Age of Innocents

Stand by Me is a movie full of universal truths about boys: jokes about mothers never get old, barf is endlessly fascinating, the best part about being outside is getting dirty and not caring, and no one can understand you like the other boys your age understand you. When the movie was released in 1986, I was around the same age as the characters in Rob Reiner’s adaptation of the Stephen King novella The Body. Although Stand by Me is set during the era of my father’s childhood (the '50s), I related to the film completely.

At around that age, there was a group of four of us school friends that would hang out all the time, sleep over at each others’ houses, rip around on our BMX bikes and make stupid jokes of the variety we’d never dare utter around our parents. Although we never went on a quest for a dead body or got covered in swamp leeches, we did go exploring in Edmonton’s river valley and come back mosquito-bitten and filthy. We never had an awesome treehouse, in which one could only enter with a secret knock, but we built forts and drew secret plans for traps and weapons we could employ to protect the sanctity of our sanctuary. And, of course, bullies were a seemingly constant threat – in fact, my nose is still a bit crooked from a rock I took to the face when I was about eleven, courtesy of an older kid with great aim.

Stand by Me was the first and probably only film that I saw at that age that I felt spoke to my life. Add in some highly quotable dialogue (“I don't shut up, I grow up; and when I look at you, I throw up!” “And then your mom goes around the corner and licks it up!”), a little action (the white knuckle train trestle scene) and the greatest barf sequence ever spewed across the screen, and the film had it all.

I loved the movie. I had the soundtrack (on cassette, the way it was meant to be heard) and as soon as it hit video, my family endured me watching the pie-eating contest puke-a-thon several times in slow-motion (ha-ha-ha – so good!).

I recently snagged the Stand by Me DVD in a sale bin for about $6, which was about what I wanted to spend to see the movie again. With typical cynicism, I thought I’d see it two-plus decades later and write it off as a manipulative, cheezoid Hollywood star vehicle. It features River Phoenix (Chris), Wil Wheaton (Gordie) and Jerry O’Connell (Vern), who became stars because of it, and it’s full of actors who were already established at the time, such as Corey Feldman (Teddy), Richard Dreyfuss, Kiefer Sutherland and John Cusack (he plays Gordie’s older brother in the flashbacks – yep, like you, I’d totally forgotten about that).

To my surprise, I thought the film was even better two decades later. The rite of passage period piece really is timeless and the characters still ring true.

This time I took notice of how completely realized the performances are from the kids – all the camaraderie, insecurity, posturing and vulnerability of boys that age is there. There’s a 35-minute doc on the DVD, called Walking the Tracks: The Summer of Stand by Me, that includes all of the major performers (minus Phoenix, who died of a drug overdose in 1993), Reiner and Stephen King. It gave me a sense of a very successful collaboration between a writer who has crafted a story very close to his own experiences growing up (for example, the leeches scene is very close to an experience King had as a boy), a director who was able to make the writer’s journey visually epic yet narratively intimate by spending a lot of time working with his actors (Reiner was famous for playing “Meathead” on Archie Bunker before he found fame as a director), and actors who were naturals (O’Connell, for example, had never acted professionally prior to the film).

In retrospect, Stand by Me hits closer to home for me than the average viewer in my demographic. I couldn’t help but compare the four characters in the movie to my aforementioned group of four friends. We weren’t the same mix of personalities, but there were shades of similarity. There was the tougher, outdoorsy one who was maturing a little bit more quickly than the rest of us physically, a hyperactive daredevil who – yes – loved to make the rest of flinch and give us shots, the bookish one who even had a bowl cut and was carrying around anger stemming from his parents separation, and I was the goofier, chubby one, although mercifully not sack-of-hammers dumb (and I guess being the writer inches me out of Vern territory and into Gordie Land – whew!).

Much like in the film, we grew apart after entering junior high (grades seven to nine, for those with a different provincial system), and one of us died some years later. A little while after high school finished, the daredevil dropped acid and ran right through the window of his fourteenth floor apartment. Sounds like something out of a movie, but it’s true.

Stand by Me is a loss of innocence story, as well, for main character Gordie, who essentially starts the journey to manhood when he finally stares death in the face via the broken body of Ray Brower, and then stands up to Ace (Sutherland) and his gang. I never pointed a gun at a knife-wielding bully, but a year after the movie was released my dad was killed in a car accident. As you’d expect, that childhood innocence – already on its way out – was left reeling and choking in the dust. The next day, I wanted – no, needed – to go to my best friend’s house. He was the tougher, outdoorsy one of the group, and I just had to spend time with someone who wasn't trying to coddle me. I think we even managed to joke around for a while that afternoon, and now I realize that it must've been friggin' difficult for him to deal with the situation, yet he didn't let on. He just  acted like the same true blue friend I'd known for years.

That memory became sharp again when I watched the scene at the end of Stand by Me between Gordie and Chris, where Gordie confronts the death of his brother as his friend helps him through it. It was difficult to sit through, and reminded me again just how honest the movie is in the way it depicts boys dealing with some heavy stuff.

So if you can find a film that really gets inside of you and pushes those buttons you keep hidden far away from the outside world, embrace it. Find those rare stories that speak to you on a deeper level, and give your irony a rest for while. Lo and behold, sometimes even a blockbuster Hollywood movie can dig at a deeper reality. Once in a while, anyhow.

Or just revisit Stand by Me so you can watch the pie eating contest again in slow-motion. That rules too.

-Dave Alexander