise the first time as children, and one in the 1980s when they return as adults to finish what they started.

The book was adapted into two movies. That first movie grossed over $704 million worldwide, becoming the third-highest-grossing R-rated film at the time of its release as well as the highest-grossing horror film, not adjusted for inflation. The follow-up, IT Chapter 2, landed two years later. This movie had a respectable box office return, but both its critical and commercial performance tracked behind its predecessor. 

This is funny because from my very first viewing of the films, I’ve always felt like it was this second film that had the most interesting things to say. I’m very much in the minority here, which brings up certain questions about the story’s promise about coming home and reconnecting with your childhood.

And being a person who likes to think about movies, and being a person who is also matured enough to attend at least one high school reunion, I want to speculate that maybe the reason why the world didn’t know what to do with IT Chapter 2 says a lot more about the deceptive behavior of nostalgia than the actual craft of the movie.

Stephen King’s IT

  At the core, IT is a powerful mirror to the experience of growing up. Like The Night of The Hunter, IT gives visibility to how some of the best representations of childhood aren’t themselves what we’d call “child appropriate,” which reveals something about how vulnerable children really are. Pennywise the demon clown becomes the metaphor for any evil thing that preys on defenseless children—that can be a neglectful or abusive parent, chronic bullying, or a specific traumatic event.

    The story gives visibility to how these kinds of monsters can wreck unimaginable violence on a person’s psyche. This manifests both in the slaughtering of children as well as the psychic damage that the protagonists of this book carry with them into adulthood. The narrative of the story illustrates how the only real fellow combatants these kids have is each other. 

    Children who have not entered into the systems that poison their parents have that special reserve of power that they can use to protect one another, even against an ancient evil. And when they leave that behind, they lose access to that power. The consequence of that is that the trauma that infected them as a child festers in them. The only way they can expunge themselves of that is to return home and confront the genesis of their trauma—alongside the fellow soldiers they fought with before. 

         Part of the success of the book is in courting such a wide range of feelings. Even though it’s a “horror book,” the subjects being examined combined with King’s gift with language afford the experience lots of healing and catharsis, as seen with something like this passage from the epilogue: 

“You don’t have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever, live with them forever, love with them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become […]

“So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away, drive away from Derry, from memory … but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost, and the wind blew in the night.

“Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.

         “All the rest is darkness.”

         This same book also contains passages exploring the sensory experience of having your head chomped off by a smelly, slimy swamp creature. 

         And this is conversely what makes King’s work, especially this work, such a powerful illustration of childhood. King’s writing has a special distinction of targeting adult readers yet extolling the magic of children in a way that is reverential yet also somehow sensible.

    There’s a subplot where poor Eddie, the sickly kid who is always one asthma attack away from disaster, discovers late into the book that there never was anything medically wrong with him, but his mother’s smothering hold over him led him to believe he was more fragile than he was. Realizing that he gave himself a disease just by believing he had one sparks a new defiant gene in him, while also putting him and the reader in a position to wonder what other applications imagination can have for the adult mind, particularly against a being that thrives on turning children’s imagination against them by morphing into their worst fear. That’s the kind of bold yet sensible study of imagination that makes IT so satisfying. King shared in an interview in 1980, when this book was in the early stages,

Leon: The Professional (1994)

“I taught school and you could see the kids losing their imagination right in front of your eyes. I don’t know whether it’s peer pressure of some sort of governor they have. But imagination shrinks and shrinks and shrinks …”

         The book was a hot sell right off the bat, but this property really came into itself once it acquired generational legacy—around thirty years after it premiered, right when the children who grew up on the book are really hungry for a proper adaptation. New Line Cinema discovered as much when director Andy Muschietti premiered IT in 2017, an adaptation of the novel focusing specifically on the Losers as kids (which he produced alongside his sister, Barbara Muschietti). Once that film broke all the records, they were given the greenlight to produce a follow-up IT Chapter 2 developing the remaining storyline. 

    See, the book jumps back and forth between two storylines that we, the reader, are progressing through more or less simultaneously. Muschietti, though, chose the much simpler method of just depicting the events in chronological order, with either movie covering a different timeline. All the childhood stuff happens in one movie, all the grown-up stuff happens in the second. Two different movies, two different casts.

    Tackling this book in any adaptation is going to be a beast because that sucker is a thousand pages following six protagonists across two different timelines. Cutting a 1,000 page book into two movies was probably the best way to cover the material from the novel, but the method of division would also boost the first movie while severely penalizing the second. We’ll get to that.

         Part of the reason why they’re such impressive adaptations is that a lot from the films that we might now call “iconic” was not handed to Muschietti. The ordering of certain events is scrambled to fit a different narrative structure, and certain bits, like The Losers playing in the local reservoir, were invented specifically for this adaptation–and yet they feel compatible with the terrain that King developed.

These creative instincts reflect in the general craft of the film. We will be discussing Bill Skarsgard’s portrayal of Pennywise in 50 years the same way we discuss Anthony Perkins in Psycho or James Earl Jones in Star Wars. And the way the movie lights the hallways of the houses, the places where these kids live and are supposed to feel safe, you understand why the monsters would find them here. 

But the part of the film that everyone agrees was the best was the seven little stars at the heart of the 2017 film. The Losers Club podcast recounted in their episode review of that first film,  

“So many times in horror movies, we concern ourselves with like the monster on the poster, and all the care goes into that monster, and the kids, the teens, the whoever, are there for fodder. They are there for the monster to act out on, and that’s where we get our kicks. But with this movie, it’s all about the kids. And they absolutely nail the kids. All seven of them … I can recommend this horror movie that I did not find frightening because of the kids.”

       Thus, IT emerges as one of the most dominant forces of culture in a year that also saw the first Wonder Woman movie, The Greatest Showman, COCO, and a then record 3 Marvel movies. The world was absolutely ready to welcome the film’s culminating chapter. 

At least, they thought they were. 

The Losers Club also did another episode some five years later where they recounted the highs and lows of the Stephen King renaissance spurred by the 2017 film, including the 2019 sequel–which was widely considered one of the “lows.” They offered such blistering observations, such as that the cast had “no spark” or that the film itself offered some of the worst writing they’d ever seen, one contributor placing at the “bottom of the Mariana trench” in their ranking of Stephen King films.

This episode dropped shortly after the first IT movie had launched on Netflix, where it marinated in the streamer’s top 10 for a good few weeks, and one of the hosts speculated over whether that second movie would find anywhere near that level of success if it likewise dropped on the service, barely concealing how they didn’t think it would–or would deserve to.  

    I’ve seen echoes of this attitude from a lot of sources–not just from like highbrow critics who weren’t held enough as a child. The people who seem to hate this movie the most are the people who also love the book the most and who also loved the first movie.

I don’t have the same history with the material as these guys who literally host a podcast devoted to Stephen King. In a way, that gives me a certain objectivity in how I discuss these movies. Though, given the specific subject, perhaps that disqualifies me from having an opinion about a movie so intertwined with nostalgia and with such a powerful claim on a certain audience that I am not a part of. But to lay down my cards and explain what I’m doing talking about IT …  

I was in film school while the first IT movie was making its runs. Most of my buddies were very taken by the trailers and the memes. But the mania around the movies passed with very little ceremony from me. The idea of a killer clown eating children seemed familiar, so I must have seen a poster for the miniseries on IMDb at some point, but I had not read the book and did not plan to. Nor did I intend on ever seeing these movies.

But about two years after IT Chapter Two came out, I was working as a youth mentor for boys with behavioral issues. The histories of these boys were all varied and unique, but they all had some kind of dark spot of their childhood–this is why I imagine so many of them could so easily see themselves in King’s work. I had read “The Shining” by this point, and so I leveraged that as a common interest between us. But I also saw some copies of that other Stephen King book, the one with the clown giving a very carnivorous smile.

    During the weekdays we’d often put on some kind of film as a treat for getting housework done early. Around the start of Halloween season, the supervisor put on the 1990 miniseries, which … was intermittently compelling, but overall, the thing read like a mid-tier “Power Rangers” episode where everyone’s allowed to say “b*****d”. But it did spark my curiosity enough to check out these movies at long last.

Should be noted that by this point, I had also warmed up to the idea of horror movies as a necessary part of the cinema diet. This was some months after publishing my love letter to A Quiet Place, as a point of reference. But this adventure was still more of an anthropological study than something I was anticipating liking.

The first film I thought was good enough, but I’ll also admit I was still a little puzzled at how it had become like a tentpole of pop culture. And knowing that the discourse had marked the first film as “the good one,” I was expecting to not really care for part 2. And so when I caught it some two weeks later, I was genuinely blindsided at just how affecting it was for me.

    I feel very deeply when I watch movies. But very few moments in all of cinema have moved me as much as the scene after the adult Losers escape from killing Pennywise, and after losing one of their own, where they wash themselves in the reservoir where they all played as kids, symbolically cleansing themselves of their traumas and aches here in the waters of their childhood, finding refuge once again in one another’s embrace. My experience with watching the second film was enough for me to want to go back and review how I felt about that first movie. Which I did some two weeks later, with a companion review of the second movie a day or so after. And just to be safe, I repeated the process about a month later. 

So after three viewings of either movie in the space of like eight weeks, two things happened. One, I decided that maybe I liked the first movie after all. Two, I figured I needed to set aside some time to read this sucker, which I did only a few weeks later.

My experience with the movies is somewhat unique because my adoration for Muschietti’s movies emerges because I was compelled by the argument being presented and how it was articulated, not from the way they fed a certain nostalgic appetite, which is the prototypical design by which people tend to find and claim ownership of Stephen King's IT.

Nostalgia, According to Stephen King

         Mr. King wasn’t the first dude to introduce nostalgia to the media sphere. 1941’s How Green Was My Valley would win Best Picture its year, and it came to many of the same observations about childhood, community, and what capitalism and social unrest did to those things. But so much about the modern nostalgia economy in pop culture comes into focus when you look into Stephen King generally. 

The engine of this story sees a bunch of 40 year olds reminiscing about the good times they had together in the same window that has them recall just how nightmarish their childhood was. The creature they call “It” is a malevolent creature who spends most of his time in hibernation, but awakens once every 27 years to feast on the children of this town. The Losers discover that their hometown has a dark history of all sorts of malevolent goings on, the most dramatic episodes of which fall on these 27 year cycles when his influence is strongest.

This is a motif King borrows from a lot in his horror works, especially his early works like Salem’s Lot or The Shining. Many of King’s most famous works track the way that a place or a community can be contaminated by evil deeds and roped into his loop of repeating hurt or wickedness, and this becomes a way of understanding cycles of evil, like the son of an abusive alcoholic who grows up to be an alcoholic father with murderous impulses. Grady Hendrix wrote of the book in 2013,

Storm Warning (1950)

“… published in 1986, halfway through Ronald Reagan’s second term, there is a case to be made that It is a response to Reagan’s fetishization of the values of the 1950s. Here are the sleeping adults, awakened by a gay bashing in 1985 who suddenly realize their 1950s childhoods were not some idyllic paradise but a complicated place where racism, bullying, sexism, and terror were all part and parcel of the deal. That the gleaming engine of American enterprise had an ugly underbelly of poverty and suffering.”

This all makes IT as a property particularly relevant for our time. Nostalgia has always played some role in the prominence of certain intellectual properties or larger genres and styles. But pop culture has also probably never been as enslaved by its own ghosts or seeking after its own childhood assurances as it is here in the 21st century. (Who’s ready for Toy Story 6, fellas?!)  

         In this adaptation, that nostalgic hook is curated in such a way to specifically entice those who fell under the spell of the book a generation ago. In the novel, The Losers are kids during the late ’50s, and the adult cycle falls in the mid ‘80s, contemporary to the time the book was written. Thus, by the 2010s, the kids who grew up with the book are in the same place as The Losers are during the second cycle, and suddenly it’s the late ‘80s that are the mythologized romantical paradise of childhood, which you see reflected in the ‘80s nostalgia that had absolutely pervaded the media by this time. 

The Muschietti adaptations jump the timetable forward so that The Losers are kids in the late 80s, and adults in a time more or less contemporary to when the films are premiering. This is also reflected in the craft of the movies, which are designed to evoke the kinds of films that were really popular during this time. The parts of Benjamin Wallfisch’s score that don’t sound like they come from some infernal carnival are very reminiscent of John Williams’ scores from the late 80s and early 90s. This also positions the adaptation to reap the goodwill for other Stephen King works during this time, like the film Stand By Me, which premiered the same year that IT the novel was published. Screenwriter Gary Dauberman explained the influence saying,

“Stand By Me is still one of my favorite movies and that's one of my favorite stories so that's an element I wanted to preserve because it's there in the source material. Andy wanted to preserve it and really make that a part of it because I think those moments of levity provide a great contrast to those darker moments, or makes the darker moments feel all that much darker. That was something I cared deeply about.” 

         Stephen King’s IT is, in many ways, even more of a vessel of the 21st century nostalgia fixation than other pop culture tentpoles we’d normally think of—more than even, say, a live-action remake of a beloved Disney animated picture. This nostalgic saturation becomes the defining agent in how audiences have either accepted or rejected either one of Muschietti’s adaptations. It wasn’t because "Chapter 2" had bad writing, and it wasn’t because the cast just “lacked spark.” 

Let’s start with the casting.

The Face of Innocence

          A huge part of the reason why the 2017 film creates such a lovely mirage of 1980s childhood is because the flagbearers for this whole nostalgia parade—the kids themselves—are so endearing to watch. You could easily watch these guys and believe that you are peeking back into your own childhood—or even the one you wish you had. Muschietti shared that behind the scenes,   

“We made them bond way before shooting. We had them for 10 days doing activities together. There was technical stuff. We had bicycle camp because kids today don’t necessarily know how to ride bikes. Magically they all became friends.”  

One thing that the first movie does especially well in the casting is in finding kids who feel like they were picked off the street. They’re charismatic, yes, but they also don’t feel like shrunken movie stars. They feel authentically like kids.

Some of these kids had experience under the limelight, but these were all unknowns that we got to discover ourselves—the obvious exception being Finn Wolfhard, whose specific Stranger Things clout only gave this movie more authority as another document on 80s nostalgia. (Wolfhard’s casting in IT was announced approximately two seconds before the first season of Stranger Things dropped on Netflix.) 

    This winds up forming “Chapter 2’s” first major obstacle. You attach to the kids because they are the faces that imprint upon the audience. And so when you suddenly give these characters a whole different mask for the second movie, well, it’s sort of like watching three seasons of The Witcher with Henry Cavill only for Liam Hemsworth to swoop in and finish the series. Like … who are you and what did you do to Geralt?

Moreover, the adult actors are absolutely not blank spots. Richie grows up to be a standup comedian played by Bill Hader. We are not “discovering” them and claiming ownership of them. All that celebrity electricity just starts to feel like static. 

They also could have worked just a little harder to pick actors who not only looked like the kids, but who could also match their energies. Sophia Lilis and Jessica Chastain both independently give fantastic performances of Beverly. But no part of me thinks that Jessica Chastain is playing the adult version of the character Sophia Lilis played in 2017 just because they are both redheads. 1989 Beverly is slightly spunkier than she is described in the book, 2016 Beverly is slightly more demure. Both are playing to the strengths of the actresses. But for a duology that’s supposed to reveal something about the throughlines between the past and the present, it feels oddly out of synch. The connective tissue between the two generations of Losers is a lot thinner anyone was anticipating. “Who are you, James McAvoy, to be taking Georgie’s name in vain?” And this made for a frustrating experience for a lot of viewers.

  IT Chapter 2 has basically the opposite situation we discussed with the last Harry Potter movies. Here, the directorial flavor has traveled continents away from what Chris Columbus did in 2001, but the casting is familiar. The “Deathly Hallows” movies are widely more embraced as suitable capstones for Harry Potter than IT Chapter 2 was for its much shorter series, and I think this reveals something about what audiences actually expect from their franchises. A lot can change about the voice of a given series across time, but it’s the faces of the characters we attach to. 

That isn’t to say that they’re bad actors or bad in their roles at all. The adult Losers have a different kind of charisma than the younger cast, but they also light up the screen. And more, they all feel really at home here in this horror playground. This cast wasn’t really lacking in anything, they were just put in an impossible situation.

  Everything that made the idea of “Chapter 2” so hype-able made the experience of “Chapter 2” more demanding. These films are just two different animals that happen to use Bill Skarsgard and some of the same locations.

Perhaps they could have had it both ways if, say, at the end of the first movie, there was like a post-credits scene with James McAvoy in the present time getting the phone call from Mike and just hearing “It’s back,” and cut to the standard “Pennywise will return in IT Chapter 2” title. [Oh, turns out Muschietti actually had a similar idea.] Just a little something to inoculate against the nostalgia virus. (Muschietti has also teased the idea of splicing both films together for one long supercut imitating the structure of the book, but … he’s been teasing it for a while now.) But without that connection, nothing else really matters.

         “Too Much of IT”

         There are some specific writing issues that come up in discussion of “Chapter 2.” There was a little discourse around how the film framed Stan’s suicide. In the book, his death is more straightforward—he killed himself because the prospect of having to face Pennywise again scared him that much. But the film ends with him explaining in a letter to his friends that choosing to end his life was the best thing he could do to give them the best chance to defeat Pennywise.

Stan giving them a final hug from the other side of the veil was probably the best way they could have ended the duology, and I can appreciate them wanting to return some power to Stan’s character. Even so, it didn’t seem to occur to Andy Muschietti or Gary Dauberman that they were validating the viewpoint that sometimes killing yourself is the best thing you can do for your buddies, and it’s fair to ask whether they couldn’t have workshopped that more. At least find a way to challenge that idea in the text. Something.

         There are specific writing issues that I latch onto. The choice to make Richie gay, for example, which he was not in the book, feels like something they just decided to go with on the day of shooting. Nothing about this was foreshadowed in the first movie. And really, nothing about this was foreshadowed in the first hour of the second movie. Learning this about Richie doesn’t make anything else he’s done in the films make sense. It seemed to occur to Dauberman and Muschietti that Richie in the books is the least traumatized of The Losers, and so they needed to give him something to feel anxiety over, but I also feel like they could have found  a more graceful way to weave that in.

         But most of the discourse hasn’t been that focused. When people point to what exactly the second film was missing, 9 times out of 10, they dance around this idea that “the magic just wasn’t there,” which leads into some kind of discussion about how the writers should have known better than to do X. 

    But I’ve always felt like the writing works really well here, especially compared to other movies with six+ protagonists re: any of the “Avengers” movies. Even in that first Avengers movie, where the cast is comparatively smaller, you still have some characters who get moments of revelation and some like Thor who are just kind of there for decoration. But in IT Chapter Two, each character has a clear start and end point. They believe something at the end of the movie that they did not at the start:

    Bill needs to accept that it wasn’t ever his fault Georgie died. Beverly needs to have faith that someone could ever love her authentically. Ben needs to have the courage to tell Beverly that he could be that person. Eddie needs to be able to see himself as a hero for once. Mike needs to complete the plan he set in motion when he called his friends back to the battlefront. Each of these guys get to arrive at this conclusion with some special feat during the final confrontation with Pennywise. (Richie’s culminating moment comes a little bit earlier when he returns to the group after nearly fleeing Derry.)

   But maybe the most common critique is that it’s “just too looooong.” Makes sense. “Chapter 2” is only three minutes shorter than The Odyssey. But I don’t have the same experience with IT Chapter 2 that I have with, say, the second and third “Pirates of the Caribbean” films.

         I have a much longer history with either of those movies, yet I still struggle to remember exactly what happens in them or why Will, Norrington, and Jack were having that hamster wheel fight. Whenever I do get around to them, I’m bothered by the cannibalizing plot which makes a 90 degree turn like every 45 minutes. Will spies Elizabeth kissing Jack, while missing some necessary context, and this is supposed to aggravate the tensions in their relationship, but this misunderstanding has no real consequence for their relationship and is cleared up without any repercussions. 

IT Chapter 2, by comparison, has a clear line of action. About forty-five minutes in, we get the instruction: everyone go on and walk down memory lane, and then we’ll meet up after dinner to go kill a clown—which we all kinda knew was going to be the case because of that little promise the characters made in the last film. You could say it’s repetitive seeing this play out among five characters, sure, but these threads all have clear connections to both the character arcs that we witnessed in that first movie and to a shared final destination that is brightly telegraphed.

I think that the same thing that makes the second film more engaging for me is the same thing that makes the first film more appealing for everyone else. The pacing for IT 2017 is a little lazier. The events are unfolding over the course of a summer, not a weekend. You can always feel the movie sort of spiraling toward something sinister, but the narrative events themselves are much more pleasant and leisurely. The second film makes you get down to business much quicker. 

        In the end, the performance disparity between the two It movies has more in common with the reasons why the first “Wicked” movie was more commercially viable than the second. What's the easier sell for a night out? Singing about how glam it is to stand up to authority, or actually depicting the stress and labor and heartache involved in cleansing a corrupt system?

         IT Chapter 2’s deficiencies aren’t really in anything in the movie’s craftsmanship. Both movies are just making different promises, and one was significantly more enticing than the other. The first IT movie is there to hug your inner child and remind you of how nice it felt to be swaddled in the womb of ‘80s iconography where even the darkness was familiar and comforting. The second movie? It pushes you out into the light screaming so you can lay your demons bare. It makes you ask the hard questions.

Can You Ever Go Home Again?

During a flashback scene in “Chapter 2,” Stan poses the question to his friends about whether or not they will all still be buddies once they’re all grown up. The kids are all really keen on the idea, but of course, we cut right back to the adult Losers who have not thought about each other in decades, which makes them all seem like major failures.

A major component of Stephen King’s IT is exposing just how bizarre it is that a team of kids who went through what The Losers did could ever drift apart, let alone completely forget one another. Yet that’s exactly what happens. There’s a magical component to this in both the film and the book. Mike explains that it’s part of the darkness that hangs over the town that the further you get from Derry, the more your memories of it start to cloud. But this also has obvious real-world parallels. How many people in their 40s can honestly say they’re still in regular contact with their buddies from fifth grade? 

Of course, in both the book and the 1990 mini-series, the real kick is that this dissolution happens a second time. After they’re done killing Pennywise, they all kind of figure out that the spell is going to take effect again, and in a few weeks, they will remember nothing of Pennywise or each other. (This, I suppose, raises certain questions for all the involved parties. Ben and Beverly leave Derry together, get married, and start having kids. Will they seriously remember nothing about how they met?) The book closes in on this inevitable tragedy of human memory where it’s just beyond the adult mind to hold on to any part of childhood, and the only thing we can do to frustrate this process is read books like these and imagine what tremendous feats we, the reader, must have accomplished with our friends during that time that is no longer accessible to us.

But at the end of IT Chapter 2, we get dialogue confirmation, during a phone conversation between Mike and Bill some months after they defeat Pennywise, that they are retaining their memories of both their childhood and their reunion and are presumably maintaining their long-distance relationships. 

This is probably the biggest deviation either film makes from the book. The first IT film accepts its untethered fantasy. It doesn’t try to test the structural integrity of the bubble it’s floating around in by making the audience ask a question that can only have one answer.

But while I do think the ending of “Chapter 2” offers a certain comfort, I also don’t think that the film is just choosing the more sentimental route just for points. This movie understands the territory more than I think it’s given credit for. 

Peter's Friends (1992)

The subject of adult friendship and loneliness has been around for a while, but for reasons we can perhaps guess, the last few decades have seen an upturn in interest on the question of “Why is friendship so much harder as a grown-up than as a kid?” Serana Dai wrote for The Atlantic,

“Recent research has found that although plenty of Americans have friends, many of them aren’t seeing one another. Partly, this is because institutions that used to encourage consistent, more seamless socialization, such as religious and civic groups, have largely declined in popularity. Without those conduits, planning hangouts becomes a form of social labor—the kind that, for many people, can easily feel like a chore.” 

         Meanwhile, Rhaina Cohen submits that what adult friendship could use is more spontaneity absent any kind of itinerary, like what you used to do as kids.

Luca (2021)

“This pursuit of efficiency and the safety of following norms can come at the cost of pleasure. [Sheila Liming, the author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time] told me that an efficiency mindset risks making friendships feel transactional, as if each meeting should be ‘worth it.’ But squeezing hangouts into short, infrequent slots is unlikely to feel fulfilling. If you haven’t seen each other in a while, focusing on catching up is natural. Ticking through life’s headlines, however, can feel like exchanging memos, whereas joint adventures create memories—the foundation of close friendship. As the sociologist Eric Klinenberg told The Atlantic, ‘You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time.’”

I’ll agree that the time economy is a major eroding element when it comes to maintaining friendships, particularly those from a certain time in your life. And more, as I tracked in my essay on The Banshees of Inisherin, human connection becomes a much more willful act once you are made to participate in a capitalist system. At the same time, when I think about people I used to be close to, even as recently as high school, the distance isn’t always some kind of accident. 

One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

    The fact is that people mutate, and sometimes they change into someone you no longer wish to engage with. (Dang it, Tyler from 11th grade prom was there January 6th!) Deciding exactly when to hit “unfriend” is a bigger beast than I can tackle right now, and also a very personal ordeal. But for more on understanding social division, see my deconstruction of Raya and the Last Dragon. 

Maybe it’s the lack of specific reference to the growing political divide that made the ending for IT Chapter 2 feel artificial for some. At the same time, I also don’t think that politics covers every situation. I can think of lots of people in my circle whose political behavior I don’t share whom I still feel very invested in. It’s also my observation that actually talking with friends who voted differently than I did is seldom as bad as I think it’s going to be. (Not never, but seldom!) People are a lot more than the face they show on social media. While people always tend to make friends with likeminded individuals, psychologists Ian MacRae and David Robson reported for BBC in 2024,

Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005)

“In line with previous studies, however, we found they overestimated how much others wanted to create an argument over differences in opinion – an assumption that may hamper the free exchange of ideas and potentially stand in the way of forging new friendships.”

The “IT” movies leave the specific political views of the characters out of the conversation. But this idea of projecting distance onto someone else is a huge part of the process the films explore. After all, sometimes we are the ones changing, and we don’t want to be reminded of who we used to be, or in some cases who we still are. And IT Chapter 2 makes a robust study of this phenomenon as well.

         The film opens with Mike giving a voiceover, musing, “People want to believe they are what they choose to remember. The good stuff. The moments. The places. The people we all hold onto. But sometimes … we are what we wish we could forget.” This folds into the film’s explanation for why The Losers lost touch with not only each other but also who they were as kids. That’s why Ben doesn’t want to think about how sad it was being the fat kid in school who was always told that the cute redhead he wrote a poem for was always going to choose someone else. They each carry lingering shame and aching from their childhood, and that dark cloud has shaped who they have become as adults. 

    Bill’s main arc in this film, for example, is extricating his guilt over Georgie’s death in that first movie. (This affects, among other things, how he as an author always writes unhappy books.) Thus, he allows the memories of who he was at that time and the people who formed him to fade away. The Losers all do this, denying themselves not only the salvific bonds they shared but also the opportunity to live free of the darkness that found them as children. 

    Even young children are capable of feeling responsible for their miseries, and even adults are capable of harboring that shame. Something to that phenomenon can be described as cancerous. That can exacerbate feelings of guilt, and it can make a lot of the idealism and relationships a person carried as a kid feel inaccessible, even painful. That prospect becomes considerably less painful, though, when you choose to offer yourself grace and not condemn yourself for being a work in progress–or for simply refusing to accept blame for things that were not your fault, like Beverly coming to not hate herself for not knowing how to stop her dad from abusing her as a kid.

    People reject IT Chapter 2, I imagine, for the same reasons they might reject the idea of a high school reunion. I have definitely participated in social circles that feel like some cross between an African-savannah watering hole and a cutthroat beauty pageant, but I wound up having a really good time meeting up with old friends--even though we hadn't seen each other in years, even though our paths had wildly diverged, and even though we never fought a killer clown together (at least, not that I can recall ...) There was none of the cringe or judgmentalism that I had been conditioned to expect.

Maybe my crew was just really swell, but I also feel like at least a part of that was internal. This is where the music undescoring IT Chapter 2 really rings true for me. It was deciding that it would be okay to revisit not just these people, but also the person I was as a kid and insist that, even if he was a work in progress, he was also a person whose company was worthwhile.

“We Are Losers, and We Always Will Be” 

         Against all odds, I adore Andy Muschietti’s IT movies. I love them as vehicles for creative scares. I love the craft involved. I love what they reveal about the nature of friendship and identity and facing your fears alongside people who have your back. And, of course, I love the hellish book that spawned this whole franchise in the first place. 

         I included my specific path to falling in love with IT specifically because it is my honest observation that the composition of a person’s nostalgia for this work bears profound influence on how they are willing to interact with it. People were turned off by the second movie not because it was actually any worse than the first film or because you can’t actually go home again, but because it actually very accurately describes the cycle of shame and isolation, and it tracks exactly what it takes to thwart those things once and for all, and the reality of that can be a little too sobering.

To be clear, I don’t necessarily take pride in my preference. I think that my specific vantage point gives me some kind of objectivity, but I’ll also concede that a work’s greatest obligation is to its target demographic–in this case, the fellas who felt really seen by that first movie. I don’t feel comfortable declaring they were just watching the movie wrong. Even so, I think this does pose some questions about the behavior of things like nostalgia and healing, and what obligation art even has for these things. 

    What makes IT so revelatory has always been the way that it captures the duality of nostalgia. Reminiscence can be a powerful, even salvific thing, but if you're only in the nostalgia game for the tickles and frivolities and choose to never look the monster in the eye, well, you're leaving yourself vulnerable.

         The thing people misunderstand about nostalgia is that it's never really about retreating to a state of non-actancy. It’s always about returning to a state of mind where anything feels possible and when you have fewer excuses to avoid doing the right thing. Truly good movies can go a long way to help us remember what that was like.

    Truly good friends can carry that even further.

                --The Professor