An Ode to the Gleeful Terror of Tim Curry’s Pennywise
Tim Curry, who died this week at 80, will probably always be best known for his performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and not unreasonably. With his snug corset and unsubtle make-up and minuscule shorts to which are fastened fishnet stockings, Curry’s kooky scientist with a penchant for brewing male lovers in his lab is one of pop-culture’s unlikely icons. Frank-N-Furter exists in the gap between the counter culture and punk, the child of classic musicals and 1930s B-movies. The performance is daringly weird, perverse and outlandish, seductively charming, and, for all the flamboyance, Curry never veers out of control, never takes it too far. With his gender-defying garb and the way he gleefully flaunts his sexuality, Frank-N-Furter is an inimitable figure, unburdened by shame. And this strange, beseeching man who proudly eschews the mainstream’s prissy morals isn’t an outcast: he rules over a large, diverse assembly of hired help and acolytes who seem, largely, to like him. In any case, they’re content enough spontaneously break into carefully choreographed musical numbers. He’s a mad scientist, but Curry plays him as something more interesting, something weirder, than a villain. Curry’s genius is that he shows us how fun and liberating embracing the weird can be. He admires how the Transylvanian just acts like himself. But my favorite Tim Curry performance will always be Pennywise, the clown in Tommy Lee Wallace’s 1990 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s It, which, compared to Andy Muschietti’s mega popular pair of films, is modest, even a little lame. The miniseries is only three hours long, so Wallace had to heavily truncate King’s gargantuan tome, curtailing and expunging scenes and entire characters, as well as toning things down to fit broadcast rules. But Wallace uses this hindrance as inspiration for creative ways of translating King’s writing to the small screen. You can see it from the very beginning. The first chapter of the novel is one of the scariest things King has ever written. It’s smartly structured, the details with which he describes the scene are astute and intense, the prose is lovely and melancholy and mostly free of the sloppy redundancies and annoying colloquial tics that King loves a little too much, the two young brothers are efficiently and empathetically fleshed out so we are quickly invested in them, and when the horror, which he portends, does arrive, it’s not just shocking, but tragic. The miniseries is basically the same. It’s a rainy day, and a young boy wearing a yellow raincoat chases a boat made of newspaper floating down a gutter alive with flowing rain. The boat falls into a sewer, and, as the boy goes to retrieve it, a face appears out of darkness—a clown, with spotless, uncanny white skin, a bulbous red nose, and untamed red hair. In his Bronx accent, he talks affably to the boy, magnanimously returning his boat and asking him to play. Soon enough, he tears the boy’s arm off and leaves him to die in the gutter. In the miniseries, this is implied, following the decree of network TV standards circa 1990, but it’s still scary because Curry almost convinces us that he is a nice clown, a friend, even though he is lurking in a sewer. When his insidious nature is revealed, the change in tone and his face gone malformed, the scene feels dynamic in a way that doesn’t require gore or intricate special effects. Here and throughout the film, we see how he has fun betraying a child’s trust and ruining his innocence, which is maybe an even more profound violence than dismemberment. The shape-shifting eldritch entity of mysterious origins relishes torturing children. He takes many forms, but likes being a clown the best. It’s a nasty irony. As King writes, “The fears of children could often be summoned up in a single face… and if bait were needed, why, what child did not love a clown?” “The clown may be the source of mirth, but—who shall make the clown laugh?” Angela Carter wrote in Nights at the Circus. Pennywise, naturally, makes himself laugh. While Muschietti’s films are far more faithful translations of King’s opus narratively, having the freedom of an R rating, a big budget, and twice as much time as the miniseries to tell the story, they rely on generic creepy imagery and ostentatious scare tactics, expensive banality. Bill Skarsgård plays Pennywise with relentless menace. There is little nuance and few surprises. Compare Curry’s Pennywise to Bill Skarsgård’s: Skarsgård looks and sounds unequivocally evil from the beginning, whereas Curry actually has the mannerisms of a clown you might find at a kid’s backyard birthday party. That juxtaposition makes him scary and exciting. Curry knew that in order to scare kids, he first has to appeal to them, inveigle them with his deceitful promise of friendship, earn their trust with kindness, all smiles, and speak to them in playful words—speak their own language. As Lovecraft says in “The Outsider,” “Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.” This may be why as adults, the Losers Club forget their childhood horrors: so they can save their own lives. If you can’t get your innocence back, maybe you can at least rid yourself of the memory of what took it from you. And, unlike Bill Skarsgård’s, Curry’s Pennywise is having fun. His taunts and emotional torture are unsettling yet also profane fun because he delivers them in the tone of a friend busting your chops. When he appears in the library, invisible to all but our lead character, he has a hoot practicing his standup. “The clown may be the source of mirth, but—who shall make the clown laugh?” Angela Carter wrote in Nights at the Circus. Pennywise, naturally, makes himself laugh. The image of him, his attire a blasphemous betrayal of the wholesome fun a clown costume promises, and with vibrant, colorful balloons in his hand, lingers in our minds for a long time. He appears on screen for less than 20 minutes, yet it feels like he is always there. In his absence, we still sense his danger. He is all the characters think about. We can contrast Curry’s clown to another supernatural villain he played, Darkness in Legend, mythic under the prosthetics, delivering in his deep demonic voice cryptic proclamations. And yet, Darkness has a romantic side, too: he is attracted to the innocence of a beautiful young woman, and wants to marry her. (Though he uses dark magic to woo her, which to him is an acceptable declaration of love.) When he is vanquished at the end, he reminds Tom Cruise’s hero that evil lurks in all living things, so while his corporeal presence may die, his essence lives on. Pennywise—or rather, It—has terrorized the small simple town of Derry, Maine for who knows how long, generation after generation born and dead as he remains lurking in nightmares, manipulating his victims, making real their deepest fears because he knows them so well. King’s best writing has an earnest intimacy. What makes him one of the great writers of adolescents is the respect with which he portrays the kids’ vulnerable moments, their hopes, their shame, their fears. Too often, horror has gradually come to think that if a film wants to be taken seriously, its bad guys, however wicked, however sadistic, man or monster, whatever their motivation (if they even have one), should be austere. Humor is unbecoming. Tim Curry had no such delusions; he understood that scary can be fun, and fun can provoke fear. When Pennywise cracks a joke, the contrast of his antics with the scary stuff can be more impactful, have more personality, than just scare after scare. It’s a skill to control tone and tempo and cadence. And when Pennywise enjoys the horror he evokes, his laugh can perturb more deeply and last more clearly in your memory than a simple jumpscare or spilled blood. You don’t forget Pennywise telling a kid, “Kiss me, fat boy!” and neither does the kid, who is embarrassed by his weight, gets teased about it; years later, as a slender, successful adult, when the long-buried memories of Derry come back, it’s that quip and the clown’s guffaw he remembers.
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