This essay appears in Issue 28 of The Mockingbird magazine, now available to order.
I went downstairs the other day, into our basement. It can sometimes be a hard place to find grace — it was full of teenagers, their respective signature scents and hair care products rivalling the sweet animal-vegetal odors of Taquitos, Gummy Nerds, Coconut Water, discarded socks damp and muddy from chasing around the yard or, more accurately, filming themselves chasing around the yard. They were watching a horror movie — The Exorcist: Believer (2023), the latest entry in what’s become a decades-long franchise. I scoffed. I told them that if they wanted to watch a genuinely scary movie, they should watch the original Exorcist (1973), William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel. They scoffed back. There was no way a movie that old could still be scary. With Dad Swagger I told them to try it and see. I told them this was a classic, the classic horror movie, in fact. One of my daughters came upstairs a couple of hours later.
“And?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“A really scary movie, right?”
“Oh wait, you mean The Exorcist?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah we stopped watching that. It was really slow and the special effects were really fake. It wasn’t scary at all. We were kind of laughing and then we got bored and watched something else.”
“What did you watch?”
“It.”
“Why?”
“Well, we heard it was like a classic. Like you saying about The Exorcist.”
“And?”
“Not bad. The special effects were fake. But it was kind of scary, I guess.”
I have lamented this underwhelmed response to The Exorcist to friends and colleagues, and they’ve offered their own versions of the same evidence: Young people are losing their capacity to concentrate and, simultaneously, to be engaged at all by older media. Indeed, for them, a movie released in 2017 is, apparently, older media.
Based on Stephen King’s 1986 novel, It is set in the small town of Derry, Maine, in the 1980s. A group of teenage misfits tries to make sense of why people, and children in particular, go missing at a rate much higher than anywhere else in America. These disappearances have a particular significance for one character, Bill, whose little brother Georgie is one of the latest to go missing.
As the story develops, the characters have terrifying encounters, individually and collectively, with a malevolent clown, Pennywise, who, we learn, emerges from a netherworld every 27 years to feed on the children of Derry. With the adults either oblivious or purposefully ignoring the situation, the kids themselves decide to fight the clown and attempt to banish it from their town and their lives, for good.
When it was first released, the movie’s trailer generated 197 million views in 24 hours, a record at the time. The movie itself, which had a budget of 35 million dollars, has grossed, worldwide, more than half a billion dollars and ranks as the highest-grossing horror movie of all time. At the time of its release, reviews were generally positive, but no critic ever pointed to this movie as some kind of signal masterpiece of American cinema. Why, then, did it prove so popular? For two reasons, I propose: First, to cite a representative assessment, New York Times critic A. O. Scott observed that the clown in the movie is “the literal, lethal manifestation of evil in the world.” Further, the clown’s success “is abetted and to some extent camouflaged by the ordinary human awfulness that also afflicts Derry … [namely] an ugly assortment of bullies … gossips, and abusive parents.” Unintentionally, perhaps, Scott invoked two traditional, intersecting conceptions of evil — evil as a phenomenon, and evil as the outcome of free will gone wrong. In so doing, he’s drawing our attention to the film’s investment in longstanding conceptions of the bad, false, and ugly (as opposed to the good, true, and beautiful). But in fact, the movie suggests we needn’t take seriously the phenomenon of evil: It’s just a clown — indeed, we can be entertained by it.
***
Evil itself, at least in the Catholic intellectual tradition, has two major and long-since synthesized source definitions that I think are especially germane to narrative arts like literature and film. The first account, from St. Augustine, portrays evil as a lesser result of the greater good of God’s creating man with a free will: This is the very line that divides and cuts through every human heart, as Russian writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn famously put it. The second main account of evil comes from St. Thomas Aquinas, who, in consonance with Augustine, proposes in the Summa, “What evil is must be known from the nature of the good,” which eventually leads to an understanding of evil as deprivation, as the absence of the good.
From my vantage, as a novelist and professor of English, it’s to narratives that we often turn for understanding so much about human experience, including the problem of evil. As the French philosopher Paul Ricœur argued in his magisterial three-volume study, Time and Narrative, human beings are, by nature, storytelling creatures: We understand ourselves and our lives in narrative terms, and we seek the same understanding of people and phenomena around us. This is all straightforward enough when it comes to much of human experience, including, I add, evidence of evil that results from the disordered exercise of our free will, the most vivid and lasting representations of which, from across the Western literary tradition, come to us from Dante’s Inferno, as we will see. But — if we accept Aquinas’ definition of evil as privation, as absence of the good — this poses a natural paradox for any artist: How do you create something, a presence, to represent an absence? And what’s beauty’s place, in such an effort?
Before returning to It, I think the best way to make sense of all this is to go to hell — at least Dante’s version of it. In the thirty-fourth canto of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil reach the icy depths of hell, the fourth ring of the ninth circle, where they encounter Lucifer, the massive emperor of this inverted kingdom, who, we are reminded, “was once a handsome presence.” No longer, obviously, but in Dante’s rendering his present hideousness is a privation pointing to a presence. I think this might be the preeminent demonstration of how a literary artist gives shape and logic to evil: Dante observes of Lucifer that “if he was once as handsome as he now / is ugly and, despite that, raised his brows / against his Maker, one can understand / how every sorrow has its source in him!” Thereafter he offers us a striking view of this ugliness: “He had three faces: one — in front — bloodred; / and then another two that, just above / the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first”: Each of Satan’s faces is winged; his six eyes weep tears and blood; and he is encased in ice and eternally eating and flaying and crushing three traitors: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. Virgil informs Dante that as their last hike through hell, they must climb Satan’s icy, shaggy flanks, because “it is by such stairs that we must take our leave of so much evil.” Eventually, the poet and his guide emerge “to see — once more — the stars,” and from there make their way to Purgatory and, ultimately, to Paradise.
We’d be hard-pressed to find a better representation than Dante’s of evil as both an act of disordered free will (resulting in damnation) and an exterior phenomenon whose depravity affirms supreme goodness and presence. This is largely because Dante’s representation corresponds so fully to three qualities of beauty: clarity, proportion, and integrity, per Thomas Aquinas. These qualities have long been seen as objective, defining features of a work of art (by Étienne Gilson, Umberto Eco, and other modern scholars). When it comes to Inferno, the poem’s clarity is evident in the story’s intelligibility about the consequences of a disordered free will; the poem’s proportion is evident in its integration of metaphysical and physical logics, particularly with respect to the kinds of physical punishments sinners endure in proportion to their offences against the will of God; finally, the poem’s integrity is evident in its wholeness of imagined world — Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise — and the many syntheses, integrations, and harmonies that endow the poem with such force and meaning, beginning, most famously, with its rendering and revelation of “so much evil,” as Virgil puts it, throughout the nine circles of Hell and culminating in a direct encounter with Lucifer.
***
So now, from Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante, are we really going to move back to Stephen King and the movies? Yes, and here’s why. When it comes to art — whether we are seeking depictions of the good, true, and beautiful, or of the bad, false, and ugly — religiously serious people tend to look only in one direction: the past, as perhaps I did, myself, in evangelizing about the original Exorcist to my teenaged children and their friends. But let’s try to make sense of, for instance, why an at-best-pretty-good movie featuring an evil clown has enjoyed so much commercial success. It doesn’t hold up very well against St. Thomas’s criteria of clarity, proportion, and integrity, because, as we shall see, it’s governed by a final misunderstanding of evil itself.
Pennywise preys on children by identifying and then exploiting their fears. As such, each of the main characters is at multiple points terrified by the clown’s workings, in most every case by something ghoulish or strange and threatening that has its source in an unresolved childhood trauma, personal struggle, or family issue. These encounters often happen in the midst of grown-ups who never notice anything. Bill struggles with his little brother Georgie’s death and his having unintentionally played a part in it; Mike struggles with memories of a house fire that killed his parents; Beverly is going through puberty while living with an abusive father; Stanley, the son of a rabbi — a fact that has no religious meaning whatsoever in a movie about evil, I might add — is beset by anxieties, especially when he has to fetch things by himself from his father’s forbidding office; Eddie is a hypochondriac; and Richie, well, Richie doesn’t like clowns. Pennywise manifests to each child in ways that capitalize on these fears, and the power of his evil resides in his ability to scare them into submission, captivity, and death.
To be sure, the movie more broadly provides us with evidence of evil, especially when it comes to representations of free will enacted in fallen ways. The townspeople have a tacit collective capacity to choose to ignore the awfulness around them, nowhere more starkly than when an old lady watches from her front window while little Georgie struggles in front of a gutter and then, a moment later, disappears into it as the clown captures him. She does nothing about it. More immediately, in relation to the main characters of the story, Beverly’s father abuses her, and all the other kids are subjected to taunts, bullying, and brutal attacks by a vicious band of older teenagers led by a boy named Patrick. Patrick’s own rage and violence make him susceptible to Pennywise. The clown chooses not to prey on his fears but instead to tempt him to ever worse acts of violence, against both the main characters and even members of his own family. In these secondary ways, then, you could say the movie demonstrates clear and engaging components of St. Thomas’s criteria for beauty: clarity, proportion, and integrity. We can see this to the degree that we understand Patrick’s actions in and of themselves, how these actions make sense with the rest of the characters and events, and how they seamlessly fit into the work as a whole. In these respects, the film succeeds as an aesthetic representation of evil.
But can it point to its opposite: the good, true, and beautiful? As a film, it has sensory appeal. This is the case especially in its use of primary colors — the yellow of a boy’s rain slicker, the red of the clown’s balloon — but it’s hard to call the film beautiful if we hold that beauty and truth and goodness go together. The trouble with It is that the film’s overall intention and even ambition is too captive, alas, to the weak religious spirit of the age.
In the movie’s climactic sequence, Pennywise captures Bev and spirits her away to his sewer system dungeon, where he does not kill her but instead puts her in a levitating trance. To rescue her, her friends enter his lair and endure an escalating set of terrors, both collectively and individually tailored, culminating in Bill’s meeting what appears to be his murdered little brother, who pleads with Bill to bring him home. Through much suffering, Bill recognizes that this isn’t his little brother but instead a manifestation of Pennywise, which leads eventually to a kind of extended action-movie style battle that results in a stalemate between the kids and the clown.
It’s now that Bill and the other characters discover why the clown hasn’t killed them or, more accurately, why he can’t kill them. There are three reasons: First, their friendship provides solidarity and a call to courage and sacrifice that defeats the isolating fears and self-interest the clown depends upon; second, each character realizes that the terrors confronting them are nothing other than externalized psychological weaknesses and not real. Finally, Bill realizes the reason Bev isn’t dead yet: She’s not scared of Pennywise, and he can’t kill what’s not scared of him. The movie is tellingly silent, however, about why she’s not scared of him. It instead moves quickly into the next sequence, in which Bill and his friends turn the tables on Pennywise, noting that now he’s scared, and indeed he escapes away into a deep well, where he had to wait until the movie’s sequel, which came out in 2019.
With the clown gone, the kids rally around each other and the movie ends in a gauzy feel-good way: The music and imagery affirm that because they’ve believed in each other and believed in themselves, they have defeated evil. It’s an ending underpinned by “moral therapeutic deism,” sociologist Christian Smith’s provocative term for the abiding faith of, among others, most American teenagers (and therefore of no less than half of the audience who originally saw It). Moral therapeutic deism is characterized by belief in the following:
1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
Now, the great appeal of a movie like It resides in its offering a representation of evil that is as easy and mushy as moral therapeutic deism’s representation of the good. Evil exists, and it shows up in weird ways that grown-ups can’t understand; evil takes root in our lives because of psychological issues beyond our control; and only in coming to terms with these issues and through teamwork can we combat evil.
The problem with such a representation is that it’s too amenable to emphasizing the false and bad and ugly as individuated beyond the possibility of empathy (parents just don’t understand!), impossible to overcome (those psychological issues), or a little too easy to overcome (with teamwork!). All of this supports a claim about life itself that might sound just a little too easily right to the therapeutically attuned average North American teenager, whether in my basement or elsewhere. At the same time, for those formed by and committed to a higher-order understanding of the human person and of our place in the Divine Plan, for those seeking to right our lives and our culture according to the enduring truths of faith, beauty, and reason, it’s deviously hard to make sense of how evil exerts pressure on our efforts to participate in that plan if we can’t take evil — a clown — seriously while it’s enjoyed by millions of others as a clown.
This is what makes It a dark mirror for us: By making evil into a clown that occupies a natural spot in the cosmology and logic of moral therapeutic deism, it’s merely entertaining to encounter. Kind of scary, I guess.
This essay was adapted from a Newman Centre Faith & Reason lecture, from 2023.
