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Ain't drinking from no well.
I finally got around to reading It this summer. In part, because I knew I had some long plane flights ahead of me and I wanted to pack one book to save space so I wanted to bring as much book per book as I could. Also in part because I'd recently read A Wrinkle in Time. Now, both novels are about small groups of misfits teaming up using the power of the human spirit to defeat an otherwordly, unknowable entity called It that eats fear and wants to devour all those who resist It. I'm not dismissing the importance of maintaining faith and truth and forgiveness and love in today's world. But being aware of "[the themes of] cyclical violence, generational trauma, the respective fucked-uped-ness of both childhood and adulthood, and the fundamental horribleness of American history" as well as the necessity of not looking away from mundane, banal horrors and addressing all those things to help break the cycles and stop them from perpetuating into the future seems more salient for the world as it exists right now.
Also, I didn't need that much Jesus coming out of nowhere.
So I'll take book with the gangbang in a sewer and an actual Jew.
I saw the movie today. Coming right after playing through Bioshock made for a strange viewing experience. Monstrous shapes and sounds coming from pipes and bodies in all the wrong shapes and pure nightmares calling out and horrors rising up out of the water in the dark - yeah. I spent a lot of the movie going, "Oh, okay." Not quite the right context for being scared, but I was definitely impressed, and there were some shots and images that took my breath away for all the right and wrong reasons at once. The images were mostly what I'd paid to see, so in that respect, I got my money's worth.
I can't help but keep thinking about Stan. I'm absolutely certain that comes as no surprise to anyone.
Nobody seems to have written any fics where he survives adulthood and doesn't commit suicide rather than face It again. I'm not sure what sort of person he'd be, to have to change into that, and I've been thinking about it for a while now. What I keep coming to is someone who's forced to incorporate the unknowable into his worldview would have to shift the basic operational praxis. Stan in the movie's fairly close to Stan in the book in terms of personality, though he's far more observant on film. His Judaism is the part I think would have to come into play. In the book, in the childhood segments, he focuses on his beliefs in what's real and rational, in what he knows to be true about the world, and there's a passage where he describes he's more offended than horrified at what he sees It create because he knows how unreal it all is and how it's not something that could possibly exist in the world. Changing himself to where he can say that It is a part of the world - he could do it and stay Stan Uris. I think he could do it by becoming a more observant Jew. Things like bringing his own food with him because he can't always trust restaurants, and things like moving strongly into a different but congruent kind of faith to what he held as a child.
In the book, he said he could stand being afraid but hated being dirty. So to survive going back and getting dirty again, he'd have to have internalized being clean, knowing it's not just what touches his skin but how he moves through the world.
Something like that. Mostly, I'd give money to see all seven Losers as adults and Stan saying the Shehecheyanu as thanks for all of them surviving to see each other again.
Also, I didn't need that much Jesus coming out of nowhere.
So I'll take book with the gangbang in a sewer and an actual Jew.
I saw the movie today. Coming right after playing through Bioshock made for a strange viewing experience. Monstrous shapes and sounds coming from pipes and bodies in all the wrong shapes and pure nightmares calling out and horrors rising up out of the water in the dark - yeah. I spent a lot of the movie going, "Oh, okay." Not quite the right context for being scared, but I was definitely impressed, and there were some shots and images that took my breath away for all the right and wrong reasons at once. The images were mostly what I'd paid to see, so in that respect, I got my money's worth.
I can't help but keep thinking about Stan. I'm absolutely certain that comes as no surprise to anyone.
Nobody seems to have written any fics where he survives adulthood and doesn't commit suicide rather than face It again. I'm not sure what sort of person he'd be, to have to change into that, and I've been thinking about it for a while now. What I keep coming to is someone who's forced to incorporate the unknowable into his worldview would have to shift the basic operational praxis. Stan in the movie's fairly close to Stan in the book in terms of personality, though he's far more observant on film. His Judaism is the part I think would have to come into play. In the book, in the childhood segments, he focuses on his beliefs in what's real and rational, in what he knows to be true about the world, and there's a passage where he describes he's more offended than horrified at what he sees It create because he knows how unreal it all is and how it's not something that could possibly exist in the world. Changing himself to where he can say that It is a part of the world - he could do it and stay Stan Uris. I think he could do it by becoming a more observant Jew. Things like bringing his own food with him because he can't always trust restaurants, and things like moving strongly into a different but congruent kind of faith to what he held as a child.
In the book, he said he could stand being afraid but hated being dirty. So to survive going back and getting dirty again, he'd have to have internalized being clean, knowing it's not just what touches his skin but how he moves through the world.
Something like that. Mostly, I'd give money to see all seven Losers as adults and Stan saying the Shehecheyanu as thanks for all of them surviving to see each other again.