Stand By Me still resonates years later
There’s no other move like it. It’s an eighties flick about kids in the 1950s that somehow resonates with a guy like me who came of age in 1990s. I’m talking about
the 1985 classic based on a Stephen King novel and starring River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell.
I had a chance to rewatch this movie during this past rainy Saturday, and it still engages me like it did the first time I saw it when I was a kid. There’s something almost magical about this film for me; it reminds me of my adolescence even though it comes from the perspective of someone my parents’ age. No matter how many times I watch it, the four main characters are always freshly entertaining to me, as if I’m seeing a movie that just came out. Their constant exchange of juvenile jabs and gross-out humor seems like it was written by someone who was listening to me and my friends talk at that age. If you were never an adolescent boy, you will find their behavior vulgar and rude — which, of course, it is — but that’s what life is often like when you’re not a boy but not yet a man.
The adventure the four young kids go on — to find the dead body of a boy killed by a train in a remote section of woods — is the perfect setup for a coming-of-age movie. The gang of four finds themselves tested by everything from blood-sucking leeches to a knife-wielding hoodlum, and they survive it all by helping each other out when they most need it. Even though they are rarely nice to each other, and often call themselves the worst names, they still love each other in a rough-and-tumble sort of way.
My wife remarked on how much the main character, Gordie Lachance (played by Wheaton) looks like photos of me as a kid. It’s true. I was as skinny and awkward-looking as him at that age; my out-of-proportion head seemed to bobble on a stick-thin body. The similarities go beyond just looks, however. Just like Gordie, I was identified early on as someone who was “good at writing stories.” It can be kind of a dubious distinction at that age, when all of the glory seems to go to boys who show promise in sports or other forms of competition. Luckily, if you’re good at translating the written word into out-loud stories, you can at least entertain your friends around a campfire (Gordie does this with an infamous story about a pie-eating contest).
The other big reason I love the movie is the theme of coping with death while in the prime of life. The entire story is steeped in the harsh reality that youth does not guarantee invincibility. All of the action is driven by a quest to find the body of Ray Brower, a kid who was just out picking blueberries when his life was cut short by a train — a potent symbol of mortality that shows up again and again throughout the movie. One of the more memorable scenes is when the four main characters get caught on a bridge with the locomotive hurdling toward them. It’s a reminder that life is never completely safe, even when you’re immersed in the freedom and innocence of youth.
Fortunately, I was mostly well-insulated from this kind of reality during my childhood. Still, I’ll never forget my eight-year-old classmate, Shawn Pletan, who got off the school bus one day and was struck and killed by a man involved in a high-speed chase with the police. Even though I didn’t know him well, I felt the loss deeply.
Movies like
help me and others process the unforgiving realities of life. We need more films like that to be made.
OUT FOR A WALK
KEVIN O’BRIEN
EDITOR
