This article contains spoilers for It Chapter Two as well as the preceding film and the original novel.
Like the Stephen King novel on which it?s based, It Chapter Two opens with a hate crime. Adrian Mellon (here played terribly by former director of note Xavier Dolan) kisses his boyfriend at a Derry carnival, and the two are followed out of it by a gang of homophobic hoodlums. The two are viciously beaten, and a barely-conscious Adrian is thrown over the side of a bridge into a rushing river. He?s pulled out and eaten by Pennywise. The crime alerts Mike Hanlon to It?s resurgence, spurring him to reunite his friends to battle it again.
So, there?s gay stuff in It Chapter Two. Queer shit. There is Homosexual Content TM. If you read Stephen King?s novel, you knew it was coming. If you?re like me, you were dreading the film?s handling of the Adrian Mellon scene. We were right to do so. The scene is exceedingly brutal, seeming to relish the seeping blood covering Adrian?s now unrecognizable face the same way the film delights in the outlandish gore inflicted by Pennywise. In King?s book, homophobia in Derry is implicitly tied to the presence of It, both evils feeding off of and into one another. In the film, homophobic violence is no different than Pennywise?s fantastical ?kills.? We?re meant to be horrified by both, but with the whispered suggestion that it?s still fun to watch.
This is where the queerness ends in the book. Not so in the film. Seemingly by way of apology for the Adrian Mellon scene, the filmmakers have added just a dash of gay to their main cast. Richie Tozier (played by Finn Wolfhard as a child and Bill Hader as an adult) is heavily implied to be gay. I say ?heavily implied? because it?s never outright stated. There?s no coming-out moment. Still, it?s pretty obvious what?s going on here.
The film?s lengthy middle portion is taken up by new flashbacks which take place during an unseen part of the first film, when the friends briefly split up after wounding and escaping from It. Each character has a new jump-scare setpiece encounter with It during this time. Richie?s begins at an arcade, where he?s playing Street Fighter with another unnamed boy. The game ends, and the boy slaps Richie?s hand, lingering just a half-second longer on the gesture than expected. The camera notes the physical contact. Richie responds by asking, a bit too desperately, for the boy to play another round with him. At this point, the bully Henry Bowers and his gang appear. The boy is Henry?s little cousin, and he instantly turns on Richie. The bullies call Richie a faggot and a fairy and chase him out of the arcade.
A frustrated Richie wanders to a nearby park, at the center of which is a massive statue of Paul Bunyon. Naturally, the statue comes alive, but its taunt of Richie is of particular interest. ?Wanna kiss, Richie?? it asks him, before transforming into a garish CGI monster and chasing him across the park. The illusion vanishes and Richie is spared, and the film cuts to adult Richie in the same park, staring at the same statue. Then Pennywise appears to him and starts to tease him about his ?dirty little secret.?
So at this point it should be obvious what the film is getting at. Richie is gay, he?s closeted, and this is the deep-seated fear that Pennywise is picking on. The problem is that there?s a clear divide in the film between the treatment of this idea in the child segments and in the adult segments. When Richie is a child, the depiction of his burgeoning sexuality is depicted with shocking subtlety and tenderness. As an adult, it?s nonsensical and heavy-handed.
The centerpiece of Richie?s sexuality is his relationship with fellow Loser Eddie Kaspbrak. The new flashbacks to the Losers as children have a new focus on the playful antagonism between the two. They tease each other and bicker in the way only close friends can. It?s never the primary focus, but it?s conspicuously present.
At one point, the two argue in the background of a scene over whose turn it is to lie in the clubhouse hammock. Eventually Eddie just gets in with Richie and they lie there together. Eddie gently kicks Richie?s face with his foot, knocking his glasses off. There?s something sweetly familiar to this detail, that moment of physical contact that meant nothing to Eddie but something more to Richie, a gesture with significance Richie couldn?t decode at the time. It?s, and I can?t believe I?m saying this, actually recognizable to my own experience of being a young queer person who had no idea who she was. You carry these little totems with you, tiny pinpricks in your heart. The details may drift away, but the way the moments made you feel never will. Is it great queer cinema? Not hardly. But it?s far better than anyone should have expected from a film like this.
That?s the kid scenes, though. The adult scenes are much, much different, presenting some pressing questions of coherency. Chief among them: Why is Richie still closeted in 2016? He lives in New York City, he?s a successful stand-up comedian, he has no family ties to speak of. Why can?t he just be out? Had the film?s timeline adhered to the novel?s, with the adult half playing out in the 1980s, this may have made more sense. It certainly does for the child Richie. I thought of the scene in the first film where Eddie, ever the hypochondriac, rants about the terrifying possibility of AIDS infection. What must young Richie have thought of that?
This isn?t to say, of course, that homophobia doesn?t exist in 2016. The film makes a point of this with the Adrian Mellon scene. Still, the film can conceive of no reason why Richie should have remained in the closet all these years beyond a general sense of shame and internalized homophobia, neither of which is ever actually depicted. We have no idea how Richie feels about being gay. There?s no sense of his life or personality as they relate to his queerness. Him being gay is just another Dark Secret for Pennywise to pick on. It?s Ben?s shame over being formerly obese, it?s Beverly?s fear of her abusive father, it?s Bill?s guilt over his brother?s death. It?s just another hanging thread to be tugged on, a board hung around the neck headlined ?This Is My Trauma.? It?s cheap, it?s ugly, it?s borderline offensive.
And yet?.there?s an ?and yet.?
At some point in the film, we see a flashback to young Richie carving ?R +? into a wooden fence. The camera obscures the final initial. The last we see of adult Richie is him returning to that fence, where we see that he carved ?R + E,? and he gets to work digging out those same old lines, making the mark new again. Eddie didn?t survive the final battle with It, and Richie was more affected by this than his friends. As I watched him re-carve those letters, I couldn?t help but feel a tiny spark of warmth, remembering the look on young Richie?s face as young Eddie lightly kicked it. Hader and Wolfhard turn a deeply lame character rewrite into something gentle and tender. They find a queerness that feels familiar in a script to which queerness is alien. It Chapter Two is not queer cinema. Its depiction of gay characters is largely trashy and pointless and incoherent. But in these performances, there?s something more. There?s real queer life. If only the movie was good. If only, if only, if only.
