The monster in IT isn’t really Pennywise. It’s the evil in the world, especially the corruption that manifests itself in the town of Derry, Maine, through the subtle nudging of a villainous clown.
That appears to be the message of Stephen King’s bestselling book, as well as the subsequent movies. After IT Chapter Two came out this month, though, some people were eager not to blame the evil among each of us, but to pin it all on Donald Trump.
According to the director of IT Chapter Two, Pennywise could be a stand-in, not for some deeper philosophical point about widespread evil, but for the president.
“He does exactly what the clown does, you know?” Andy Muschietti told AFP. “The clown is trying to divide the [kids] all the time, to turn them against [each other] and make them weaker. That’s how he conquers, he tries to conquer them and destroy them.”
Muschietti is not the only one to blame the evils of Derry on Trump’s America. In a not-the-Onion article for Out, one author complains that Pennywise is no longer a queer ally (who knew he ever had been?) and pegs his shift, oddly, on the commander-in-chief: “So Pennywise isn’t just the physical manifestation of what is revealed to be some kind of cosmic entity that feeds off fear and human flesh, he’s a homophobe. Trump’s America strikes again!”
King himself has likened his horror stories to Trump. Recently, on a book tour for his upcoming The Institute, King said, “As I was re-writing this book, all at once, I find out we’re locking little kids up in cages on the border and I’m thinking to myself — this is like my book.” The author has been a frequent and vocal critic of the president, and he even said the Trump presidency was scarier than one of his novels.
But whatever happened to the evil within? Stories such as IT might have something to tell us if we can avoid cheapening their message — as, unfortunately, the second film adaptation does to its source material.
IT: Chapter Two begins, jarringly, with the murder of a young gay man at a local fair. The hate crime is based on the real-life murder of Charlie Howard in 1984. When King wrote the murder into his novel, he based it on the traumatic event in his own hometown of Bangor, Maine, on which Derry is based. But in the movie, the event has less pathos; it comes off as a vulgar trick to get the ball rolling.
At Slate, senior editor Jeffrey Bloomer writes that the film “exploits a ghastly real-life killing for a cheap shock, delivered without context or any clear thematic underpinning.” He concludes, “It’s obvious they failed to fully reckon with what they’ve put on the screen, and the results are grim.”
Despite the complains of insensitivity, Muschietti maintains that he had to include the scene because, well, Trump. The grim moment was essential, he argued, to “a movie that is connected to the times that we live in.” He added, “We live in a culture of fear, leaders that are trying to divide people, to control us, to conquer us, and to turn us against each other.”
It doesn’t make for better cinema, but Muschietti repeats a time-worn trick. It’s easy to explain away all of your problems if you blame them not on poor artistry, but on everyone’s favorite cop-out: Trump.
