The King’s Red-head Orgy: desire, death and honesty in Stephen King’s IT

Author:Author Amy Burge
Published: Posted on

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By Dr Charlie Oughton

‘Your hair is winter fire,
January embers,
My heart burns there, too.’

So says the love haiku that Ben Hanscom sends Beverly Marsh in Stephen King’s IT. The story follows a group of outcast children, The Losers’ Club, who become friends and lovers as they battle a murderous alien entity – IT – as well as townsfolk who look the other way. This piece is about how the representation of death and desire changes between King’s book, Tommy Lee Wallace’s 1990 miniseries and the first film adaptation by Andres Muschietti (2017) to reflect social attitudes.

Character Beverly Marsh is a vortex within the story. She is the only girl in The Losers Club and becomes the focus of several amorous relationships.  Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (you guessed that, didn’t you?) posits that ‘patriarchal society has structured film form’ (1999, 833) so that cinema creates an environment that places women in an alternatively domineering and masochistic relationship with the male-gaze orientated camera via what Mulvey terms as ‘the three different looks’ (1999, 843) of cinema. The principle can apply to books as well as to films. IT’s haiku-writing poet, Ben, represents ‘the look of the characters at each other within the screen illusion’ (ibid) as he falls in love (lust) at first sight.  ‘Ben saw everything with his lover’s eye’, the book (2017 Kindle edition) tells us. He is unclear if Bev has ‘any chestworks’ (ibid) yet, but sees her ‘bright golden ankle-bracelet…winking back the sun in brilliant little flashes’ (ibid), leaving him ‘foolish and exalted…but inarguably blessed’ (ibid).  We readers are the ‘look of the audience as it watches the final product’ (Mulvey, 1999, 833) and we empathise with Ben’s frisson (bless!). Both of these looks are however subordinated to the third look – King’s act as director, ‘the look of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event’ (ibid), pointing out what he chooses that Ben will see that so enchants him, especially in Ben’s increasing amour. The detailed character portrayal and switches between narrative perspective throughout IT to create the illusion of experiencing the world through the camera’s eyes as King identifies vicariously with his subject – the haiku was based on King’s own experiences. Part of the reason the story remains so popular is that the romantic stories at the centre are so powerful. We watch as Ben first fetishizes Bev, then saves (and demystifies) her in The Apocalyptic Rock Fight (yelling ‘You ain’t supposed to throw rocks at girls!’) before eventually beginning a sexual relationship with her.

But part of that love story is the very real terror that the power image of the body, and the sexuality it symbolises, holds over us. Book-Bev’s clothes and manners betray her lack of financial privilege in the land of the American Dream and lead to her ostracization from the girl peers whom King’s book states consider her ‘uncouth’, but they emphasise her biological adherence to beauty conventions and mark her as valuable regardless. It is very much a double-edged sword that empowers and endangers her. She internalises these reactions and switches between shyness and a forthright streak alternatively seen as tomboyishness or sexual precociousness as she notices her clothes struggling to fit around her increasingly-pubescent body and imagines her crush, Bill’s genitalia for the first time while watching the bullying Bowers Gang lighting their own farts. Her abusive, possibly incestuous father simply calls her ‘slutchild’ and her emotionally and physically violent husband, Tom, marvels at how she can be ‘Voluptuous and sexy as hell, but a child’ emotionally. The book works because it doesn’t shy away from exploring these realities, though they may seem almost pornographic now.  You survive any way you can.

Desire bonds The Losers. King uses the same name for the eponymous monster as is popularly used for sexual intercourse. This is a story where, infamously, the pre-pubescent friends have group sex in a sewer in order to commit to each other, navigate their way back to safety and move on to adulthood. The section was expunged from the IT miniseries and watered down to a chaste kiss (with all that that implies) in the 2017 Muschietti film adaptation of the story. To adults, sex has become something that must be thought of only (if at all) by adults and has become connected to the ideas of ageing and death rather than the butterflies of arousal. IT, as Pennywise, the most famous guise of the entity, brings death. King ensures that Bill and Bev’s eventual, adulterous one-night stand reminds The Losers how to ultimately kill IT.

Films, Sex and the Mirror’s Gaze

It’s not just objectification that controls us. What we are desperately trying to ignore is what we can’t vanquish if we just believe enough: death. The difference between the book and the adaptations (so far) is how they deal with our current conception of gendered-age and social role.

Ben’s love haiku can also be applied to Bill, the story’s protagonist (and Bev’s crush). Bill leads the group to hunt IT after IT kills his little brother. The book notes Bill also has ‘fine red hair’ like Bev’s. They both notice. Bev has to be beautiful with the red-headed association of desirous-danger or be unimportant. The 1990 miniseries’ Bevs were Emily Perkins (at 11 years old) and Annette O’Toole as the adult. Ben’s haiku’s description just about applies if considering their russet hair as burnt embers. Bill? Blonde Jonathan ‘The Neverending Story’ Brandis was the younger version and brunette, faux-ponytailed Richard ‘John-Boy Walton’ Thomas was the adult. The hair-colour connection vanishes. That he is there is enough to ensure his worth.

More intriguing is the idea that to represent Bill canonically would be inappropriate. Bill’s adaptation representation negates another theme of the original story: male objectification.  The Loser is greeted as ‘chrome dome’ as an adult in the novel. He’s gone bald. King (ahem) waxes lyrical about how Bill began to lose it when ‘he was only a college sophomore’. Who also has receding red hair? Pennywise the Dancing Clown, part man, part eternal, part-playful child and the guise in which IT appears to the children most. Bill later marries a woman, Audra, who is strikingly physically similar to Bev. They are all tied together in an intoxicating, passionate, terror loop between the young love and the idea that procreation will birth their replacements.  Even Pennywise had a kid with The Babadook in a meme the other year. Is it because Bill must remain the de-facto, easily identifiable hero in the visual mainstream that he cannot be seen as representing a supposedly non-aspirational model of a person who actually ages?

When the miniseries was released, the internet was not widespread. Academia was still rarefied. King’s books certainly did not have widespread critical acclaim. The red-headed four-way between Bev, Bill, Bill’s wife Audra and IT was forgotten.

Flash forward a generation to 2017 and 2019 film adaptations of the story and visually the importance of procreation is reduced. King’s tale is split so that the children’s story is covered in the first film and their adult selves are introduced alongside the children’s flashbacks in the second. Young Beverly is Sophia Lillis, a natural redhead who cuts her canonical long hair off in an obvious feminist strike (likely also to benefit the short-haired Sophia) after it attracts unwanted sexual attention. Social media chat threads are devoted to whether flame-maidens Amy Adams or Oscar-nominated Jessica Chastain (who plays the part) look more like Bev, as though the actresses’ supposed verisimilitude to the subjugated character pinpoint their suitability to play her. Young Bill is Jaeden Lieberher, who has auburn tones (notably brown for his Funko figurine). In the Muschietti’s film, adult Bill actor James McAvoy has mid-length, brown hair. McAvoy shaved his head for films such as Split. Judging from set photos, the one potential nod towards Bill’s canonical description is a blink-and-you-miss-it grey streak.

In fact, all of adult characters’ ages seem to have been decelerated. While miniseries-Bill had that hippyish ponytail, he and several others wore button-down-shirts – smart-casual-at-the-golf-club chino ensembles. They were pretending to Adult rather well.  In IT Chapter 2 Mike Hanlon is the buff guy from the Old Spice adverts and publicity shots suggest that t-shirts are the order of the day. This is canonically correct – ‘kid clothes’ as the book puts it, but minus the grey flecks and ‘pie-bald’ hair of the books.  The Losers are not allowed to be older, now. Not really.

The mainstream can no longer contemplate death unless it is death of the other, such as bratty teens in a slasher film, those who look like they’re physically surplus to the requirements of society or are worthy of a ‘cute old people’ Cocoon ending.

Yet at 39 years King posits it as the last of childhood, when you put down your toys for the final time, in the notes for the 25th Anniversary edition of the book. Right now, however, Bill is only four years older than Superman actor, Henry Cavill. Is there a limit to possibility? IT’s adaptations show us we increasingly want to deny the mysteries of death in favour of a perpetual but sanitised childhood that sneaks peeks of adulthood – such as IT’s sewer orgy, infanticide and masturbation sequences in the book – and turns back ashamed. Book-Bev kept watching as she hid behind a car watching transfixed as others discovered their bodies. The mere snifter of a nipple will now draw Twitter storms and you are now ten minutes closer to your own death than you were at the start of this article.

Laura Mulvey asserted that the purpose of deconstructing controlling visual pleasure is to destroy it. Visually, IT reflects a time where global shifts in politics mean age is now a dirty word and sex is something we’re terrified of despite it being what got us here in the first place. The dirty, shameful, terrifying events The Losers live through are liveable for them as survivors because they highlight how strong their bond becomes to cope with it. They have to work at it.

Will IT Chapter 2 be able to convey these messages of the book with the visual differences in place? Only time will tell.

References
About the author

Dr Charlie Oughton’s book on Stephen King’s IT is forthcoming from McFarland in 2019. He lectures in media and culture at Regent’s University London, University of the Arts London and University of Southern California and is a freelance film and crime journalist.

Twitter: @DrCOughton

Instagram: @DrCharlieOughton

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