Problematic Clowns in my Favorite Horror Movie? It’s More Likely Than You Think
Homophobia and Misogyny in It: Chapter Two (2019) written for CTCS 412
Andy Muschietti’s 2019 horror film, It: Chapter Two, follows the Loser’s Club (a group of seven friends who made a blood oath to stop Pennywise, an all-knowing murderous entity) as they return to Derry, Maine twenty seven years after the events of the 2017 film It. The film does not faithfully follow its source material, Stephen King’s 1986 novel of the same title, and thank god — we don’t have to watch a child orgy on screen or suffer through increasingly racist jokes and the overt sexualization of multiple 13 year old girls (seriously, who needs to read about a 35 year old man thinking about “the fact that [a] girl was clearly braless under her thin western-style shirt” (King 553)?). Instead, the film tones down those events in order to deliver a satisfying ending and extraordinary CGI and VFX. Yet, despite, these changes, It: Chapter Two still manages to carry homophobic, racist, and misogynistic undertones.
The film opens on character Adrian Mellon’s extremely graphic death at the hands of both several homophobic Derry residents, and Pennywise in clown form. He and his boyfriend are stalked at what seems to be a normal, cheerful Fourth of July fair, full of families and little kids running around, culminating in the two being cornered on a bridge. Adrian’s boyfriend, Don, is rendered unrecognizable, and Adrian is thrown over a bridge.
The juxtaposition of the happy families in the background and a gay couple’s brutal beating serves to set the tone of the rest of the film (that is, senseless violence in the face of thriving life), as well as play into tired tropes. While the novel relates homophobia and racism to Pennywise’s presence in Derry, the film fails to cement that bond, and so this event simply plays into the tired Bury Your Gays trope, which “has appeared in media across genre since the end of the 19th century. Works using the trope will feature a same-gender couple with one of the lovers dying and the other realizing they were never actually gay, often running into the arms of a heterosexual partner” (Hulan 17). And while this trope started as a safe place for queer authors where they could write queer relationships without fear of political or social backlash, straight creators today “invoke the trope […] as shock value for their [straight] audiences [… and] often use the trope irresponsibly” (Hulan 24). In this film specifically, a gay person is targeted for being gay and then is the first person to die. Other events of homophobia are peppered throughout the film, though this one is the most obvious rendition of Bury Your Gays. Moreover, there are connotations of race/class and gender issues as well.
The Losers, sans Stan Uris who had killed himself rather than confront his childhood fears again, gather at a Chinese restaurant to catch up and hash out their plan: they will split up in town and gather meaningful artifacts from their childhoods in order to perform a ritual to rid the world of It once and for all. The ritual itself reeks of appropriation — Mike goes into the forest and finds a tribe of indigenous people, and then steals their sacred, carved wood bucket into which the losers have to throw artifacts of their childhood. Mike explains his theft with pride, and then glamorizes this unnamed tribes’ traditions in a way that is extremely disrespectful to real indigenous cultures, re-perpetuating stereotypes which have existed since the first colonizers stole their land.
In the process of Mike’s explanations, it is revealed that nearly every loser is rich and/or successful in some way: Bill, who had lost his brother Georgie in the first film, is now a successful novelist and screenwriter, developing numerous films with his famous actress wife. Ben, whose personality in the first film was that of the ‘fat comic relief,’ has lost all of his weight and become a shredded, critically acclaimed architect. Eddie is a risk assessor for an insurance film, and is married to a woman who is just as overbearingly protective as his hypochondriac mother. Richie is a standup comic in Chicago, and Beverly has become a fashion designer, married to a man named Tom. They have all moved on from their Derry roots, finding success in the outside world, accruing wealth or fame or some measure of happiness.
However, Mike, the only person of color in the group, has been left behind. In some twisted portrayal of class and race, Mike is stuck in this small backwards town, resorting to living on the top floor of the small local library and eating takeout every night, glued to police scanners in a desperate attempt to track Pennywise’s actions while his friends achieve their dream jobs.
Furthermore, Beverly’s aforementioned husband is shown to be just as abusive as her father. As Beverly grew into her teenaged body in the first film, her father had become increasingly more volatile and violent, grabbing her arm and making leering advances; and in the second film, Tom beats Beverly for answering a phone call from her childhood friends, for daring to communicate with other men. She only has the strength to leave him because she remembers her blood oath, and by extension a love poem which Ben had previously written her (“Your hair is winter fire, / January embers. / My heart burns there too.” (It: Chapter Two)). In this way, it is not she who saves herself but Ben who saves her, however indirectly.
The film, in allowing Beverly to remain with for so long such obsessively destructive people, pushes an extremely harmful narrative regarding abuse and victimhood; that victims of abuse cannot escape from those cycles of violence unless they are rescued by a man. And, furthermore, as the token woman in a group full of men, Beverly is caught in a love triangle. Ben has a crush on her and had gifted her the poem anonymously, while Beverly thought that Bill wrote the poem this whole time and therefore had a crush on him; and Bill was also in love with Beverly yet was hesitant to act. In fact, in It: Chapter Two, after having established that he is married, he continues to flirt with Beverly and hint that he is still in love with her. And, towards the end of the film, Beverly is saved from a hell-ish sequence only by Ben yelling her name loud enough that she is able to break free from the hallucination and reach out, Ben pulling the both of them out of the collapsing ground, this time directly saving her life.
Pennywise also continuously uses Beverly’s femininity against her as well. Out of all of the Losers, she is the only person who is tormented by images of blood, obviously recalling the cycles which most those who experience periods go through monthly. At one point he locks her in a school bathroom stall and drenches her with it, plugging all the stops so that she is slowly drowning in the viscous liquid. It seems to imply that Beverly’s worst fear is an intrinsic part of herself; another harmful narrative, when women are so continuously told that to be a woman and to embrace one’s innate femininity is to be monstrous. As written by Agnieszka Graff et al in “Gender and the Rise of the Global Right,” men benefit when their “efforts are invariably directed at purging women of sexual agency, degrading sexual diversity, banishing overt expressions of sexuality, and asserting particularly muscular and virile forms of masculinity. These efforts are directed in part at setting up the model of the ideal woman” (Graff 545).
This ideal woman is, of course, one which is weak and submissive; and suffocating Beverly in her own blood is a visual tool which recalls that subjugation. And when Beverly is sent off on her own, she not only returns to her (now-dead) father’s house, she also encounters an old woman who transforms into a stiff, murderous, naked crone, which says more about the way society treats the ancient female body than anything else. It is about the grotesque being linked to femininity; if you are not pretty enough or pleasing enough then you must be evil; or, that there is no average-ness allowed.
Lastly, in that same vein, Beverly is the only loser who is burdened with the knowledge of everyone else’s death as, in the first film, she had accidentally looked directly at Pennywise’s true form. She gets continuous nightmares of her friends dying over and over again, further intensifying a burden which most women already carry. Those who present in a feminine way are already intimately aware of the death and danger that stalk us daily (having to walk home with our car keys clutched in our hand, or being wary of venturing outside at night), and yet here Beverly is being given even more violence to suffer through in her private life. And so women are not allowed a safe space in this film.
The homophobia returns halfway through the story, with Richie being distinctly queer-coded despite never stating outright that he is gay. In hiss self-reflection sequence, he ends up at an old arcade and clumsily plays games with another classmate, blundering his way through awkward, innocent flirting (holding up a quarter, speaking overeagerly, “Here! Do you want to play again? I mean, only if you want” (It: Chapter Two)). Even this, however, is too much for the other boy, who backs up defensively and says “Why are you being weird? I’m not your damn boyfriend,” and then “You idiots didn’t tell me that this city is full of little f*gs” (It: Chapter Two). When Richie finally runs out of the arcade, near tears, Pennywise appears to taunt him, magicking the giant Paul Bunyan statue outside so that it lumbers around the lawn swinging its axe at Richie, Pennywise floating next to it screaming over and over again, “I know your secret, your dirty little secret!” (It: Chapter Two).
The problem here is twofold: firstly, Paul Bunyan is recognizably an American symbol of masculinity, who possesses superhuman strength and performs traditionally male-oriented tasks (lumberjacking, travelling self-sufficiently through the wild countryside, wrangling an ox). Having this all-American figure chasing and taunting Richie sends the subtextual message that to be queer is to give up one’s right to be manly, or to at least lack masculinity and be threatened by displays of it. Richie’s supposed fear of Paul Bunyan’s macho-ness translates to the continued exploitation of gay men feeling insecure in their willingness to pursue a balance between masculinity and femininity.
Secondly, Pennywise’s dialogue assigns an inherent sense of shame to being gay, primarily by using the word “dirty.” The film does an extremely good job of showing how some scars, especially those verbal ones from our childhood bullies, cut so deeply that one thinks about them for years to come. What is not okay, however, is Pennywise’s verbiage and word choice. If It: Chapter Two gets anything right it is that even in this day and age, coming out is still not universally accepted; it is still illegal in some countries and, despite the laws put in place, queer people (especally transgender folk) even in America are still being discriminated against.
However, rather than pursue this angle and explore Richie’s reasoning for staying in the closet for so long, the film instead associates external shame, fear, and loss to being gay. As Himberg writes of the real-world entertainment space: “The impetus for LGBT celebrities to come out, or to be outed, stems from associations with the closet as a place of shame and with individualism’s stress on being ‘honest’ with oneself and others about ‘who you are,’ as well as the premise of identity politics, which is that civil rights for LGBT people will come only from being out and proud about one’s identity” (Himberg 84). And It: Chapter Two succeeds in representing the fear and shame which permeates today’s atmosphere, without giving us a solution. It is, again, shock factor for the pure exploitation of it.
In the last act of the film, the group as a whole makes it into the sewers where they face their final battle against Pennywise. Throughout the film, It: Chapter Two pays lipservice to this queer version of Richie by heavily implying he has a crush on fellow loser Eddie. In the background of some flashback scenes, they are shown closely wrestling in hammocks, or constantly checking to make sure the other is okay; naturally gravitating towards each other as though they have an awareness of the other that does not quite extend to the rest of the group. And on the same wooden bridge that Adrian Mellon was thrown off of, a child Richie carefully carves the initials “R + E” into the railing.
In the climax, then, Eddie saves Richie from being eaten, kneeling next to Richie and saying excitedly, “Richie, I think I got It, man! I think I killed him!” only in the next second to be stabbed through the chest by one of Pennywise’s flailing tentacles. In a heart wrenching scene, after the losers beat Pennywise for real, Richie crouches next to Eddie’s body, holding him in his arms, cradling his head in his arms, pleading: “We can still help him.”
The cave starts to collapse around them and the Losers drag Richie, sobbing, away from Eddie’s prone body. The ending is bittersweet; in the first film there’s a moment of sweet relief and childhood triumph in the middle of high summer, with all of the losers jumping into a lake and wrestling, water droplets arching slowly through the air, limbs flashing in bright sunlight. That moment is recreated at this end with the losers leaping into that same lake to wash off their blood and grime, but it is marred by their losses, primarily Richie’s. The losers crowd carefully around Richie as he sobs onto Beverly and Mike’s shoulders, a surprisingly tender moment of non-toxic masculinity; in a twist on the Bury Your Gays trope, it is not Richie who has perished but rather Eddie, the object of his affections.
As the film rolls to an end, the losers do their best to move on. Mike packs his bags, finally able to leave Derry with peace of mind. Bill returns to his film set, having worked out a new happy ending for his newest upcoming film. Ben and Beverly lounge on a yacht clinking champagne glasses, the sun playing through their hair, a beautiful dog lying panting at their feet. And Richie is crouched back on the bridge, carefully retracing the old “R + E” carving. It seems as though the only people who are allowed to have their happy fairytale endings, really, are the white heterosexuals. After spending half the film pining after Beverly, Bill returns to his marriage as though he hasn’t just been emotionally cheating. Ben and Beverly paint the picture of the perfect capitalist millionaires with not a care in the world. Stan and Eddie are dead, Richie has just lost a person he’s been in love with for over twenty years, and Mike has had no opportunity for higher education and now must rebuild his life away from Derry.
They exist in vastly different temporal spaces than their friends. As Maria Filippino writes in “Doing Time: Queer Temporalities and Orange is the New Black,” the recognition that one must “[explore] temporality’s relation to self-identity around sexual fluidity […]. (non)monogamy, gender transition, and reproduction and parenting” is particularly important for queer people who exist in an inherently different temporal space; Richie and Mike are left in the past while their (alive) counterparts move on towards the future.
Being that the It franchise spawned from such a revered author, the film’s ramifications are widespread, and the aforementioned harmful stereotypes have resounding real-world consequences. Though the film is extremely well-produced in terms of special effects and dialogue, there is no denying that it also sends some conflicting messages about gender, sexuality, and race and class, and that we cannot consume media uncritically, even if it is perceived to be made for simple entertainment. The way that It: Chapter Two’s writers consistently assign shame to being gay and fear and grotesqueness to womanhood is unacceptable, whether it was intentional or not. And these tropes tell an uglier narrative; they are indicative of pervasive trends worldwide, and in having them displayed so outrightly, the film helps to perpetuate and cement these narratives in those who just wanted to enjoy a nice horror movie.
WORKS CITED:
Graff, Agnieszka; Kapur, Ratna; and Walters, Suzanna Danuta. “Introduction: Gender and the Rise of the Global Right,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44, Spring2019, №3. pp. 541–560.
Himberg, Julia. “Diversity: Under-the-Radar Activism and the Crafting of Sexual Identities.” The New Gay for Pay: The Sexual Politics of American Television Production. University of Texas Press, 2017.
Hulan, Hayley. “Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context.” McNair Scholars Journal, 2017, Vol 21. pp. 17–27.
It: Chapter Two. Directed by Muschietti, Warner Bros. Pictures, 6 September 2019.
King, Stephen. It. Viking, 15 September 1986.
San Filippo, Maria. “Doing Time: Queer Temporalities and Orange is the New Black.” In Medias Res, 2014. Web. Accessed 1 December 2019.
