As an adult, it’s nonsensical and heavy-handed. When Richie is a child, the depiction of his burgeoning sexuality is depicted with shocking subtlety and tenderness. 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. Richie is gay, he’s closeted, and this is the deep-seated fear that Pennywise is picking on. So at this point it should be obvious what the film is getting at. Then Pennywise appears to him and starts to tease him about his “dirty little secret.” The illusion vanishes and Richie is spared, and the film cuts to adult Richie in the same park, staring at the same statue.
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“Wanna kiss, Richie?” it asks him, before transforming into a garish CGI monster and chasing him across the park. Naturally, the statue comes alive, but its taunt of Richie is of particular interest. The bullies call Richie a faggot and a fairy and chase him out of the arcade.Ī frustrated Richie wanders to a nearby park, at the center of which is a massive statue of Paul Bunyon. The boy is Henry’s little cousin, and he instantly turns on Richie. At this point, the bully Henry Bowers and his gang appear. Richie responds by asking, a bit too desperately, for the boy to play another round with him. The game ends, and the boy slaps Richie’s hand, lingering just a half-second longer on the gesture than expected. Richie’s begins at an arcade, where he’s playing Street Fighter with another unnamed boy. Each character has a new jump-scare setpiece encounter with It during this time. 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.
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Still, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on here. I say “heavily implied” because it’s never outright stated.
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Richie Tozier (played by Finn Wolfhard as a child and Bill Hader as an adult) is heavily implied to be gay. Seemingly by way of apology for the Adrian Mellon scene, the filmmakers have added just a dash of gay to their main cast. This is where the queerness ends in the book. 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. In King’s book, homophobia in Derry is implicitly tied to the presence of It, both evils feeding off of and into one another. 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. If you’re like me, you were dreading the film’s handling of the Adrian Mellon scene. If you read Stephen King’s novel, you knew it was coming. The crime alerts Mike Hanlon to It’s resurgence, spurring him to reunite his friends to battle it again. The two are viciously beaten, and a barely-conscious Adrian is thrown over the side of a bridge into a rushing river. 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.
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Like the Stephen King novel on which it’s based, It Chapter Two opens with a hate crime. This article contains spoilers for It Chapter Two as well as the preceding film and the original novel.