Don't get me wrong.
I really enjoy the new It movies. Super creepy, great cast, striking imagery but man,
does it push the limits of believably. Cannibal space clowns from outer space living in small-town Maine? Fine.
Intergalactic space turtles puking up the universe? Been there, done that, no problem.
What I'm talking about is this: Mike in the movie calls all of these people and they all
answer the phone, even though he's listed as an unknown number that has got to be the craziest
thing that happens in either of these two movies.
I mean, what is this some kind of alternate universe where there's no spam callers because if so,
I want to live there, even if I do have to dodge a murder clown every couple of decades, seems like a small price to pay.
Hello Internet, welcome to Film Theory! Where the only It to fear
Is it itself, and maybe also fortune cookies stuffed with weird eyeball monsters.
Today we're talking about the movie franchise with the least
optimized title for the internet: IT.
More specifically we're looking at the ending of it chapter 2 which everyone of the internet has tried to explain and which everyone has failed in
Doing. Yeah, yeah shots fired and all that, but honestly
I can't blame 'em. The ending as its presented in this movie is weird, and confusing, and not super clear.
I don't think even the directors really knew what was going on.
Anyway, as the plot goes the main
characters perform a ritual that has a wacky name: The Ritual of Chüd. IT (haha, jokes) fails for reasons that go
completely unexplained. The scary clown then transforms into a scary clown spider and then a few CGI chase scenes later
the heroes are suddenly able to win through the power of negging, again through no
apparent reason that goes explained. That's a real good message by the way, "be petty and mean and you can conquer the
Cosmos' greatest evil." But in all seriousness, the ending here is just flimsy.
Why did the ritual of Chüd fail the first time? What
suddenly changed that allowed the Losers Club to suddenly be able to defeat the clown? If that ritual was gonna end up being pointless the
entire time were the repeated fetch quests to find tokens in the middle of the movie a complete waste of time, too,
because if so,
PLEASE, why didn't you cut them? This was nearly a three-hour movie!
My bladder was about to pop at the end of this thing. But in all seriousness,
I didn't really have an answer for any of these questions,
neither do other videos on YouTube. Heck! Even Stephen King's original source material is wishy-washy on a lot of that stuff. ("But he knew well enough." WAS IT MATPAT?)
But, after seeing the movie a couple more times, this time with smaller big gulps because I learned my lessons, I'm convinced that we all
misunderstood the big climax of the Losers Club story.
I've got a theory- A FILM THEORY-that for all of Pennywise's talk of the Ritual of Chüd not working
not only
for the Losers Club,
but also for the ancient native tribe who tried it before them. By the end of the film
the Ritual of Chüd is indeed
the reason he is able to be defeated. That the first failed ritual of the club, and that Pennywise's
subsequent defeat, all boiled down to two
main things. 1. The tokens that the losers collected weren't enough to complete the ritual, and 2.
one of them didn't even bring the right token to the fight. Yeah, that's right,
one of these bozos didn't even manage to snag their token in the first place.
So today let's take a moment to find out why the losers should have died, and how they accidentally found their way to defeating the
Universe's scariest circus freak. In case you forgot, or more reasonably
just gave the ritual of Chüd a big ol' eye roll when you saw IT: chapter 2, let's briefly recap,
shall we? The ritual requires each participant to bring a token of their past trauma to IT's underground lair.
They're then meant to destroy the tokens, in the process, trapping Pennywise or more accurately his true form, the Deadlights, in an authentic
tribal lantern Mike clearly purchased from Pier1 Imports.
And it's this golden ticket hunt for tokens that sets us up on our extended sequence of mid movie fetch quests full of naked CGI
grandmas, and more over-the-top jump scares than a five nights at freddy's game.
Eddie finds his inhaler, Richie gets an arcade token, Bill recovers his dead brothers paper boat,
Mike gets the rock that they used to fight against the town bully in the first movie, Bev gets the romantic haiku that Ben wrote
for her when they were kids, and Ben reveals that he still got the yearbook page Bev signed all those years ago. The six
descended to Pennywise's lair, burn those items, or heat up Mike's rocks since you know,
It's a rock, the deadlights descended into the lantern and then nothing. Pennywise escapes
immediately without any
level of difficulty. He taunts that the Native American tribe, the Shokoiwah, once used this same technique before, and that it didn't work then either.
But, you know, at this point the movie Mike is a guy who literally brought all of his friends, who are rich and
successful and famous, back to a bummer of a town to fight a killer cosmic clown,
using a strategy that he knew failed the first time, so, you know, his word is kind of garbage at this point!
But still, what the movie never really answers is what went wrong for the losers Club, and for the what-cha-ma-call-it tribe from centuries
before. Those are the mechanics of the Ritual of Chüd after all, and that's exactly what they do,
so is the ritual itself just flawed? Well, to understand we have to first look at what the ritual actually means.
It's not just about burning some stuff,
it's about destroying your past.
Mike's instructions to the group were technically true: "find and destroy the tokens of your traumatic past"
but he actually missed that the point of the ritual was to get over the things from your past that you're afraid of because that
is what IT actually feeds off of. To truly destroy the things, not so much in a physical sense
but in a symbolic sense. Sure,
The mechanics are physically destroying things, but to successfully perform the ritual of Chüd, you have to destroy the trauma
associated with those things.
TL;DR: What Mike really should have done was have the gang enroll in a lot of therapy, and then once they dealt with their issues,
then come back to town to destroy the cosmic clown. But in all seriousness
if you look at these mid movie fetch quests sure, several members of the gang face some harrowing experiences to get their tokens,
but do any of them actually
overcome their fears in the process? Let me save you a thinking time. No.
No, they do not. Bill is lured to a sewer by his dead brother,
Georgie's voice calling for help. Bill reaches in
desperately trying to rescue his brother, who again is dead. In the end
he fishes Georgie's boat out of the sewer after getting attacked by thousands of zombie baby hands, so he technically got his token
but did this experience force him to overcome the fear and guilt that he still has about Georgie's death?
No, in fact
it shows the exact opposite that he's not over Georgie's death, despite being an adult who knows that his brother is dead
he still clings to this belief that he can somehow rescue Georgie.
He's living in denial. Sure, after that encounter he manages to rescue the token, but the token is meaningless.
Let's look at another example.
Bev is able to grab Ben's post card from the hiding spot in her old home,
But the apartment is still haunted, literally, by her history of the history of IT,
but also figuratively by the specter of fathers. Both Pennywise and Bev's own father. Like Bill she doesn't actually
confront her fears here. She's just confronted by a giant naked CGI woman.
She literally runs for her life,
running away from Pennywise,
running away from that old woman, running away from her father. All of it without achieving any sort of closure on her childhood abuse.
Same goes for Eddie, who faces the leper in the basement of the pharmacy. Symbol of his old hypochondria
He does what he needs to do to grab his inhaler token, and then immediately runs away from the shop
afraid. Richie grabs his literal token of a token from the arcade,
which honestly has almost nothing to do with his secret of shame of being gay,
something that we're gonna touch on more here in a minute. Most of his token getting takes place in flashbacks,
so he's not even dealing with his fears in real time, at least until the end of the scene where he finally also runs away
from Pennywise, in broad daylight in the middle of a public park.
He tells himself that Pennywise isn't real, but when he opens his eyes, no! Pennywise is still there
meaning that the fear is still there, showing pretty clearly that Richie still has demons that he doesn't want to talk about.
Even Ben and Mike, the two losers who already had their tokens, haven't really gotten over the fears that those tokens
represent. Ben, whose token is the yearbook page that only Beverly signed, has literally been carrying that page with him
every day of his life. Let me rephrase that,
he's carrying a symbol of his loneliness and unrequited love on his person for over 20 years.
Doesn't get more 'not over it' than that.
And, as we see in the opening scenes of the movie, adult Ben is still a loner. Sure,
he's super rich and successful, but he's at home. He's alone in his massive house, refusing to attend meetings in person.
He's isolated. Just like he was when he was a kid,
Isolated. And even when given the chance mid movie still hiding his true feelings about Bev, still
allowing her to think that it was Bill who wrote her that poem so many years ago. And then there's Mike, showing up with his
rock, which honestly makes sense.
But what is the true essence of that token? Mike's issue in the first movie was that he was shunned as an outcast, and even
though it seems like he's been integrated into the town of Derry, he hasn't. He's the only one in town
who knows what's happening, and who hasn't forgotten his own past, making him an outsider.
He's also the only member of the Losers Club to stay back in Derry,
thereby making him an outsider again,
but this time to his very own friends, the losers. And then he lies to the whole group about the ritual of Chüd.
He tells them that the ritual has worked in the past, but it hasn't. And that truth doesn't come out until
Pennywise spills the beans at the end of the movie. Mike is ashamed and afraid to admit the truth to his friends. Clearly
he doesn't feel like he belongs here. So now that we've seen how the losers have overcome
practically nothing by the end of the second half of this movie,
it becomes a little clearer why their token burning during the final battle isn't effective.
These objects are still just that. They're objects. They're hollow. They're meaningless.
So when they burn, nothing happens. And so when Pennywise pops out and all his spider clown glory, it's not a shot.
The ritual doesn't work because they didn't believe. There was no
substance behind what they were doing, and instead of getting rid of their problems all they've gotten rid of are a couple of pieces of
moldy paper and an old shower cap. So then how would do the losers end up winning?
What changes between this moment at the end of the movie?
Well now the gang
actually has to get over their issues, and they have to do it in a hurry. And that's why the entire next sequence of the
movie is all about the Losers Club yet again going on secret personal missions about their past
trauma. Only this time when they're forced to confront that trauma they get over it.
For Mike, Pennywise already outed him,
so, as soon as he confesses to the group that he was actually lying about the Ritual of Chüd and starts being an actual team
player, well, Mike's in the clear. His friends learn the truth, they didn't abandon him. Boom! His token
suddenly has meaning. The others in this sequence are a bit more complicated.
Ben and Bev have to go through everyone's two worst fears- getting buried alive and having to touch anything in a public restroom.
Ben is finally forced to let go of that torch
he's been carrying for Bev
all those years to avoid being literally buried in his past, while Bev
confronts herself as an adult, and lets go of her adolescent trauma so she can reach out, in a literal and figurative
sense, to make another human connection, with Ben. Bill
meanwhile has to shoot himself with a sheep dart,
which is just a weird, weird moment that I don't want to linger on for risk of demonetization.
But suffice it to say that the thing is actually killing isn't a person, it's his guilt and shame
over the loss of his brother.
So with those four finally overcoming their issues we cut back to the fight to find Eddie and Richie still mostly avoiding their problems.
Literally running away, again, from the 'scary' 'not scary' doors.
And then Richie gets caught in the deadlights
Suddenly Eddie, who's fears
this entire time have been imaginary diseases from his
hypochondria, has to finally decide what the real danger in his life is. As a child
he was told that everything was dangerous. So overcoming his fear naturally involves
the realization that it actually is all in his head. That loved ones being in trouble is the real thing to fear here.
He convinces himself that the spear he's holding will damage Pennywise, and he throws it and it does. Which shows us that Eddie now
understands that he controls his own fate. That what he believes is true can become a reality. And in the process Eddie
manages to save Richie. Unfortunately for Eddie though
It wasn't all in his head, since IT turns around and impales Eddie, making the official tally IT
thousands, Losers Club still zero.
But what Pennywise doesn't realize is that he's
inadvertently sacrificed the last token on behalf of the Losers Club because, Eddie is Richie's true token.
Remember what I said that we'd come back to this later?
Well, Richie is the most interesting case out of all the Losers Club because not only has he not fully gotten over his fear,
he's never really owned up to it in either movie in the first place.
Richie's secret is that he's gay, but we're shown at the beginning of the movie that Derry is not exactly a woke environment.
We see that Richie never talks about being gay. He actively hides it.
He even masquerades as a straight guy in a stand-up routine.
"My girlfriend caught me a 'lightly observing' her friend's Facebook page" during his treasure hunt midway through the movie
he picks up a literal token from an arcade, which sure is associated with a painful memory of being bullied,
but the real token of his fear isn't a thing. It's a person. When Eddie
sacrifices himself for Richie down in Pennywise's caverns, Richie finally
realizes how much he truly loved Eddie, and how much their friendship has mattered to both of them.
The death of Eddie is,
surprisingly, also the destruction of the last token,
Richie's token. In Eddie's death Richie for the first time sees that you should show how you feel without fear, shame, and regret.
And with that suddenly all tokens are properly destroyed.
All fears are properly overcome. Pennywise, by killing Eddie, delivers
the thing that the Losers Club needed in order to complete the Ritual of Chüd. This time the right way. He invertinely does
himself in. If you think it's still a stretch that Eddie is the real final token here,
well,
look no further than the moments leading up to Richie being caught the deadlights. Richie goes up and starts
actively insulting Pennywise to its face and it does nothing.
"hey 'lame person' wanna play truth or dare? Here's a truth,
you're a sloppy 'doodoo head'!" Pennywise is getting insulted here and yet he is not affected by it in the slightest.
But, if we fast forward exactly four minutes later in the movie the losers defeat him using the exact same technique,
insulting the clown to death.
So what happened in between those two moments?
The only major change to happen in that
four-minute span is Eddie's death. The book and the movie of IT have pretty different
representations of the ritual of Chüd and all the events leading up to it,
but there one piece of the story that remains true in both versions the losers can't defeat IT until Eddie dies.
he dies the same way in both versions, too- and after he does, and
only after he does, are the losers able to defeat IT. Either by punching Pennywise to death like in the book, or verbally
abusing him to death until he's like a deflated balloon like in the movie.
Everything else around the ritual can change, but Eddie's death has to remain in the story because it's his act of love that helps Richie
overcome his fears. The movie closes with Richie finishing the carving he made when he was younger,
R + E, with the message that you should 'be who you want to be, and be proud'. And that my friends is how
Pennywise defeated himself, and what everyone, including the losers Club themselves,
misunderstood about the ending of IT: Chapter Two. But, hey, that's just a theory
a film theory. ANNNDDDD CUT.