tinyletter is being discontinued, here's it chapter one

surprise surprise, it's me, that gif of cilla black going surprise surprise.

it's christmas eve and we have been watching the movie it chapter one, not because it seemed like a particularly good idea to watch it chapter one but because once you start watching it chapter one you might as well admit that you're watching it chapter one and get on with the not inconsiderable task of watching it chapter one. so you see the predicament.

it chapter one is not a good movie, although it does exist higher up in the general pantheon of garbage than it chapter two, a movie whose central premise could be roughly boiled down to big titty ghost goes woo. it chapter one is also not a christmas movie - it is, in point of fact, a movie that takes place squarely over the course of one summer - but it is nonetheless a movie that somehow fundamentally understands that people who would exchange the muddle through somehow line for hang a shining star upon the highest bow in have yourself a merry little christmas are perpetrating moral cowardice. i can't exactly explain why this is the case, but it is so.

the thing, of course, is that stephen king is one of nature's great sentimentalists and it is perhaps for this reason that all of his novels could arguably fall within the boundary of festive classic if you happened to look at them sideways. his work, at its heart, is desperately concerned with the dwindling of promise, with the vain struggle towards something resembling moral goodness against incredible odds and with an ever-present ache for some other, storied former time when things were somehow different. the line - not from it, in fact, but from stand by me - where he notes i never had any friends later on like the ones i had when i was twelve is core to his whole philosophy. not so much the implication that things were better in the past (because they seldom were) but rather that our idea of ourselves was simpler, that the friend we could be and the person we could be was easier and cleaner in some long ago time, perhaps before we were really paying attention enough to appreciate things properly.

the point of uncle steve, and of it in particular, has always been that you can't go home again, and this, to me at least, is also something that sits at the core of christmas as an adult; the sneaking suspicion that the festive season is not what what it used to be, that people you trust won't always do the right thing and that adults aren't going to save us, or even choose to do the right thing. i felt this very much as we engaged in this afternoon's ill-advised rewatch/hostage situation with it chapter one - a movie that blends blumhouse-style panto horror visuals with the kind of gold-limned turbo-nostalgia filled with fields of wheat and grassy knolls and brave children holding hands and promising one another to come back, one day, if they absolutely have to. it's a movie that understands that nostalgia doesn't only extend to good times, that horror doesn't mean you don't long for the period that prompted them, that looking back can feel like safety even when it isn't.

this isn't a tinyletter about anything really - it's barely a tinyletter about it chapter one - but i did think as i watched that movie that 2023 has been broadly terrible and i feel very little but dread for 2024, but all the same i love my brave friends and i love my brave wife and i love my cat who has never had anything to be brave about, and that's something.

the thing is that i never had friends later one like the ones i had when i was twelve is both true and, thank god, a total fallacy, because we may have been better or easier at some other former time, but the friends we make now are the ones we get to keep forever.

anyway, i hope you're having a good christmas, or an ok christmas, or just doing whatever you can. here are some more stray observations about the movie it chapter one:

- "we're supposed to be having fun. this isn't fun, this is scary and disgusting": stanley uris summing up 2023.

- it never ceases to amuse me that eddie - a dear canonical sweetheart in book form - is allowed to be the absolute dirt worst in this movie, for no other reason than that actor is extremely talented but also presumably has bad vibes and is unpleasant to be around.

- pennywise the dancing clown is a miracle of stage makeup, but did the filmmakers at any point consider the necessity of making him look even halfway capable of taking out something more aggressive than, say, an horsefly? i remember watching this movie once with a dear friend who watched the scene in which he is apparently stymied by a character running up some stairs to get away from him and then commented "so is he strictly a downstairs clown?"
 

- this isn't, i suppose, so relevant to the it universe specifically but every year that passes it becomes funnier that the makers of stranger things looked at canadian reprobate finn wolfhard and thought sure, that's a kid who isn't suddenly going to become a supermodel and mess up our storyboarding.
 

- your hair is winter fire, january embers, my heart burns there too is a very good poem, but ben does then proceed to eat out on that one - let's face it - haiku for the better part of the next thirty years.
 

- movie said bev is a lesbian and ben is i guess a lesbian too - won't be taking comments at this time.