Stand by Me, my #149 on Flickchart, was considered one of the great coming-of-age movies of the 1980s, possibly of all time. That means that, of course, a wide range of people in a wide range of age groups related to its observations on growing up, especially at the characters' fragile age of 12.
But I bet there were two groups of people for whom this effect was particularly profound:
1) Those who were 12 years old in 1959, when the movie is set;
2) Those who were 12 years old in 1986, when the movie came out.
That second group was me.
Stand by Me was released on August 22, 1986, and I did not turn 13 for another two months. And I definitely saw it in the theater, surely before my birthday, though it would have been possible not to since movies stayed in cinemas a lot longer back then.
It's hard to believe they didn't know what they had on their hands with this movie, and released it in the doldrums of summer. August has never been a great release date for a movie, even early August. And even though the summer blockbuster era was not, back then, what it is today, surely that logic still applied.
But the release date did also have a certain timeliness, as this movie also takes place at the end of the summer of 1959, just before its four 12-year-olds are going to junior high school and expecting their friend dynamic to change irrevocably. Labor Day, when the movie takes place, is about a week after the film's August 22nd release date.
Whether this was canny timing or just an accident, I'm sure the end-of-summer melancholy, combined with my age, meant that everything about the themes of Stand by Me really hit home with me. Because of the way my schools were set up, it was not actually a summer of transitions between schools for me, as I still had one more year of middle school left before going to high school. But perhaps, having already undergone this transition once, I was better capable of understanding what the characters were going through.
As I was rewatching this movie for the first time this century -- and I can't be absolutely certain I even watched it in the 1990s -- it occurred to me that this film has a similarity to the first film I wrote about back in February, The Princess Bride, which wouldn't come out until the next year.
On the surface? Nothing in common. But when I was writing about Bride, I was inclined to list just a bunch of great, memorable quotes, which I jotted down as I was watching -- reaching a total of 42 before all was said in done.
I don't think of Stand by Me in terms of memorable quotes, though there are those. The concept for the advertising campaign, as exemplified in the poster above, was based on quotes, which had a certain currency to them even if you hadn't seen the movie yet.
No, I think of it in terms of memorable scenes, which is sort of the same thing -- and which is also something we would credit to the screenwriter more than we would necessarily credit to the director. (To name names: Stand by Me was written by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans. I've never heard of them either, unlike Princess Bride scribe William Goldman.)
The common element between the two movies is obviously Reiner, and I think he excelled at making these things memorable through his approach to filmmaking. Coming in at only a scant 89 minutes, Stand by Me is nonetheless chockablock with three- to four-minute scenes where something happened that had quite a strong impression on me.
A list? Okay. Though it's not going to be in order.
1) The scene where the boys get leeches while going in the water.
2) The scene where the junkyard dog is sicced on their balls.
3) The scene where they have to outrun an approaching train.
4) The scene where Lardass prompts a contagious vomiting episode among those watching a pie-eating contest.
5) The scene where Kiefer Sutherland threatens to kill River Phoenix and you really believe he will, like killing somebody doesn't make a damn bit of difference to him.
I'm actually going to stop there, though I could continue. I'm going to stop there because I want to transition to a related point.
The thing that (almost) all of those scenes have in common is that they involve real danger for the characters. When I'd seen bands of kids together in the movies -- like, say, The Goonies the previous year, which also starred Corey Feldman -- I never felt like they were actually in danger. Don't get me wrong, I love The Goonies. But there's a difference between the peril in which those kids find themselves, and the danger that befalls the Stand by Me crew. There's a reason I use the word "peril" for one and "danger" for the other. Peril has no bite to it.
Watching Stand by Me, in 1986, was an experience of wondering if these kids would actually make it out of this movie alive. And there was good reason in the story for that fear, because there's death all over this movie. Wil Wheaton's Gordie has already lost his brother (The Sure Thing veteran John Cusack!) to a car accident, just four months before the events of this movie, and the actual point of their journey is to go see the dead body of a young man hit by a train -- who provides the title of the original Stephen King novella, The Body.
(I don't want to get sidetracked, but I will include a parenthetical thought here, one of my only reservations about Stand by Me. In what world do multiple people know about the existence of a dead body that has not even been found by the police yet? And in what world do they clash over who's going to find and report the dead body? That part of is a bit strange, though it does provide good thematic heft.)
So with death hanging over this movie at all points -- and one death that occurs later that we don't learn about until the end -- it was easy to worry about whether our characters would actually survive their interactions with rambunctious golden retrievers, leeches, trains, guns, knives, and even cigarettes. (Yep, it was definitely a grown-up thing for me to see other 12-year-olds smoking cigarettes, which was no part of my personal experience, and would never appear in a movie nowadays except maybe the most grungy indie movie you can imagine.)
But these fears of death are as much about the impending change in our lives -- both the characters and mine -- than any actual fears of death. In my privileged suburb of Boston, we didn't know anyone who had died, not even including any of my friends' parents. Heck, most of us even had all our grandparents. Death was very remote for us in August of 1986.
But change? We already sensed it was coming. We already knew that we weren't going to be friends with the same people in a few years that we were now. It was right around this time that I had a falling out with one of my friends who had been among my best friends to this point, and I'm ashamed to tell you that it wasn't me, it was him. I was the one who decided he wasn't cool anymore, and I actually ended up punching him in the forehead at one point.
It was a volatile emotional time, 12 years old, and that's another impression you get from Stand by Me. Every kid except Jerry O'Connell's Vern has an episode of crying in this movie, and it's not over something like getting hurt. It's over genuine emotional trauma from big, existential things. Gordie lost a brother. Chris is thought of by everyone as a criminal. Teddy's father is crazy and held his ear to a hot stove, permanently mangling it. Even the relatively stable Vern gets shit for being fat.
So it wasn't only the physical dangers that Stand by Me perfectly encapsulated, it was the emotional dangers. And they all got wrapped up into one intense viewing experience, the sort I'd never had before at age 12, the sort that played a role in maturing me beyond where I had been when I entered that theater.
So even though it may have been more than 35 years since I saw Stand by Me, and there was reason for me to wonder if it still belonged in my top 200 on Flickchart, I can confirm that this viewing brought back all the formative experiences I had when I first watched it. It brought back that feeling that the world was not, in fact, safe, and probably never had been.
This post was not a lot about Rob Reiner. But Reiner was definitely a key ingredient in bringing this altogether, getting incredible performances from child actors, effortlessly blending the comedy and the drama, and giving the whole thing the necessary epic sense to entrench it in all of our minds and hearts -- and not just those who were 12 in the summer of 1986.
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