It: Chapter Two Adapts a Storyline About Racism Into a Storyline That’s Racist
The 2019 movie manages to be less progressive than the 1986 novel it’s based on.
By JACK HAMILTON
The filmmakers’ “solution” to this is made disconcertingly evident in the second film. As a young child, Mike Hanlon apparently watched his parents die in a fire, and he harbors guilt over not having done enough to save them. This event is hinted at in the first film, but in oblique ways that also evoked the book’s 1930 Black Spot fire, when a nightclub frequented by black soldiers was burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan–like Maine Legion of White Decency, an event that Hanlon’s father first recounts to him in 1958. It’s particularly disturbing, then, when the second film reveals that Hanlon’s parents were drug addicts (“crackheads,” specifically) who died in a fire that seems to have been either the direct or indirect result of their own drug use, while a young Mike is shown watching them burn alive while seated on his tricycle.
It is one thing for the filmmakers, in transposing a story from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, to dial down the explicit racism a young black character faces. Social mores do indeed change. But to transform the only black protagonist from the child of responsible, nurturing parents into the child of negligent crack cocaine addicts is far worse than lazy writing; it’s to actively draw from a deeply racist set of cultural tropes. In the transition from book to film, Mike Hanlon has arguably gone from a victim of racism at the hands of Henry Bowers to a victim of racism at the hands of the filmmakers. I don’t think that this was done with malicious intent, but I do think it is the product of the filmmakers not knowing how to wrestle with some of the novel’s most challenging but crucial material. Not unlike the town in which it’s set, Muschietti’s It only sees what it wants to.
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