Then and Now
For the fourth of July in 2018, I took a trip to Boulder, Colorado. I had the entire week off of work, had planned nothing, and I found that I could book a flight to Denver from San Franciso on short notice for a price that wasn't too excessive. I had no idea what I would do in Boulder, but it seemed like I should get out of my small Mountain View apartment and experience something, anything, beyond my rather humdrum existence there.
Boulder is a beautiful little city. I could write more about this, for sure, but that is for another day. Instead I'm going to talk about the accident that happened while I was there: in my hotel room, late one night, I happened to watch the film It, which is the first of 2 films adapted to tell the story from the Stephen King novel of the same name.
The film itself was disarmingly good. I could qualify this by tacking on the phrase "for a horror movie", but that's just hedging against the people who might read this who detest the genre. No, horror films are not for everyone, nor is it not clear to me if there's ever been a great horror movie that stands on its own as a great movie. But I'm not a film critic, and this post is not a movie review, so we needn't sort this out before proceeding. (Out of consideration for the kindly reader, I will add the usual adage that headlines movie reviews and say that, while I will attempt not to spoil anything about the films or the original novel, I can't promise I won't.)
The novel It is about a shapeshifting entity that takes the form of a clown so that it can lure in children and eat them. On the surface, this gambit makes very little sense. Aren't so many children afraid of clowns that posing as one is more a liability than an ace in the hole? There's more to the story than just carnality: the creature itself feeds not just on flesh but on the fear felt by its victims. Sometimes the clown ruse works (as it does quite well in the first chapter of the book), but more often the shapeshifter poses as the thing the child fears the most so it can terrify its victim, corner them as they flee, and then consume them. The form of a clown embodies the dubious duality that it can both draw in children and instill a sense of unease at the same time.
If this sounds like a silly premise for a 1000+ page novel, rest assured that it is. My grandmother was an avid reader of fiction, and, while she never read Stephen King, she once told me about a friend of hers that read his books for years. That is, until she finally got around to reading It, which she thought was so ridiculous that she swore off reading King forever. But any lengthy story can be made absurd by simply reducing it to its logline. Make yourself describe the Star Wars series in a few sentences and, on the strength of that alone, ask yourself honestly if these are films you're interested in consuming. The outlandish narrative of It works not because its premise encapsulates all its appeal, but because, like all good stories, it is a vessel the author uses to smuggle in flirtation with more meaningful themes.
The story concerns a group of 7 middle school-aged children who realize that the disappearance and deaths of kids in their small town in Maine are all connected by a single thread, which they follow into the sewers where the monster lives and battle in order to destroy it. This is the first half of the story, which serves admirably to drive the plot of the first 2017 film. The first film came just over a year after the release of the incredibly popular television series Stranger Things, which shared many of the same elements: it is set in the 1980s, it takes place in a small rural community, and is about a group of middle school kids who must band together in a world of mostly clueless adults in order to fight a transdimensional evil. (Indeed, in what seems like a casting coincidence, but probably is not, the actor Finn Wolfhard plays the character of Mike in Stranger Things and Richie in It.)
After seeing the first movie in my hotel room last summer, I immediately regretted not having seen it in the theaters. (I never go see movies in the theater.) For whatever flaws it may possess, it very much struck me as being a cinematic construction equivalent to a haunted house or spooky ride that you find in a theme park. It doesn't weigh itself down with heavy questions about the nature of good and evil. It doesn't ask the viewer to dwell on the meaning of any particular scare, much in the way that a car taking you through a haunted house ride doesn't stop and let you inspect the thing that sprung out and scared you in the strobing lights before it whisks you along its tracks to the next scare. There is just evil that exists in the world. There are things that go bump in the night. We're not supposed to ask why. We're just supposed to identify with the characters (remembering, perhaps, the things that spooked us as children), strap ourselves in, and root for them as we go along for the adventure. In the vein of horror films that attempt to do this, the first part of It does this very well. (If the financial scoreboard can be trusted, It Chapter One became the highest grossing horror film of all time shortly after it was released.)
The end of the first film, alas, is not the end of our story. The creature has a cyclical nature; it emerges every 27 years from hibernation in order to feed on children. The second film concerns itself with the children as adults, who have long since grown up, moved away from their hometown, and have all but forgotten about the psychotic clown they destroyed as tweens. One of them remains behind, and when children start disappearing again, 27 years later, he has to enlist the help of his childhood friends by contacting them and convincing them to return to fight the evil from their youth that they have all but completely forgotten.
As a young child, I had always shied away from horror films. At the first appearance of any sense of gore or fright in a film, I would immediately change the channel and find something else to watch. At a slumber party with friends in sixth grade, I hid my head in my sleeping bag for the entire second half of Jaws 2, listening to the screams from the characters on screen, imaginging the horror in my mind, but being completely unable to pull my head from the sand and watch anyone get eaten by the shark.
I remember when I began to read adult novels in middle school. (Some of you can probably guess where this is going.) At the time, this struck me as being an important rite of manhood. What do adults do? They read those books you find at bookstores, the ones that top the bestseller lists, the ones with thick spines and adorned with the names of authors that have become household names. I dabbled in Crichton, Grisham, and Robin Cook. At some point, I came to understand that my conquering of the adult world wouldn't be complete without confronting the terrors of the horror genre. It was my own form of exposure therapy; if I read a bunch of books by the most popular horror writer of the day, then surely by immersing myself in them, I would become inured to their intended impact.
The first adult horror novel I ever read was It. In the King canon, it was an arbitrary decision among the many options available in used paperback in a small bookshop on Woodward Avenue in the Detroit area. It was an 1,100 page novel that I devoured in 8 days. I remember carting it around between classes with me, subtly and quietly trying to make a big show of the fact that I was now reading stuff that was supposed to scare adults. I was twelve years old at the time, a tender youth scraping his way through the real-life horrors of seventh grade. I didn't think much of It after I read it; it was just one of many novels I had to get through in order to conquer my fear of monsters and mayhem, and to prove myself to be a worthy adult.
The day after I saw the second film, I went out and got a copy of the book. Re-reading its pages now, the book feels familiar to me in a way that can only happen when you revisit something you read as a child. When I started reading, I remembered something I had forgotten. It wasn't lost on my 12-year-old self that I was reading the book at an age when I could most relate to the plight of the children fighting the monster. But what of the second part of the story? What of the stories of the adults who were 37 or 38 years old? I mused, as a youth, how interesting it would be to revisit the book when I was that age and re-read it again from that perspective.
But would I ever do this? Surely, the older me, far off in the future and a few years shy of the age of 40, would have moved on to bigger and better things. I did the math: by age 37 my father already had a wife and two-year-old son to support. In all probability, the future me would be in the same position. Why on earth would this person take the time out of their busy life to revisit a novel they read at 12, just to see how well it plays from the adult point of view?
The mystery has been resolved. I am now 37 years old, so I now know very much the direction that my life has taken, and where I have ended up, in the meantime. It is at this age (coincidentally) that the second film installment was released (it just came out earlier this month), and I went to go see it. I did this merely as a diversion, to entertain myself on a Friday night and take my mind off of the weightier adult matters that have come to preoccupy me. The second film toys with this very question: once we grow up, haven't we left behind the silly little limitations and fears that plagued us in our youth?
The answer is a resounding "no". The characters have grown up, but their adult lives are still very much overshadowed by the echoes of things that terrorized them in their youth. From a psychoanalytic perspective, there is much in the story that sits nakedly obvious to the viewer; Freud would watch the films and nod knowingly at the struggles of the adults, all the while smiling and rolling a cigar between his fingers. When the adults finally fight the eponymous monster of the story, they are confronted by, and must overcome, manifestations of the things that haunt them as adults. These fears are familiar to us. As a story with an altogether nonsensical underlying mythology about the struggle of humans fighting an otherworldly evil, this is why the characters are sympathetic to the audience, and it is where the catharsis of the film's conclusion lies.
The first film can be taken standalone as a fun horror romp that doesn't bother to explain itself. The second film deals with heavier themes than the first, and, of necessity, it must concern itself with the exposition and true nature of the monster itself. Oddly, this doesn't weigh it down. The second chapter of It is a horror film, but it carries itself with a levity that isn't typical of the genre. Most horror stories take great pains to rarify themselves, setting themselves in remote and dark places, ostensibly to enhance the ambience that cloaks the scares, but perhaps also to allow the audience to maintain a healthy psychological distance from the monsters in the stories. The adults that inhabit the second film are not stern, serious characters that inhabit a dark universe where no one has a sense of humor or no one ever laughs. They are us, and this is why the story works. (Case in point: Bill Hader plays the adult Richie and steals every scene he's in. I also watched the film twice without realizing that one of the adult characters is portrayed by Isaiah Mustafa, who is better known to many of us as Old Spice's "the man your man could smell like".)
A made-for-TV miniseries was released in 1990, a few years after the original book. The first installment of the more recent film adaptation was released in 2017. If you consider the time gap between these, then it's plainly obvious that there is a generation of people who were reared on the story when they were roughly the age of the children, and who have had it thrust back into their lives when they have finally reached the age of the adults. The fact that the original novel serves as an anchor point that lets me peer back across the years to my youth, while itself being about this very thing, is not one that is in any way unique to me.
It seems, however, to be the epic story that I can call my own. I am surrounded by people who have come of age reading Harry Potter, Twilight, Lord of the Rings, and a perhaps a dozen other franchises that have never really spoken to me. I've perseveratively seen the second film twice since it came out; I will most likely see it again. When I started re-reading the novel last week, I plowed through the first couple hundred pages in two days. I realized it would be easy to consume the book as quickly this time as I did when I was 12. In the end, I slowed my pace and am taking my time, easing through the pages and savoring what happens. I know what's going to happen, but it's been long enough that I don't really know. It has to be slowly drawn out from the darker recesses of my memory. Is it more distressing that as we get older, everything seems to change, or that nothing seems to change?
Time to float.
Boulder is a beautiful little city. I could write more about this, for sure, but that is for another day. Instead I'm going to talk about the accident that happened while I was there: in my hotel room, late one night, I happened to watch the film It, which is the first of 2 films adapted to tell the story from the Stephen King novel of the same name.
The film itself was disarmingly good. I could qualify this by tacking on the phrase "for a horror movie", but that's just hedging against the people who might read this who detest the genre. No, horror films are not for everyone, nor is it not clear to me if there's ever been a great horror movie that stands on its own as a great movie. But I'm not a film critic, and this post is not a movie review, so we needn't sort this out before proceeding. (Out of consideration for the kindly reader, I will add the usual adage that headlines movie reviews and say that, while I will attempt not to spoil anything about the films or the original novel, I can't promise I won't.)
The novel It is about a shapeshifting entity that takes the form of a clown so that it can lure in children and eat them. On the surface, this gambit makes very little sense. Aren't so many children afraid of clowns that posing as one is more a liability than an ace in the hole? There's more to the story than just carnality: the creature itself feeds not just on flesh but on the fear felt by its victims. Sometimes the clown ruse works (as it does quite well in the first chapter of the book), but more often the shapeshifter poses as the thing the child fears the most so it can terrify its victim, corner them as they flee, and then consume them. The form of a clown embodies the dubious duality that it can both draw in children and instill a sense of unease at the same time.
If this sounds like a silly premise for a 1000+ page novel, rest assured that it is. My grandmother was an avid reader of fiction, and, while she never read Stephen King, she once told me about a friend of hers that read his books for years. That is, until she finally got around to reading It, which she thought was so ridiculous that she swore off reading King forever. But any lengthy story can be made absurd by simply reducing it to its logline. Make yourself describe the Star Wars series in a few sentences and, on the strength of that alone, ask yourself honestly if these are films you're interested in consuming. The outlandish narrative of It works not because its premise encapsulates all its appeal, but because, like all good stories, it is a vessel the author uses to smuggle in flirtation with more meaningful themes.
The story concerns a group of 7 middle school-aged children who realize that the disappearance and deaths of kids in their small town in Maine are all connected by a single thread, which they follow into the sewers where the monster lives and battle in order to destroy it. This is the first half of the story, which serves admirably to drive the plot of the first 2017 film. The first film came just over a year after the release of the incredibly popular television series Stranger Things, which shared many of the same elements: it is set in the 1980s, it takes place in a small rural community, and is about a group of middle school kids who must band together in a world of mostly clueless adults in order to fight a transdimensional evil. (Indeed, in what seems like a casting coincidence, but probably is not, the actor Finn Wolfhard plays the character of Mike in Stranger Things and Richie in It.)
After seeing the first movie in my hotel room last summer, I immediately regretted not having seen it in the theaters. (I never go see movies in the theater.) For whatever flaws it may possess, it very much struck me as being a cinematic construction equivalent to a haunted house or spooky ride that you find in a theme park. It doesn't weigh itself down with heavy questions about the nature of good and evil. It doesn't ask the viewer to dwell on the meaning of any particular scare, much in the way that a car taking you through a haunted house ride doesn't stop and let you inspect the thing that sprung out and scared you in the strobing lights before it whisks you along its tracks to the next scare. There is just evil that exists in the world. There are things that go bump in the night. We're not supposed to ask why. We're just supposed to identify with the characters (remembering, perhaps, the things that spooked us as children), strap ourselves in, and root for them as we go along for the adventure. In the vein of horror films that attempt to do this, the first part of It does this very well. (If the financial scoreboard can be trusted, It Chapter One became the highest grossing horror film of all time shortly after it was released.)
The end of the first film, alas, is not the end of our story. The creature has a cyclical nature; it emerges every 27 years from hibernation in order to feed on children. The second film concerns itself with the children as adults, who have long since grown up, moved away from their hometown, and have all but forgotten about the psychotic clown they destroyed as tweens. One of them remains behind, and when children start disappearing again, 27 years later, he has to enlist the help of his childhood friends by contacting them and convincing them to return to fight the evil from their youth that they have all but completely forgotten.
As a young child, I had always shied away from horror films. At the first appearance of any sense of gore or fright in a film, I would immediately change the channel and find something else to watch. At a slumber party with friends in sixth grade, I hid my head in my sleeping bag for the entire second half of Jaws 2, listening to the screams from the characters on screen, imaginging the horror in my mind, but being completely unable to pull my head from the sand and watch anyone get eaten by the shark.
I remember when I began to read adult novels in middle school. (Some of you can probably guess where this is going.) At the time, this struck me as being an important rite of manhood. What do adults do? They read those books you find at bookstores, the ones that top the bestseller lists, the ones with thick spines and adorned with the names of authors that have become household names. I dabbled in Crichton, Grisham, and Robin Cook. At some point, I came to understand that my conquering of the adult world wouldn't be complete without confronting the terrors of the horror genre. It was my own form of exposure therapy; if I read a bunch of books by the most popular horror writer of the day, then surely by immersing myself in them, I would become inured to their intended impact.
The first adult horror novel I ever read was It. In the King canon, it was an arbitrary decision among the many options available in used paperback in a small bookshop on Woodward Avenue in the Detroit area. It was an 1,100 page novel that I devoured in 8 days. I remember carting it around between classes with me, subtly and quietly trying to make a big show of the fact that I was now reading stuff that was supposed to scare adults. I was twelve years old at the time, a tender youth scraping his way through the real-life horrors of seventh grade. I didn't think much of It after I read it; it was just one of many novels I had to get through in order to conquer my fear of monsters and mayhem, and to prove myself to be a worthy adult.
The day after I saw the second film, I went out and got a copy of the book. Re-reading its pages now, the book feels familiar to me in a way that can only happen when you revisit something you read as a child. When I started reading, I remembered something I had forgotten. It wasn't lost on my 12-year-old self that I was reading the book at an age when I could most relate to the plight of the children fighting the monster. But what of the second part of the story? What of the stories of the adults who were 37 or 38 years old? I mused, as a youth, how interesting it would be to revisit the book when I was that age and re-read it again from that perspective.
But would I ever do this? Surely, the older me, far off in the future and a few years shy of the age of 40, would have moved on to bigger and better things. I did the math: by age 37 my father already had a wife and two-year-old son to support. In all probability, the future me would be in the same position. Why on earth would this person take the time out of their busy life to revisit a novel they read at 12, just to see how well it plays from the adult point of view?
The mystery has been resolved. I am now 37 years old, so I now know very much the direction that my life has taken, and where I have ended up, in the meantime. It is at this age (coincidentally) that the second film installment was released (it just came out earlier this month), and I went to go see it. I did this merely as a diversion, to entertain myself on a Friday night and take my mind off of the weightier adult matters that have come to preoccupy me. The second film toys with this very question: once we grow up, haven't we left behind the silly little limitations and fears that plagued us in our youth?
The answer is a resounding "no". The characters have grown up, but their adult lives are still very much overshadowed by the echoes of things that terrorized them in their youth. From a psychoanalytic perspective, there is much in the story that sits nakedly obvious to the viewer; Freud would watch the films and nod knowingly at the struggles of the adults, all the while smiling and rolling a cigar between his fingers. When the adults finally fight the eponymous monster of the story, they are confronted by, and must overcome, manifestations of the things that haunt them as adults. These fears are familiar to us. As a story with an altogether nonsensical underlying mythology about the struggle of humans fighting an otherworldly evil, this is why the characters are sympathetic to the audience, and it is where the catharsis of the film's conclusion lies.
The first film can be taken standalone as a fun horror romp that doesn't bother to explain itself. The second film deals with heavier themes than the first, and, of necessity, it must concern itself with the exposition and true nature of the monster itself. Oddly, this doesn't weigh it down. The second chapter of It is a horror film, but it carries itself with a levity that isn't typical of the genre. Most horror stories take great pains to rarify themselves, setting themselves in remote and dark places, ostensibly to enhance the ambience that cloaks the scares, but perhaps also to allow the audience to maintain a healthy psychological distance from the monsters in the stories. The adults that inhabit the second film are not stern, serious characters that inhabit a dark universe where no one has a sense of humor or no one ever laughs. They are us, and this is why the story works. (Case in point: Bill Hader plays the adult Richie and steals every scene he's in. I also watched the film twice without realizing that one of the adult characters is portrayed by Isaiah Mustafa, who is better known to many of us as Old Spice's "the man your man could smell like".)
A made-for-TV miniseries was released in 1990, a few years after the original book. The first installment of the more recent film adaptation was released in 2017. If you consider the time gap between these, then it's plainly obvious that there is a generation of people who were reared on the story when they were roughly the age of the children, and who have had it thrust back into their lives when they have finally reached the age of the adults. The fact that the original novel serves as an anchor point that lets me peer back across the years to my youth, while itself being about this very thing, is not one that is in any way unique to me.
It seems, however, to be the epic story that I can call my own. I am surrounded by people who have come of age reading Harry Potter, Twilight, Lord of the Rings, and a perhaps a dozen other franchises that have never really spoken to me. I've perseveratively seen the second film twice since it came out; I will most likely see it again. When I started re-reading the novel last week, I plowed through the first couple hundred pages in two days. I realized it would be easy to consume the book as quickly this time as I did when I was 12. In the end, I slowed my pace and am taking my time, easing through the pages and savoring what happens. I know what's going to happen, but it's been long enough that I don't really know. It has to be slowly drawn out from the darker recesses of my memory. Is it more distressing that as we get older, everything seems to change, or that nothing seems to change?
Time to float.