Movie Review: Stephen King's It

"It may be profligate, but is it not life? Is it not the thing?"

Lord Byron, in a letter to his publisher, writing about his own poem Don Juan.

Yesterday, I went to see It, the new movie based on Stephen King's thumping 1986 novel, which runs to over a thousand pages. (Actually, the movie is only the first part of a duology.) I rarely go to the cinema these days, for various reasons, but this was one movie I wasn't going to miss.

I read It a couple of years ago, and I was greatly impressed. After The Stand, I think it's Stephen King's best work. And let me get this out of the way; I believe that Stephen King is a genius, probably one of the greatest novelists of all time. There's a lot of snobbery when it comes to Stephen King, for two main reasons; the first being that he is a horror writer, the second being that his books sell in their millions and appeal to every kind of reader.

I've mentioned that I'm a member of a horror club. As far as I know, none of the other members of my horror club are keen on the writings of Stephen King. I won't accuse them of snobbery, but I do think they're missing out.

(Sadly, and incidentally, Stephen King has developed a particularly bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, to the extent that the God Emperor had to block him on Twitter. To be fair, Trump is uncannily similar to the villain of King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone, so King obviously has a long-standing horror of populist politicians.)

The particular power of King's writing is something that defies analysis. His plots are rarely all that original. His characters are fairly stock. There is no great ingenuity in the construction of his plots. But as a storyteller, he is up there with the best. You identify with his characters. You care about them. You buy into the story. What's happening on the page seems important. Indeed, King writes with such a sense of urgency that life itself seems more important and vivid, as seen through his stories.

As I've said, It is a monster of a book. But that's a big part of its pleasure. The story revolves around an evil entity which has haunted a small American town (King's stock-in-trade) for generations, and which comes alive every twenty-seven years. The entity can take various forms, but most often takes the form of a scary clown. In fact, this book seems to have popularized the figure of the scary clown, to the extent that hardly anybody seems to like clowns anymore. (I never liked them in the first place) The protagonists of the story are "The Losers Club", a gang of eleven-year-olds. all of whom are bulled in school.

The novel has two timeframes-- one strand of the story is set in the late fifties, and another strand is set in the present day (that is, the eighties). In the second timeline, the Loser's Club reassemble as adults, and confront the reawakened "It" once again. (In the book, the narrative shifts between these two timelines. The film dispenses with this, so that the first film is entirely set in the first timeline, now brought forward to the nineteen-eighties.)

So here we find many of Stephen King's standard themes-- childhood, plucky kids, camaraderie between kids, small-town America, a confrontation with some elemental evil, courage, and the journey of life.

That last theme, the journey of life, is the one where the book really shines. King takes a group of characters who had a traumatic, formative experience in their childhood and shows them to us as middle-aged adults. The book is as much about lived experience and the passage of time as it is about an evil clown. And King succeeds in reproducing the texture of life, the roller-coaster ride of life, with extraordinary vividness and poignancy.

The sheer size of the novel gives him scope to do this. He describes the lives of his characters in such detail that the stakes of the supernatural drama at the novel's centre seem so much higher. One particular passage, in which he describes the contents of one hypocondriacal character's medicine cabinet, lingers in my memory especially. King's gift is that he doesn't treat such scenes as character establishing moments, or as filler, but with as much seriousness as he treats the big dramatic moments. They could easily be short stories in themselves.

(One detail in the book which I adored is the glass tunnel that connects the children's and adult's sections of the town library. It has a thematic importance, but it's delightful in itself, and the author dwells on it with evident relish.)

So much for the book. What about the film?

The film was excellent. I award it four marks out of five. (Five marks are reserved for the films I watch over and over again.)

First of all, it looks amazing-- the production values are top notch. Every single frame is constructed like a tableau. The film is set in summer, and often drenched in a golden sunlight which is very appropriate to King's romantic, bittersweet vision of childhood. This is one of those films, like Inception, which takes itself so seriously that you can't help taking it seriously, too. It demands your attention from the first moments.

I don't remember all the plot details of the novel too well, but as far as I can remember, the film follows it very faithfully. (There is one big change, but I won't say what it is.) The close-to-the-bone banter between the boys is brilliantly written-- I heard a lot of laughter in the cinema. Unless I'm mistaken, much of the banter is original to the screenplay. The eighties period detail is obtrusive-- the camera lingers on a cinema marquee to show us the titles Lethal Weapon II and Batman-- but I actually liked that. (There was one detail which jarred, however. The AIDS epidemic is mentioned, but the Losers' show an amazingly casual attitude to blood. Were you a child in the eighties? Do you remember how terrifying blood became?) 

Commendably, the movie exploits all the standard conventions of the horror genre. Sometimes, it seems as though horror movies can be divided into two categories-- gory horrors full of jump-scares (that is, sudden scares that come out of nowhere and make the audience jump in their seats), and spooky movies which rely on atmosphere. There's no need for such an opposition. Jump-scares are good. Atmosphere is good. Gore doesn't make your movie trashy, necessarily. Following it source novel, It uses pretty much every convention of horror that there is-- and it uses them very well.

In fact, the faults I would find in this movie are faults that lie in the novel itself. King never really explains the powers and limits of the evil entity-- the titular "It"-- and this makes the conflict between the Losers Club and It (or Pennywise, as it calls itself in its clown form) seem haphazard and contrived. For instance, Pennywise can manipulate the human mind, and frequently induces hallucinations. Given such a power, it seems silly that a group of schoolkids should be able to mount any kind of challenge to it at all.

It bothers me in another way that's harder to convey, but I'll do my best. This is my question: what is the story about? I realize that it's about a supernatural entity that plagues a small town, but is there anything deeper going on? I'm not talking about the thematic level here. The story obviously has themes of childhood, courage, companionship, fear, and the social construction of reality (the latter because the townsfolk are willfully blind to the the fact that there's something very odd about their home). And it has plenty of other themes besides these. 

But on the level of the story's applicability-- what does a scary clown plaguing a small American town have to do with anything happening in the world today? The time-honoured device of the "town with a dark secret" seems sadly archaic these days, and was archaic long before the novel was written. Our social problems, even our existential problems, are much less parochial. Indeed, in an era when local boundaries seem to mean hardly anything at all, the "town with a dark secret plot" seems like pure escapism. There's nothing wrong with pure escapism-- but It obviously has ambitions beyond escapism. Indeed, this objection operates on the level of plot, too-- the townspeople may be able to ignore the fact that something very weird is happening in their neighbourhoods, but how has the outside world failed to pick up on a string of disappearances and tragedies spanning generations? After all, the film is set in 1989, not 1889.

In my view, if an author is going to use the town-with-a-dark-secret device today, he or she has to explain how the dark secret hasn't aroused the interest of the outside world, the media, or the government. On a thematic level, he also has to explain why this story is relevant to citizens of the information age, the age of globalization. There are undoubtedly ways to do this-- in fact, this scenario might actually be a good way to address the theme of globalization and the loss of rootedness. For instance, the citizens of the town might have founded it with the express purpose of seeking a more stable, self-contained community. But we need some explanation, some thematic updating of the convention..

(Of course, you could respond that a story is a story is a story-- a philosophy endorsed by King himself, in a memorable sequence of this very book. That's true, but the horror genre seems to thrive on deeper meanings, deeper resonances-- to the extent that I, personally, feel unsatisfied if a story seems to lack one.)

All in all, though, I can enthusiastically recommend It, and I'm looking forward to its sequel. 

Postscript: I've been reading up on the novel, and I've been reminded that King does actually set some conditions to Pennywise's powers, particularly its powers of mind control, which explain how the Losers' Club can plausibly fight it. However, my criticism still applies to the movie, where its powers are very vague.

Identity Politics, Piety, and Grievance

I've been thinking a lot recently about the three topics mentioned above. Specifically, I've been thinking about them with regard to a phrase which is often used in Irish historical discourse: "most oppressed people ever" (sometimes shortened to MOPE).

It describes a real phenomenon in Irish discourse, though it's rarer now than it was in previous decades; the insistence that the Irish people were uniquely afflicted over the centuries, and that our suffering and endurance was greater than that of any other people. Perhaps it would never have been stated so baldly, but I have personal experience of this phenomenon. I've seen how some Irish nationalists would react at the mention of any other nations' sufferings-- defensively, indignantly, as though Irish suffering was somehow being downplayed.

Despite all that, I really dislike the phrase "most oppressed people ever". There's something very sneering and flippant about it. Let's not forget that these sufferings were real-- a million people did die in the Great Famine, for instance.

But more than that, there's something terribly disloyal about the attitude. Favouritism and filial piety seems entirely natural to me. Let's say your father, or some other relative, had failed in some ambition through his own faults, but blamed it on something else-- poor health, or bad luck, or prejudice. Let's say further that there's something to be said for his own theory, although he exaggerates it. Well, it seems brutal and disloyal to me to throw cold water on his pet theory-- even behind his back, even after his death.

Now, I certainly see the dangers of such favouritism, if it goes too far. But, at the same time, I think it's perfectly natural, and that there is something inhuman in its opposite-- a deliberate and calculated rejection of favoritism, even to the point where you become overly critical of your own group.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. I like blacksploitation movies, and I recently watched one on Youtube. (I didn't feel bad about the copyright violation, since it was quite an obscure movie and I doubt I was doing anyone out of money.) Nearly all the comments were from black people, and some of them were verging on racism against white people. It didn't bother me. It seems perfectly natural to me that black Americans should have their own narrative, one which emphasizes their suffering, the adversity they face, and so forth. It's simple loyalty to your group.

I think one important aspect of these exaggerations is that we know they are exaggerations-- deep down, or even consciously. But we exaggerate them for the sake of solidarity, or from the perception that we are redressing a balance, or for some such motive. We may be willing to be more candid at certain times, when it seems called for, and when it won't be used against us.

Personally, I think the real mischief comes when people outside the group begin to encourage these exaggerations, especially when it leads to lambasting your own group. That seems unnatural, perverse, simply wrong. And here, I'm not talking about a health chivalry, or a healthy open-mindedness, or simple graciousness. Yes, all those things should exist. I'm talking about the situation where this becomes a settled policy, a whole new attitude of its own.

An Example of Political Correctness

Right now I have a bit of a thirst for books and films that are dark and depressing. I did an internet search for "most depressing books" and came to this link. Bear in mind that this is from the Telegraph website, and the Telegraph is supposedly a conservative newspaper.

One of the novels it lists is Platform by Michel Houellebecq, and this is what it has to say about it: Michel Houellebecq’s third novel, Platform (2001; English translation 2002), led to his being brought to trial for provoking racial hatred. Crimes against humanity, more like, because this is one of the most misanthropic novels ever written, powered by a shuddering fear of Islam, laced with casual xenophobia, and full of shameless, gurning, tiresome provocations.

The very next entry is Beloved by Toni Morrison, about which it says this: A novel about slavery is never likely to warm the heart but this tale of a woman who kills her own child rather than have her become a slave – a crime for which she is forever haunted – is chilling. Of all the crimes committed by the slave owners, none is so awful as the iron bit that traps the tongue of Paul D. He recalls “The wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back.” A depressing book but perhaps necessarily so.

So a book in which infanticide is depicted is "necessarily" depressing, while a novel which tackles race relations induces the usual ritual professions of disgust-- even though slavery is much less topical than race relations.

I haven't read either of these books, but I don't doubt for a moment that the first isn't "racist", whatever that even means anymore.

This is why I get so tired of the claim that "political correctness is just sensitive language about disadvantaged groups". It's not. It's much, much, much more than that. It's everywhere.

Reading and Globalization

I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.

Henry David Thoreau

I've just finished reading Crime and Punishment. It's actually the second time I've read it, but it might as well be the first. At one point, in my early twenties, I read a whole slew of books of which I remember nothing, and this was one of them. (Funnily enough, Notes from Underground left a much stronger impression on me, especially its narrator's reflections on rationalism and the Crystal Palace.)

I liked Crime and Punishment. I read it because I wanted to read a talky, philosophical novel. It's certainly that! I much preferred the more "cerebral" passages to the the parts that concentrated on human interest (accepting that, in a work of fiction, the two things cannot be entirely separated). Raskolnikoff reminds me of myself; intense, irritable, moody, suddenly tiring of conversations and "scenes", possessed of rigid and idiosyncratic notions of personal honour.

When I finished the book, I found myself (as always) wondering what to read next. I was inclined to start on The Brothers Karamazov, which I'd started before quite recently, before giving up on it. I also felt inclined to read some more Russian literature, since I was in that mood. (I like the speechifying which seems typical of Russian literature, or perhaps of Russians. I'm not a fan of "show don't tell".)

When it came to it, though, I decided to go back to reading Irish language material instead, and here's why...

All fiction, and even all non-fiction, is a quest for what's interesting. The writer is showing us something that he or she finds interesting, remarkable. Nearly always, it's something very particular, something specific to a particular environment or way of life. 

In the case of Crime and Punishment, there are frequent references to the "progressive" ideas which are swirling around Russia, and St. Petersburg, at the time in which the novel is set. From the point of view of a non-Russian reader, the Russian setting is also of interest. (And perhaps it was of particular interest to Dostoyevsky, since he was a Russian nationalist and a Slavophile.)

Everything admirable in the plot of the novel-- Russian orthodoxy, the customs and culture of Russia, the character of St. Petersburg, the cultural ferment that was swirling around Russia at the time-- are things, it seems to me, which are threatened by secularization and globalization. (I include the cultural ferment, because I believe globalization creates a world at once atomized and internationalized, where the question: "What should our society be like?" makes little sense.)

Similarly, the film I saw this week-- Logan Lucky, a heist film set in the American South-- made me think: "The whole flavour of this movie comes from the distinctive culture of the American South. And that is threatened by globalization."

And I find myself thinking: "Rather than passively and vicariously reading about particularity, about special times and places, I should be trying to support particularity, by reading books in Irish."

I realize that logic may seem anything but flawless. But I hope it makes sense to some people.

Partisanshp and Politeness

Today, just as the library service desk was closing, I was dealing with a history lecturer whose area of study is the Soviet Union. She's a very nice lady, she always chats with me. As I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I'm quite interested in the Soviet Union myself, partly because I'm a Rossophile but also because I'm intrigued by paternalistic regimes.

I asked her whether there were many people in the Soviet Union who were not happy when it fell apart, and who would have preferred it to survive. I'm interested in this because my own experience of being a dissenter has made me very sceptical of the "official version" of history.

She launched into a fairly long reply. This embarrassed me a little, as the service desk was supposed to be closing. But soon I felt embarrassed for another reason; it became obvious to me (as it had not been before) that the lecturer was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and took a dim view of its dissolution, and that she considered the Putin regime to be worse.

This left me in a bit of an awkward position. For all my fascination with the Soviet Union, I do of course see it as an Evil Empire, evil most of all in its godlessness. Perhaps I should have made this emphatically clear. I did tell her I was a conservative at one point, but that could mean anything. To be honest, I was perfectly happy for my nods and mumbles to be taken as expressions of agreement with what she was saying.

And I very often find myself in this situation. Once somebody has assumed I agree with them, especially if they've expressed themselves with some abandon, I find it extremely difficult to disabuse them of this notion. I don't want to embarrass them, or disconcert them. The shift of atmosphere from genial to less genial is very irksome, even painful. It's like cold water being poured on top of you in a warm bath. If I don't encounter the person very often, or I'm just having a one-off interaction with them, it's likely that I'll just let it go, to avoid embarrassment. I'm more embarrassed for them than for myself.

This is one of the (many) reasons I prefer culture wars to "dialogue". Culture wars seem more straightforward, honest and manly. Give me outright animosity over awkwardness any day. Antagonists can have a certain respect for each other-- even an affection. But erstwhile allies, or people who think they are allies and then realize they are not, can rarely escape feelings of disappointment, betrayal, and embarrassment.

(For the same reason, I usually tell new colleagues that I'm a "right-wing nutcase". I choose that phrase advisedly. If I just told them I was a conservative or traditionalist or Catholic, they'd probably interpret those words in a wishy-washy way and they'd end up being taken aback that I didn't agree with them on Brexit or Trump or gay marriage or some "equality" issue.)

More on the Decline of the Church of England

The Catholic Herald reports that more than half of Britons now describe themselves as non-religious-- a record.  The numbers of Catholics have remained relatively stable, while the decline has been most precipitous amongst Anglicans.

So what is the Catholic Church doing? Increasingly, adopting the very same suicidal approach of the Church of England, of course! 

The Anglican bishop of Liverpool, Paul Bayes, whistles past the graveyard:

“In this modern world people are more willing to be honest and say they have ‘no religion’ rather than casually saying they are ‘CofE’. This honesty is welcome,” he said.

“Of course the latest BSA figures bring a continuing challenge to the churches, to speak clearly of our faith into a sceptical and plural world. But saying ‘no religion’ is not the same as a considered atheism. People’s minds, and hearts, remain open.”

Wikipedia tells me that Paul Bayes is a liberal bishop who thinks the Church of England should "celebrate" homosexuality. It should be understood that, when I lamented the decline of the Church of England in a recent post, I was not lamenting this sort of Anglicanism, but the Anglicanism it replaced. I have no respect at all for such people as this bishop-- at least, I have no respect for their religious liberalism.

Cruinneog