The nature of adapting a 1000+ page book into..anything other than a 1000+ page book is such that cutting a large portion of the source material is unavoidable-HOWEVER the route that It ch2 took, choosing to flatten each character into one specific and exaggerated trait, was maybe one of the WORST ways they could have gone about it. It’s true that this does create a believable cheat code to surface level character development, but going that route required a LOT of backtracking from genuine development that was displayed in the first movie. And I could say this about ANY of the characters, because I do think that all of them bar Bill were truly done a disservice, BUT specifically the way Eddie’s character is handled in ch2 truly makes me bananas.
Again, I GET how hard it is to take a fucking behemoth like It and turn it into something palatable for a mainstream audience that isn’t literally 10 hours long, but they cut so much of Eddie’s character from the book. And I see people portraying Eddie as like. This prickly asshole who is just kind of…mean and grumpy all the time and very stingy with his affection. Which, to be fair, is mostly how he’s portrayed in the movies. I can’t blame anyone for that given that a lot of people have only seen the movies, it just sucks because Eddie’s characterization in the book is SO much more than that. Eddie LOVES his friends, and I just really, really do not think this comes through in the movies enough. Yeah, he ribs them and banters and yeah he’s loud and hyperactive and high-strung, but he also has quotes like this one:
Which is genuinely one of my favorite quotes of all time! And he has SO many quotes like that. Eddie has pages and pages of inner monologue about how much he loves his friends. He is, in every sense of the word, a Lover. That image of his cast would be SO much more evocative if they’d continued with that characterization! I think JDG hit the nail on the head in this part of Eddie’s letter:
(If this is hard to read, it reads “I would die for my friends. They are my everything.)
One of the main things about Eddie’s character that is SO important to me is that he endured YEARS of abuse-he knows the world is cruel. He’s been exposed to that cruelty for literally his entire life! And he comes out on the other end just as soft, and loving, and kind as before. He’s not naive, he’s not dumb, he knows how the world works! He’s always known-
But he CHOOSES to be loving, he CHOOSES to be kind, he CHOOSES to be willing to do anything for his friends, right up to and including laying down his life for them. But they erased so much of this from his character, and in doing so detracted a LOT of the payoff of his final sacrifice. So, okay. They needed to make it effective and moving anyway. And they had to work with what they had at that point. So they went the “Oh He’s Not a Coward, Actually!” route.
Obviously they had to make Eddie’s death a final show of bravery in order to get any semblance of the emotional payoff that they were going for, and the natural lead up to that is for him to be portrayed as…not brave. But he’s NOT weak, he’s never been weak! He was GENUINELY one of the strongest, fiercest, bravest kids in the first movie! 13 year old Eddie Kaspbrak jumped into a creek to have easier access to the bullies he was throwing rocks at because they said something about a girl he barely knew!! 13 year old Eddie Kaspbrak got the call that his friends were in trouble, confronted his abusive mother on years and years of systematic control and manipulation, and just DIPPED on out of there to go save his friends. With one arm! He hung up, yelled at his mom, and literally jumped off the porch because “my friends need me.” 13 year old Eddie Kaspbrak climbed down a well with one arm, was once again confronted with his biggest fear, and literally fucking kicked the ancient entity that just threw up on him in the fucking face anyway! To quote the book again,
Eddie grew up in an environment that was NOTHING but suffocating, all-consuming fear and paranoia, but even so he spent his entire life ACTIVELY fighting that. Eddie has NEVER been anything but brave and ready to die for his friends at any given moment! And okay, maybe I could buy the idea that years of emotional abuse contributed to that regression, had Eddie’s entire storyline NOT been reduced to a joke. But it was! It was, and therefore ANY possible emotional payoff that they could have ostensibly played off of at this point was reduced to a moment of comedic relief. Including his literal death! His ACTUAL last words were a cheap joke and I will NEVER be over that fact.
I could genuinely go on about this for probably a hundred pages, but what it boils down to is this. The original source material for It is…a lot. And a lot of it is profoundly and unequivocally just Not Good. But, for me at least, the parts that were good, the parts that struck me so much that I’ve been on about these characters for more than 3 years now, is just that- the characters. The genuine depth that is afforded to these characters has literally carved a permanent place in my heart for this story. There’s all these little gold mines of heartfelt portrayals of friendship, and emotional sensitivity, and love. It’s just…surrounded by unnecessary reminders that Women Have Boobs Actually.
And when they plopped this source material on the cutting board to trim it up for a screen adaptation, they did the equivalent of like. Spending forever cutting up a pomegranate and scooping out all the seeds and then throwing them away and serving the outer rinds instead. There is SO much filler in that book that is just not necessary, and if they’d spent less screen time focusing on, I dunno, Bill and Bev’s misinterpreted residual feelings from childhood crushes and more on genuine characterization, it would be so much more compelling to me. And in the end, if Eddie HAD to die, it would have been MUCH more palatable had they actually put effort into expanding upon his character instead of making him ½ of the comedic relief duo even as he was dying.
Reading Eddie’s death SUCKED. Like It Sucked! But it WAS emotionally compelling to me, because it expanded upon previous characterization and it finished up his arc in a way that. Okay, obviously wasn’t satisfying in the slightest, but at least made sense? Like here’s his monologue right as it’s happening:
And this is something that simply does not translate into the movie WHATSOEVER, because Eddie’s own perception of himself, of his flaws and impurities aren’t even TOUCHED on. I won’t even go into the amount of gay coding that was erased from his character, that’s been expanded upon enough and it honestly just makes me incredibly angry, but even after removing THAT lens from this passage it’s an important insight into his character. It creates an emotional payoff that couldn’t possibly be replicated in the movie, even if they HAD given him his actual last lines (everybody knows them, I just need to include them anyway because this comparison makes me furiously angry):
But they didn’t even give him THAT, they gave him another joke! Another moment of. Whatever they were going for there. They erased SO much of the tenderness and genuine love and emotion that Eddie’s character is so intrinsically tied into that they couldn’t even give him that moment of emotional reflection as he DIED! This is literally my supervillain origin story.
This is incredibly long and has somehow morphed into another long-winded TED Talk by Me, entitled Why I Love Eddie Kaspbrak (And Why You Should To!) BUT tl;dr It Chapter 2 put too much effort into reinforcing the rigid characterization that they reduced Eddie to rather than spending it developing him as a person, and as a result his most compelling traits were completely neglected; doing so made it almost impossible to consume his character’s ending with anything but anger and dissatisfaction.
Tune in next time for the next episode of Turn On Your Location Andy Muschietti, I Just Want To Talk, starring me!
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