#the hunt i can respect you know. its a primal fear and i guess social anxiety falls hdner thst

[poorquentyn]

Why don't the adult versions in IT(the book) not remember what happened to them as kids

Accidental double negative, I’m guessing :) as to why Bill, Bev, Ben, Eddie, Richie, and poor Stan don’t remember the deadlights until Mike, the one who stayed, calls them all to tell them the murders have started again and to ask them to come home like they promised they would, home to Derry, home to the killing floor, to fight It once more…there are several reasons why, which tie into the multiple interwoven narrative layers upon which It is built. 

The first is sheer trauma. As kids, the main characters were hunted by a shapeshifting monster preying on their worst fears. They faced death, again and again; they spent some of the most formative days of their lives mired in horror. As such, after escaping Derry, they shoved what they’d seen to the farthest corners of their brains, where it lay in wait. Part of what makes It work despite the bloated overreach and some truly terrible storytelling choices (the preteen gangbang being only the most infamous) is the focus throughout on traumatic remembering, on skeletons crawling out of closets. Our heroes basically have PTSD; they have repressed their memories of It in order to cope, and Mike’s calls bring them back to the light. All six of them suffer for it, but Stan suffers the most. He was both the most rigid and brittle of the Losers’ Club and the one who understood best the nature of what they were fighting (it’s later revealed that he was the only one of them who realized as a child that It was female and could bear progeny). Remembering that, being called back into that, is more than Stan can bear. It shatters his sense of a proper ordered universe, and he kills himself rather than face that. Throughout It, King emphasizes the primal power of the kind of “children as prey” fairytale on which he’s riffing. In this case, the monster in the basement is so traumatizing that Stan chooses the abyss. “It,” then, comes to signify that thing you’re trying to forget, that part of yourself and your past that you’ve buried, that thing, that it, forever in the back of your thoughts and the corner of your eye. I would go so far as to argue that King built It around drip-by-drip traumatic flashbacks in part to evoke what abuse victims go through: the agony of remembering, bit by bit, what was done to you when you were alone and afraid. 

The second layer is the strong sense that these six made an unconscious deal with the devil–they sold out their memories, and made out like gangbusters. Mike quietly notes that the six who left turned out far more financially and professionally successful than him, the one who stayed in Derry and (thus) held onto his memories. When he calls them, they’re forced to acknowledge how much of their adult lives flow from the childhood they can’t consciously remember. Bill, a popular horror author (and a transparent stand-in for King himself), realizes that all along he’s been writing about Georgie, his little brother who was killed by It in the book’s iconic opening scene. It’s only when Bev and Eddie are called home that they really face down the undeniable truth that they married their father and mother, respectively. (That’s pretty reductive in execution, but it fits the theme well.) Stan’s been riding a spooky wave of luck for years, recalling only deep deep down why that might be (“the turtle couldn’t help us”). Ben’s a hotshot young architect who shed all those pounds, but he also swiped the look of his controversial new communications tower from the design of the Derry Public Library, his refuge as a lonely child. He’s rich and famous and handsome, and yet he keeps flying west because he’s so afraid of the darkness catching up to him, not because he remembers what’s waiting in the shadows but because he doesn’t. After Mike calls Richie, the latter notes in a daze how terrifyingly easy it would be to tear up everything he’s accomplished since leaving Derry. They are so very fragile, these American dreams of ours, and they’re rooted in nightmares. 

Indeed, the third layer goes beyond the personal to the political. As King has a one-off character note early on, It is Derry. “Somehow, It got inside.” The monster has been feeding on and encouraging the town’s worst instincts for years, happily soaking in the violence whether it’s motivated by racism or homophobia or bloodthirsty revenge. This is where Mike, my favorite character in the book (by a notch above Stan the Man), takes center stage. As the town librarian, he devotes himself to unearthing Derry’s singularly ugly history, and it is he who discovers the pattern of It. Every generation, It emerges to take Its toll; Derry is its “private game reserve.” As Mike asks: “can an entire town be haunted?” This is something arguably even more traumatic for our heroes than the memories of It Itself: the terrible revelation that the adults were in on it. In this way, King ties the fall-into-knowledge central to stories about the dark side of small-town Americana (per Blue Velvet: “I’m seeing something that was always hidden”) into his beloved monster-movie pulp. 

Finally, we get to what the titular entity actually is: a cosmic predator from beyond spacetime, thirsting for meat flavored with fear, using glamours to project images of Itself as whatever Its victims fear most. It’s easy to mock such LSD-soaked Lovecraftian lore as overblown, and it definitely is that. But it resonates with all those other layers. Lovecraftian horror drives mortals mad, which dovetails with the trauma and repression our heroes undergo. The idea of an ancient monster that everyone knows is there but no one wants to talk about, even as it inflicts its wounds on the next generation, is an apt metaphor for all variety of social ills, many of which King addresses directly. There are multiple kinds of horror struggling for the spotlight in It, from abuse to bigotry to the Eater of Worlds variety. What makes the book interesting–if also more than a little silly–is the author’s insistence that all these kinds of horror are linked. That’s why our heroes can’t remember It: not only because the movie monster turned out to be real, but because It was far worse than the movies suggested, and It’s wearing your father’s face.