IT Chapter Two was one of my most anticipated movies this year. I enjoyed the first one, and I've developed an unexpected obsession with Stephen King in recent years.
So, what did I think? Two main points: First, I was surprised that most critics seemed to like Chapter One better than Chapter Two, because I feel exactly the opposite way (this review is a bit more nuanced). Maybe critics preferred Chapter One because it works better as a standalone movie apart from the book, while Chapter Two preserves one of the deepest themes of the novel about the relation between who we are as children and as adults. My second main point: Chapter Two has a running meta-commentary on endings (also a nod to a frequent criticism of Stephen King's books), which is funny because my major issue with Chapter Two is precisely its ending.
Before diving into all that, I should mention that I re-watched IT Chapter One this week to prepare. I liked it as an updated take on Stephen King's novel (see my review). On a second viewing, I still liked it well enough and could understand how it became the highest grossing horror film of all time.
But I also felt my criticisms more deeply. During a lot of the middle of the movie it seems to jump from one scare scene to the next with little apparent plot and perhaps too many fashionable jump scares (I realize they have to cater to the audience of 2010's horror films a bit, so I go easy on the jump scares; besides, most of them work pretty well). More troublingly (at least as a fan of the novel), splitting the story into two films and focusing only on the kids in the first half completely removes the theme of identity between children and adults (although there is a line Bev delivers at the end, which is picked up in Chapter Two). To be clear, I liked Chapter One and I don't want to be that pretentious person who says the book is better than the movie (adaptations between media are always their own work of art). Chapter One worked perfectly fine as a 2010's adaptation, albeit one that left me wanting the next chapter.
Let's move on to Chapter Two.
I agree with a lot of the critics that Bill Hader (as the grown up Richie) gives an amazing performance, and Bill Skarsgård continues to do his demented best as Pennywise the Dancing Clown (and Extra-Dimensional Malevolent Entity). I also really liked Isaiah Mustafa and James Ransone, grown up Mike and Eddie respectively (Ransone in particular looks exactly like his childhood version, Jack Dylan Grazer). James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain were perfectly good as grown up Bill and Beverley, but it's hard to stand out against characters like Richie and Pennywise played by actors as dynamic as Hader and Skarsgård.
Chapter Two picks up 27 years after the 1989 events of Chapter One (for those doing math along at home, that puts us in 2016). The Losers Club are all pretty successful adults who live in fancy houses and have fancy jobs, but they don't remember much of their childhood experiences from Chapter One. The only exception is Mike, who stayed back in Derry to become a librarian (yay, librarians!) who lives in the attic of the public library. He also remembers nearly everything, or at least enough to remember the pact they made back in 1989. After the murders start again (including a particularly nasty hate crime right from the book), Mike gives everyone a call to get them back to Derry. Nobody reacts particularly well, but all of them save one return to Derry, not quite remembering what they were going to do.
Sure enough, the scares start up again with their old pal Pennywise. A few critics lamented that we don't see enough Pennywise in Chapter Two, but I actually thought maybe we saw a bit too much of him. I find him scarier in smaller doses. I was also pleased that we get at least a hint of the explanation for what Pennywise really is (he's not just a demented clown... IT is much worse than that).
My favorite aspect of Chapter Two, though, is the return of the themes of our identities over time, especially how they are shaped by memories (or lack thereof) between childhood and adulthood. This is a major part of the novel as well as the 1990 miniseries, but was pretty much entirely missing from Chapter One. As adults, do we really remember who we were as children? As kids, do we really understand the unknown terrain of adulthood beyond the horizon of time and necessity?
Getting into the philosophical issue of personal identity, can we even really say that we're the same person as a kid and as an adult? Chapter Two poses a particularly interesting challenge for theories, like those inspired by John Locke, that rely on a memory criterion. In other words, what makes you the same person at 13 and at 40 is that 40-year-old you remembers being 13-year-old you. But near the beginning of the movie only Mike among the Losers really remembers the life-altering events of Chapter One. Are the adult Losers really still the Losers?
Critics of the memory criterion like David Hume and Derek Parfit have pointed out that our memories are actually both incomplete and unreliable, a point made nicely in Chapter Two. Do you really want to base your identity on something so sketchy?
So what should identity be based on? Chapter Two seems to hint at something deeper, like the effects of childhood trauma that stay with the Losers. Even though most of them don't explicitly remember Pennywise, they have immediate, visceral reactions when Mike calls them. Maybe this requires some deeper self, a closet where the trauma hides until Mike knocks on the door.
But what is this self? Buddhist philosophers like Vasubandhu would point out that trauma doesn't require anything like a self. Causal continuity between mental moments (even unconscious ones) can do the trick. You don't need one thing to persist over time, just a causal chain (A causes B, which causes C, etc.).
So what does make the 13-year-old Losers the same people as the 40-year-old Losers? The typical Buddhist answer: strictly speaking, nothing. There is no ultimately existing self that persists over time. Instead, identity is conventional and constructed. We say the Losers age 40 are the "same" as the Losers age 13, because there is a certain kind of causal continuity, but at a deeper level of reality there is no Loser to be found (nor indeed any Lover). Or as Parfit would put a similar point in the 20th century, there is no fact of the matter concerning personal identity. To put it in a way an author like Stephen King might appreciate, we are ultimately stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell about ourselves as children are always selectively edited through the distorting filters of trauma and nostalgia.
Whether one finds this terrifying (as in Chapter Two), melancholy (as in the novel), or liberating (as its supposed to be for Buddhists), I will leave to the reader's own thinking.
One of my favorite parts of Stephen King movies are the cameos from the man himself. Chapter Two has what will probably become one of my favorite King cameos (although my all-time favorite remains his cameo in the 1989 Pet Sematary, where he plays a minister). But King makes another kind of cameo through the character Bill who just so happens to be an author of best selling novels.
There's a running gag through Chapter Two that Bill's novels always have bad endings. The screenwriter, Gary Dauberman, and the filmmakers are daring the audience to scrutinize their ending.
And so I did. And I didn't entirely like it. Mild spoilers ahead. (See another interesting take on the ending here).
Mild spoilers: I was fine with the final confrontation with IT. That's a bit corny, but it makes a certain type of narrative sense. It was rather the very end that left me a bit dissatisfied. At the end of Chapter Two, Bill says that he and the other Losers actually remember everything just fine, as if regaining their childhood memories was a kind of consolation prize for mending their fractured identities. While I'm trying hard to stand by my earlier point that a film adaptation is always its own work of art, I'm also having trouble not comparing this to the melancholy depth of the novel. The ending of Chapter Two is all just a bit too ... Hollywood. Of course, for all the nightmarish scenarios King puts his characters through and the losses they endure, he rarely ends his books on a total downer. Maybe Chapter Two was just the Hollywood version of that. Maybe a future version of myself will appreciate it upon a second viewing. But in the theater yesterday it felt a bit... too cheap and too easy after everything we've been through with these characters.
But maybe there's a compliment in there. IT all left me wanting to see Chapter Two again, but even more to re-read IT again. Because for the life of me maybe I don't actually remember exactly how the novel ended even though I just read it in 2015 and maybe I will more fully appreciate Chapter Two the second time. But all of this is a story to be written by a future version of me.
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