What Does it Mean to be a Loser?
My Loser's Club was a neighborhood group of kids and then a group of young adults from different places/interests. I refer to us as The Losers because we were not popular, not particularly or overly involved in extra-curricular activities, and, well... we were kind of losers. By this, I don't mean Burnouts. This is an important distinction. Henry Bowers is a Burnout. Ben Hanscom is a Loser. I identify with him: a hopeless romantic, his arms full of library books. As Losers, we would not be so bold as to imagine a large place for ourselves in this world. We would not be so bold as to try and become large to fill that large, imagined space by becoming captain of a team or by dating the prom queen. We were more likely to thrive in imaginative endeavors, such as reading, drawing, or role-playing. Our epic quests were in our minds. We spun our own yarns with golden threads of imagination. I might not have been the captain of the football team, but I was a level twelve gray elf mage covered in mystical, runic tattoos.
Like the kids in It, the friend group I became a part of was a hodgepodge of other Losers. Richie reminds me of my friend Jack- always a wisecrack behind his lips, the kid that began wearing a beret as a social experiment, the kid that slyly flipped the bird while blowing his trombone for the yearbook band photo (yes, the bird picture made it into the yearbook). Eddie, the sickly one was a bit like my friend Paul who also happened to be valedictorian of the school and was fluent in Elvish: our first Dungeon Master. Like Eddie, Paul suffered from bouts of illness, allergies, and temper. Ben, the analytical, poetic one was much like all of us, but perhaps particularly, like Robert, a quiet, artistic type who would become a gifted designer. We all see ourselves as the protagonist, so I guess that makes me Stuttering Bill. Rather than being afflicted with a stutter, I was quiet. I missed my eighth-grade DC Trip because I never uttered a word about it to my parents. I was too busy trying to disappear into thin air. This would have been preferable to facing that relentless bully, puberty, and his cruel stage: middle school. The truth is there's a little bit of all of these characters in each Loser, which makes them timeless. If I had to name a Beverly, I suppose it is my high school girlfriend and now wife, who often preferred the company of boys. She was beautiful but a bit too body atypical to be in with the cheerleaders. She was more at home on the softball field and the band. The stand-in for the murdered children in the book would be my close childhood friend Ryan, Robert's younger brother, who tragically took his own life back at the turn of the century. He is the Georgie of this story, I suppose. I imagine there are odd. almost supernatural events that invest every childhood with a kind of magic, and there were plenty in my own childhood spent playing out at the ponds and the woods (our barrens) and navigating the Henry Bowers of our lives. Mine was named Scott Brocus. It is provocative to think that there is a bad guy I could blame for my friend Ryan's death. A bully. An evil clown. A cosmic spider. A werewolf. It is a more provocative notion than the reality of mental illness and parental negligence that actually led to his death. Bill's guilt in the novel is relatable. To this day, I feel guilt for Ryan's death. I did not send him out in the rain with a boat to be eaten by the monster in the sewer grate, but I often think about how I was not able to be enough of a friend to prevent his death, and I have fought long and hard to defeat that guilt. Also, I think the evil, if there is a tangible evil, delights in guilt, so I try not to think those thoughts. But they linger... along with the memories of childhood. Perhaps Ryan is like Stan? Stan, who could not face the fears of his childhood? Stan, who remembered too much too quickly? My friend was suffering from schizophrenia. Stan and the rest of the Loser's Club were also seeing and hearing things the adults could not see while they were tormented by Pennywise. I mentioned earlier that there are odd. almost supernatural events that invest every childhood with a kind of magic, and perhaps this is because our imaginations fill the gap between perception and scientific reality. But there are some mysteries that even science stutters to explain.
Another theme from this book that encourages me is that there is hope, even in the face of unspeakable evil. Based on events from the novel, it seems that love and friendship are the best weapons we have. It also seems we are at our strongest in childhood, which is illogical. However, similar themes exist in the Bible and the work of the New England Transcendentalists. The Bible reminds us we must become like little children to be pleasing to God, and Emerson said, "the sun illuminates only the eye of man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child." Perhaps it is because when we are children, we still walk hand in hand with Mother Nature? A similar theme exists in Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life paintings. As the main protagonist grows from Infancy to Youth to Manhood, they trade their relationship with nature for materialistic items and symbolically lose the rudder of their ship, and are faced with a torrent, as well as the three demons of Incontinence, Murder, and Suicide. People always ask, "How can you stand teaching adolescents all day long?" Usually, I ask, "How can you stand being around adults all day?" As King tells us in the preface, "the magic exists." We seem to agree that it is most potent in youth and that it fades until, in adulthood, we forget what it was like. So, whether it's Stuttering Bill on his bike, "Hi-yo Silver, AWWAYYYYY!" or the young person in Thomas Cole's Youth questing for that castle in the sky (either on the football field or in an imaginary dungeon), we would do well to remember the magic of those hours. So many of the adults in Derry are out of touch with what's happening because they have become like the man in Cole's painting, or drone-like, as in Collins Street at 5 p.m. A theme of the book is that adults are out of touch - they often cannot see Pennywise or the horrors he calls tricks. We must do better, King seems to urge.
If you liked the connections I share to IT, you may like Kayla Rae Whitaker's personal essay "Hanging Out with Pennywise and My Grandmother's Ghost"
Book Club Q&A
What themes/tropes inspired IT, and how do these themes and tropes endure? I believe IT is a masterwork (despite its warts), so it is worth the time to pursue this question.
Stephen King owes Ray Bradbury a ton of gratitude for having written Something Wicked This Way Comes. Without it, I don't believe King would have written books like Fairy Tale, It, Doctor Sleep, and numerous others. Something Wicked This Way Comes is about a Cougar and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show - essentially a dark carnival - that blows into town in late October, interrupting, or more accurately, facilitating, Will and Jim 's- the two young protagonists of the novel- coming of age. The novel is strong in "literary elements" such as poetic prose and wonderful in its pursuit of establishing/reinforcing universal truths about happiness, death, and fear.
What King "borrows" from SWTWC is, obviously, the dark carnival trope, clearly used in It and adaptively in Needful Things. In fact, the world over associates King with Pennywise, the killer clown from outer space, because clowns have always made shockingly provocative villains. The Joker is the world's first supervillain, representing everything Batman is not. Batman is dark and serious and committed to justice, while Joker is bright and wild and committed to chaos. So Pennywise sticks in our collective consciousness like the brightly colored psychopath that he is. But he's more. He's a killer clown from outer space- from somewhere beyond the outer darkness where the, and nothingness, and the deadlights. He (or she as the book reveals) is an entity that is so horrible to gaze upon it instantly breaks the sanity of those who do (a theme of the Eldrich Gods that King owes to Lovecraft). The theme of the deranged clown will endure, either in Juggalo culture, and probably in B movies (Captain Spaulding, anyone?), and always in fighting Batman. Pennywise is arguably the most sophisticated incarnation of a beloved horror/pulp trope.
The classic question for ANY book is, what are people's favorite and least favorite parts? It's even better if they can defend their choice with good reasoning.
My first question is, why doesn't Pennywise simply show his true form to the Losers and consume them with his deadlights? If this is his most potent weapon why does he spend so much energy (and glamor) to terrify the Losers?
RANT: I think I have a way to answer this, but King never directly states my theory. My theory brings me back to the story "To Build a Fire" by Jack London. We are told that the nameless protagonist's main weakness is his lack of imagination. It is ultimately what kills him. Is the same true for Pennywise's most hapless victims? Those that are taken into the deadlights? Is the greatest strength of The Loser's Club their ability to imagine something terrifying? Is this ultimately what saves them?
How does Eddie's injury at the hands of Henry Bowers help to set Eddie free? Relatable? On theme? How does facing our biggest fears liberate us? Does it matter if it's an intentional facing of fear or not?
Another theme I'd like to focus on is the idea that evil feeds on fear. It's a theme outlined in Bradbury and King, but it is older than this. Where does it come from? Next, King mentions that fear seasons the meat like salt, which we see in the death of several of the characters in the book. But is it the villain's greed for this seasoning that ultimately leads to her downfall?
How would Bachman have ended this book differently than how King chose to end it? Explain.
Conclusion
In closing, I am fortunate as a teacher of adolescents to be close to that time of life in which magic is real and the future sparkles like a promise, much like the transcendental castle in the sky in Thomas Cole's painting. This keeps me young. It reminds me that the magic is real, as King guarantees in his epigraph. This is why I fight the notion of going on "auto-pilot" like the adults in the Collins Street painting, where the gold has jaundiced to a sickly beige the color of a hospital waiting room from the 1970s. Every year it gets harder to tear away from the seduction of routine. To me, an aging English teacher, routine is scarier than Pennywise. It has the power to make us complacent and dull our minds and hearts. I think of the mournful refrain of Wallace Steven's poem "Gubbinal," "The world is ugly / and the people are sad" or Lindsay's line "It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull," but every time I meet a kid with a dream all of that fades, fades, and though Frost claimed "nothing gold can stay," we must strive to hold onto that gold, that "strange flower, the sun." It is possible that we will fight demons in adulthood: but rarely do they take the shape of a killer clown. They are more likely to take the shape Thomas Cole suggests in Manhood as Intemperance (our inability to restrain our lusts), Suicide (literal, or, as Emerson said, "Envy is Ignorance, Imitation Suicide"), and Murder (does it count if we slowly suffocate our dreams in exchange for comfort?). These things can be scary, but I believe we have the greatest defense against them living inside of us: our childhood selves and the people we choose to be, day after day.
