‘Stand by Me’ at 40: Rob Reiner’s bittersweet portrait of childhood memory

 

It's rare to find a movie as special as Stand By Me , one that hits all the right notes in stirring up emotion without coming across too sentimental or corny.

With Rob Reiner in charge of direction, though, there was never any risk of Stephen King's story becoming anything less than a heartfelt yet unflinching portrait of adolescence, one bound to leave a lasting impact on its viewers.

I remember first watching Stand By Me one lazy weekend afternoon as a teenager, perhaps just a few years older than the boys in the film. When the adult Gordie, played by Richard Dreyfuss, revealed that Chris, the character played by River Phoenix , had been stabbed in the neck as an adult, I began to tear up.

After witnessing these four young boys sticking together, bound by a mutual morbid curiosity to find the corpse of a boy their own age, it was crushing to discover that, as adults, neither of them was still friends, and even worse, one had been senselessly killed.

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?” says Gordie, as he finishes up his memoir. When I look back now, a decade on from when I first watched the film, these words aren't necessarily relatable in the same sense – I much prefer the friends I've made in adulthood to the ones I had when I was 12 – yet I can't help but think back on all of those friendships that formed out of the innocence of childhood and abruptly ended for no reason at all.

“It happens sometimes, friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant,” he says. It makes me think of those friends who were like sisters to me, an only child, who I shared moments of burgeoning curiosity with by turning their gardens into playgrounds, climbing on trees and swinging on gates, clambering through bushes and eating sweets until we were sick. 

We'd spray our hair with flashes of pink, use the toilet in front of each other, no embarrassment in our bones, and we'd sing loudly as we tried on clothes and imitated pop stars. Just like the (considerably more brutal) summer that the boys experienced in Stand By Me , these tender moments of exploration, usually stretched out over long days of wandering around the village during the six-week holidays, formed our coming-of-age.

How strange, then, to come apart from these people as adults. To drift away and only see each other occasionally, or in some instances, to never see them again. Stand By Me perfectly encapsulates that odd feeling of childhood nostalgia that can both amuse and haunt our memories. We become aware of how vital these friendships were in our own development, how they were instrumental in teaching us about ourselves, only for them to become a relic of the past that, no matter how hard we try, we can’t fully grasp.

The reveal of Chris’ death at the end of the film isn’t simply upsetting because a character we’ve spent the film with has died – and it’s not just because we know that just seven years later, Phoenix would tragically die, too – but rather, this shocking information is a bittersweet reminder of everyone who shaped our own childhoods. There are people out there who once meant so much to us, and now they could be strangers, or they could be dead. Life is cruel, and our strong connections with others are what make it all worthwhile. 

Stand by Me, then, is a testament to those transformative friendships that live buried deep in our memory and made us into who we are, whether they were joyful or slightly more testing. Reiner delivered a profound image of childhood where innocence is destroyed yet, in a way, it can be upheld in the form of a memory, those gentle moments of bonding with others a salve for life’s more bitter revelations.