IT and XTC’s “Dear God”

When you’re a kid, parents are like God. And awful parents are like Old Testament God: loyalty above morality.

It’s my way or the highway (to hell).

Andy Muschietti’s 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s It strikes this note, and it knows when to use the right music to set the tone. And though the tone at times sounds a bit like Stranger Things-level nostalgia, the soundtrack choices are anything but. With cuts from The Cult, New Kids on the Block, Young MC, and Anthrax, Muschietti makes conscious decisions to use music to help tell the story – not to trigger winks and elbow nudges from the audience.

The real centrepiece of It in soundtrack and story is when XTC’s “Dear God” plays over montage. The song, written by Andy Partridge, was originally left off the 1986 album Skylarking because the singer thought its anti-religious subject matter would cause too much trouble for him and the band. “Dear God” instead shipped to the United States as a b-side but quickly became a common request in radio stations in America. Not to say that one of the world’s most bible-thumping nations didn’t have objections to it: a Florida station received a bomb threat for playing the song. On the other hand, a high school student in New York state held a secretary at knife point, demanding the song play over the school’s PA system.

In the film, the representatives of the township signed a charter to create Derry. But of the 91 signatures on the charter, all of those people later disappeared. You get the sense the townspeople signed a pact with the Devil, and sure enough, Pennywise the clown appears in an artist’s rendering of the historic signing. It’s small-town conspiracy feels a little like Hot Fuzz where a few townspeople go to great lengths to preserve their idyllic small-town bubble indefinitely. That’s Derry’s origin story: that the very people who claimed authority over the town and its people baked into its DNA a sin that would seemingly forever haunt Derry’s residents. The sins of the parents passed on to the children. During the events of the film (based in 1988-89), Derry has a death and disappearance rate six times the national average, and it’s worse in the case of kids.

The XTC song and music video begin with a young boy singing the first verse, followed by Partridge. The boy’s inclusion tells us that children can early on adopt a kind of wearied cynicism when their authority figures let them down. When the image of the boy in the music video transitions to Partridge, we wonder if the same mistakes in history will be repeated. Pennywise returns to Derry every 27 years, so the fear the kids face in 1989 will reappear in the year 2016 when they’re in their early 40s.

Sings the boy in verse one:

Dear God, hope you got the letter and
I pray you can make it better down here
I don’t mean a big reduction in the price of beer
But all the people that you made in your image
See them starving on their feet
Cause they don’t get enough to eat from God
I can’t believe in you

The kids in It, must face Pennywise who is responsible for the deaths and disappearances. But he is, as the kids discover on their own, not real but an embodiment of their fears, and of the town’s compromise written into the history of Derry itself. Spliced alongside horror-movie scares with Pennywise are even more frightful scenes between the kids and their abusive and repressed parents. One boy’s parents have given up on finding their missing son, another obsessively shelters her son from any infection and disease, another father is sexually abusive of his daughter. One parent simply puts too much pressure and expectations on his son, and the rest of the adults in the film are either neglectful or unhelpful.

Pennywise manifests in different ways for each character that is unique to their own relationship with their parents, not unlike the way a nightmare functions. These kids are crying out for protection and guidance and wisdom and are instead left to fend for themselves against fear itself.

When the pressure becomes almost unbearable at the end of the second act, the group of protagonists – who have been able to defend themselves to this point because of their ability to stick together – relent and decide to go their separate ways. They’ve been bullied by Pennywise to the point where they’re considering doing what everyone in Derry does – what all the adults in Derry do – they’re going to forget, repress, and accept that fear will dominate their town and their lives. That’s when “Dear God” plays.

A montage shows the kids making the compromises they didn’t ever want to make: they grow up, which to them means giving up. Bill stops looking for his missing brother while Mike resigns himself to life on the family farm. Of course in the end they choose not to give in to the town’s mentality, but this scene while “Dear God” plays shows how easy and tempting it is for them to do so.

The song is anti-authority, God or no, so Partridge’s lyrics seem to be used in It as a message of protest from the kids to their parents. But it’s also a startling realization for the kids that life is scary and painful and unfair and that no one is looking after them.

Sings Partridge in the song’s climax:

You’re always letting us humans down
The wars you bring, the babes you drown
Those lost at sea and never found
And it’s the same the whole world ‘round

And as Partridge ends his rant with “If there’s one thing I don’t believe in,” the song and music video switches back to the young boy who began the song, and the boy finishes the thought with, “It’s you, dear God.”

The kids resolve to help each other and overcome Pennywise. They save lives, and maybe even erase the clown from Derry for good. But they also won’t resign themselves to forgetting the sins of Derry’s past. They’ll return with the knowledge that they can break the pattern.

Adulthood and compromise and repression and fear won’t dominate them like it did the generation before. They’ll remember the mistakes in history and not repeat them. Because performing a moral right is more important than loyalty to any one parent, town, or ideology.

by @JoePack