Reading (and Watching) It, Part 4: Coda

It's been almost a year since I wrote about reading Stephen King's It, which had been one of the biggest omissions in my decades-long love affair with King's work. It always loomed large in the background of my life because, well, it's a big book. Last month, I finally saw the recent film version, directed by Andy Muschietti and released last fall. Thinking about the book and the film, I realized I still have more to say about It, so here we are, with a coda of sorts.

Watching the film reinforced something I felt while reading the novel: had I read It (or paid closer attention to the 1990 television miniseries) as an adolescent, there's no doubt the Losers' Club would have strongly resonated with me. Even today, as a so-called adult (I have my doubts), it's still all too easy for me to identify with these kids. Although my parents were wonderful, as an only child I understood loneliness and isolation better than most. Now I can see I yearned for some sort of strong connection with friends my age, to find my own Losers' Club.

That's one of the new film's strongest elements—how perfectly it captures the novel's thoughtful portrait of these kids in the small, fictional town of Derry, Maine. They're the kids no one else pays attention to. The kids bullies target. They're the ones no one wants to play with. The ones with absent, or overbearing, or abusive parents. They recognize this in each other, and it bonds them. Then they proceed to wage war against an ancient evil, the child-killing creature known as Pennywise. Much of the novel's and the 2017 film's horror arises from realizing these kids must grow up fast because the adults in their lives are of no help whatsoever. The film eerily emphasizes how alone the kids are by showing countless examples of grownups turning their backs or looking away, leaving the kids to face the horrors of Derry all on their own.

It doesn't hurt that the child actors in Muschietti's film are uniformly terrific, bringing King's Losers' Club from page to screen with aplomb. Full disclosure, I teared up when Beverly (Sophia Lillis) tells Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) that when she was with the Losers' Club she never felt like a loser. Lillis's acting in the scene (and the film) is simply sublime. That little moment in a film full of big moments—be they terrifying, funny, or poignant ones—best encapsulates for me what makes the Losers' Club special. Their connection, forged through shared loneliness and fear, will bond them for life. This will, of course, be revealed in the sequel, which will focus on the Losers' Club as adults.

I'm excited to see what the filmmakers do with the adult versions of these characters in part two. I'm also eagerly awaiting any hint of casting news on the grownup Losers' Club. I'm confident the sequel will live up to the first film. It (2017) felt true to the spirit of King's novel, which at its heart is about the loss of childhood innocence and how the bonds we form at that age can still have great meaning to us decades later—even if we tried to forget them.

Eventually, I would find my own Losers' Club. It consists of an assortment of people from various times and places in my life. Some of them are childhood friends that I'd long ago fell out of touch with, only to reconnect later and, to my great surprise, discover that these relationships have turned into some of the most important and fulfilling of my adult life. While we never faced anything quite like Pennywise when we were young, we did live through pain, trauma, grief. We lived through what Pennywise represents—childhood's end. We fumbled around for answers to questions we didn't even understand back then. Today we're a little closer to understanding the questions, even if we still haven't figured out the answers. What's important is we have a shorthand together, developed from having come from the same place and having shared experiences together. We've grown to realize we'd do anything for each other. We are Beverly and Bill and Ben and Mike and Eddie and Stan and Richie. We are the Losers' Club.