STAND BY ME

by Kevin Koehler

Twelve-year-old boys say "fuck."  They also say "shit," "shithead," "tits," "pussy," "ass," lardass," and "asshole."  They are vulgar.  They ridicule the imagined promiscuity/libertine sexual habits of each others' mothers, even if they could describe a vagina about as well as they could Superstring Theory.  A few of them smoke, especially if the year is 1959 when a twelve-year-old with a cigarette in his mouth wasn't acceptable, per se, but neither was it the scarlet letter of absolute, irredeemable delinquency.  Others steal.  Some are hit by trains and die.

Ray Brower was hit by a train.  He died, the corpse lying undiscovered in the wilderness outside Castle Rock, Oregon (this is a Stephen King adaptation, after all - of his short story "The Body").  While the town sends out search parties, only three people know the body's true location: two local hoods and Vern (Jerry O'Connell), a younger brother given to overeating and eavesdropping.  He enlists his friends Gordie (Wil Wheaton), Chris (River Phoenix), and Teddy (Corey Feldman) to retrieve Brower's body and inform the authorities, bringing this coterie of misfits celebrity and acclaim.

In Rob Reiner's Stand by Me, Ray Brower's body serves largely as a MacGuffin, a plot device with little actual story relevance; it's one of a number of blunders in a film that has a lot to like about it, but we'll get around to that in a moment.  Narrated by Gordie's elder self (Richard Dreyfuss), the boys follow the train tracks into the woods (verily, into themselves), exorcising their own demons en route.  There's also some adolescent hijinks along the way (leeches on penises, extended discussions of whether Goofy is a dog and the eminence of cherry-flavored Pez), Gordie talks about his writing aspirations, much crying is had, and we're treated to Reiner/King's seeming postulation (a sort of bizarro Lord of the Flies) that the world would be a much better place if it were run by children.  Adults (and their younger comrades-in-training, teenagers) are uniformly loathsome, spoiling the Garden of Boyhood with their egoism and physical/emotional sadism.   They mock the mental illness of combat veterans, steal milk money, and burn their kids' ears off.  They fix pie-eating contests (in a memorable scene that serves as inadvertent porn for emetophiliacs).  They threaten children with knives.  They don't care if anyone ever finds Ray Brower's dead body.  The obvious exception here is Gordie's saintly brother, Denny (John Cusack).  Naturally, he is martyred for his uncharacteristic benevolence.

It all might be easier to swallow if the driving force behind the narrative - the quest for Ray Brower's body - didn't have so little actual resonance.  "At the time I didn't know why I needed to see that body so badly" says future Gordie.  "Even if no one had followed me, I would have gone on alone."  I'm not sure I know why, either, as the purpose of their journey is forgotten about for long stretches; there is little urgency, and likewise, little pathos.  Yes, Gordie's brother died.  I get it.  He misses him.  He never cried at the funeral.  But is it really his own feelings that are unresolved or those of his parents, who maintain Denny's room like a shrine and treat Gordie as though the wrong brother died?  Or Chris, who realizes he isn't such a bad kid even though every asshole adult treats him like one?  Is he the one in desperate need of self-reflection? 

"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve," writes the narrator Gordie, all grown up and doing what most authors end up doing - waxing nostalgic over their lost youths.  "Jesus, does anyone?"  I imagine there are, but the absolutism is telling: I'm at pains to think of a more cynical declaration, coming as it does on the heels of yet another of Stand by Me's many martyrdoms.  It's not just innocence but human decency and the ability to connect with others that dies with youth.  In the King short story on which the film is based (but not in the adaptation; strange, as thematically it fits like hand in glove), the villainous Ace Merrill (Kiefer Sutherland) is punished for his gross misconduct by living, condemned to the irrelevancy and loneliness that comes with middle age.  Yet aren't these prelapsian characterizations of childhood as naive a portrait as the ones Stand By Me attempts to deconstruct?  Children can be cruel, same as the rest of us, sometimes more so; the notion of growing up as a corrupting influence rather than a civilizing one sits uncomfortably, even if in civilization you can't share a peaceful moment with a wild deer.

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