Maxwell Endless
Thinking About IT
Mr. Rogers visits with the mailman while I play with blocks.
TELEVISION MEMORIES
It’s a lonely experience, watching television your whole life. Sure, it’s exciting when you flip to the right channel at the right time. Television memories are private memories. Talk about them is like talking about dreams.
A baseball announcer drones from the other room.
The couch fabric scratches my legs during Are You Afraid Of The Dark.
THE MINISERIES IS BETTER
There are currently two filmic versions of the story of It, which first appeared in 1986 as a novel by Stephen King. The first was a miniseries directed by Tommy Lee Wallace which aired on the ABC Network in 1990. The second was a two part film series, with Chapter 1 released in 2016 and Chapter 2 in 2017, both directed by Andy Muschietti. These films were very successful, and in the press, reviews, and commentary surrounding them, people speak condescendingly about the miniseries, as if the movies are self-evidently better. However, the movies degrade the themes which make the miniseries truly haunting and evocative.
The Sci-Fi Channel’s Memorial Day Twilight Zone marathon never ends.
Grandfather complains about Saturday Night Live over breakfast.
GROUP BONDING
At root, It is a story about a group. Kids band together to defeat a monster. The miniseries pays careful attention to this group development. It is psychologically specific, both in terms of why each kid is there, and what they gain from acting together. While generally moving briskly and efficiently, the miniseries takes the time to show the kids bonding, with the camera placing them in striking tableaus evoking the power and force of young friendship. The kids—known as the Losers Club—slowly become comfortable sharing their deepest fears. Pivotal moments are marked by big group hugs. Each time they touch they draw closer together, depicting a kind of true friendship where there’s an appreciation of both common ground and difference.
On the surface, the film version gets a lot of mileage out of the idea of the group. We see lots of shots of them biking around and going places together. But the specificity of the group bonding, explored so carefully in the miniseries, is gone from the newer It films, mirroring our contemporary moment’s crisis of friendship. The films seize opportunities to split the group apart and present more conventional individual hero-journeys.
Father comes in during Mighty Ducks 2 to tell me that my grandfather had died.
PENNYWISE
The monster in the movies is Pennywise, an outer space alien clown with telekinetic abilities. This is a major change from the miniseries, where Pennywise disappears once The Losers Club gets deep enough into the sewers. When the Losers go through the door that leads into the monster’s lair, instead of a clown, they find an unnamed, creepy-crawly spider-crab-scorpion-like creature. This moment is generally derided by critics and fans. And it does feel like a bit of a let-down when Tim Curry, who plays Pennywise with such weird verve, is replaced by a spidery puppet. But it’s an important choice because it establishes that Pennywise is only a projection of the true form of the monster.
Noël Carroll’s essay ‘Fantastic Biologies And The Structures Of Horrific Imagery,’ provides a useful framework for thinking about the morphology of monsters generally. He writes:“Horrific monsters are threatening…They must be dangerous…The monster may also be threatening psychologically, morally, or socially…horrific creatures are also impure.”
A football in my hands while CNN covers the Columbine shooting one rainy afternoon.
Carroll goes on to lay out two basic structures for creating monsters, fusion and fission: “The central mark of a fusion figure is the compounding of ordinarily disjoint or conflicting categories in an integral, spatiotemporally unified individual.” This could be creatures whose bodies are mashups of several normally distinct bodies. The It monster, with a body that combines crab, scorpion, and spider, is a fusion. Fission monsters are those which are “distributed over different, though metaphysically related identities.” This can be a temporal division, such as the werewolf, in which the body of a man and the body of a wolf alternate from within the same form. This can also be a spatial division in which the creature, like Pennywise the clown and the space crab, has multiple bodies existing in different places simultaneously. This crab/Pennywise split is essential, as the incorporeal Pennywise, slathered in thick white pancake make-up, is not real. It only seems to exist. In the end, Pennywise is nothing more or less than a screen, a kind of TV.
The Twin Towers collapse during high school English.
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SATURN
Pennywise is deeply Saturnian. They both return every 30 years. In his painting Saturn Devouring His Son (1819-1823), Francisco Goya depicts Saturn eating the arm of his child. Similarly, we are told that Pennywise rips off his victims arms. The miniseries also repeatedly zooms in on the monster's face, placing the camera in the position of Pennywise’s victims so that it confronts us with its beckoning yellow eyes which appear to look directly through the screen. This echoes Goya’s Saturn. As Laura Thipphawong notes in her essay, “I Saw Something Scary Part II:”
Created in privacy and with uncensored impulse, Goya conceived of an image that embodies secrecy and perversion, in which Saturn becomes the allegory of hidden urges and secrecy itself… In the context of Saturn Devouring His Son, the act of seeing is the true content of the work, turning a grisly act of cannibalism into an allegorical dilemma of seeing what we do not wish to see and knowing what we do not want to know…The true subject of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son is the gaze. The painting’s notoriety and the stunningly direct and immediate impression left on the viewer are contingent on one simple aspect of the painting: Saturn’s eyes. Saturn stares directly through the canvas toward the viewer, and appears in the middle of the atrocious act, leaving no room for denial.
We have here an image of time and (parental) authority which is terrified of being usurped, and which uses ghastly oppression to prevent being overtaken by its progeny. By oppressing the younger generation, Saturn prevents any challenge to the existing social order. In this way, Pennywise can be seen as the mechanism by which society enforces its current order through isolation and repression.
However, Saturn is a complex, Janus-faced character. Symbolizing time, it also contains the seeds of change, reminding us that to delete the past is also to dismember the future. The Losers Club forms as a result of Pennywise’s presence and by gazing upon and confronting the clown creature, they find togetherness and revelation.
Visions of Death creeping through the hallways of a soap opera hospital.
If Pennywise is a screen, it can only reflect back what is already in our own minds. This is the ambiguity of repression. A simultaneous desire and revulsion that also goes to the heart of the horror genre. We only fear things we also care about. Pennywise’s eyes, visions, and his deadlights which shine like torches bewitch those who look into them.
Charles Grodin’s red, pinched face during a thousand reruns of Clifford on Comedy Central.
THE TOWN
In the miniseries, Pennywise/It has a complex relationship to the town of Derry. The characters make this explicit in a discussion when they are contemplating the nature of Pennywise’s power.
“Everybody was afraid, but nobody did anything…”
“She didn’t want to know…”
“My neighbor saw Henry bully me and he looked away, went back inside.”
“It’s too horrible.”
“They act like it didn’t happen.”
“It’s a disease.”
“The Derry disease, nobody wants to know.”
“Something’s terribly wrong with Derry.”
At first it seems like the miniseries is positing that Pennywise controls Derry, a kind of deranged father to the entire town. This vision appears in the films as well. But the miniseries goes farther in suggesting, at its very end, that something else could be going on. After the group has finally defeated It, Mike is reading through his journal. He notes that the police have discovered the corpse of Henry Bowers, who was killed sometime earlier. Mike says that the investigation ended quickly, like most investigations in Derry. It’s a quick line, but the implications are vast.
Because at this point, Pennywise/It is dead and it’s control over the town should be broken. Things should be back to normal. The police should be free to do their job. That the ‘curse’ on the town persists after the death of Pennywise raises some rather troubling questions about the nature of society.
The 60 Minutes clock ticks down Sunday evenings as the dusk gathers outside.
AMNESIA
Through the character of Pennywise/IT, the miniseries presents a complex portrait of how repression is generated by and operates within society. Through The Loser’s Club, it also offers a vision for how to fight against these forces. But this portrayal is complicated by the way it also takes care to point out that The Loser’s Club is afflicted with a persistent and repetitive amnesia.
The amnesia first strikes them after they defeat the monster as teenagers. Despite the power of their bond, they quickly forget the details of these activities and split apart. The same thing recurs after they defeat the monster a second time. Mike mentions in his diary that he and the other Losers are having trouble remembering each other's names. They forget, they split part again. It’s not that they choose to sacrifice their bond and their group strength, in favor of frivolous lives in consumer society, it’s that they have no choice. They are helpless to resist the cloud of amnesia when it comes envelop them. This amnesia often goes without comment in analysis of the story, but it is perhaps the crucial element, an unacknowledged, unexplained monster.
Sarah McLaughlin sings plaintively over images of shivering dogs.
DEADLIGHTS
”When they got here It would cast them, shrieking and insane, into the deadlights,” writes Stephen King in It. Ultimately, the portrait the miniseries paints is one of repetitive group forgetting. It also reflects the nature of consciousness in a nationalized, mass media culture. In the 90s, it was cable. Now, it's the social media timeline, which is even faster and more fragmented. The operative mechanism is the same: we are presented with provocative topics of disparate natures in rapid succession. We see them and they rouse us to a pitch of emotion before they are promptly replaced by something else of a totally different nature. These are also deadlights.
The Taco Bell gong rings out as we zoom in on a Cheesy Gordita Crunch.