After a very bad summer, Hollywood is looking to IT for a bailout. IT might
work, we'll see. IT is a horror movie version of Steven Spielberg-style
romanticism: we meet children -- pre-pubescent children -- who are naturally
good and even wise. These dear beings are confronted by various "monsters,"
including real monsters, older bully adolescents, or adults, all of whom have
been transformed by something (time + sex) into malevolent grotesques.
IT can be understood as a commercialized and creatively compromised
depiction of tweens painfully starting to engage what Michel Leiris
in his powerful book "Manhood" describes as the brutal hell of adult
sexuality. This is by no means a new story line. It's an extremely well-trod
path.
What's less well-trod -- and what IT called to mind for me -- is what new
IT must be faced when we come out the other end of Leiris's sexual inferno.
Entering that "hell" was hard and scary. Leaving it might be all too easy
and for that reason even scarier. Well, as Hemingway wrote in one of his
own coming-of-age stories, "better not think about it." Or IT. Oy.
