Lately, it seems like every other week is witness to one of my personal pop-cultural touchstones achieving some landmark anniversary. Rick Springfield’s Working Class Dog album, the one that included his signature song “Jessie’s Girl,” had its 30th birthday on February 24. Raiders of the Lost Ark also turned 30 back in June, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off reached its silver anniversary the day before Raiders. But somehow none of those tidbits surprised me or made me feel quite as wistful — not to mention old — as the news that this past Monday, August 8, marked 25 years since the release of the film Stand by Me.
The depth of my reaction surprised me, frankly, because if you were to ask me to compile a list of my all-time favorite movies — a list very much like this one, for example — Stand by Me would definitely be included among them, but probably wouldn’t rank very highly. (In fact, it comes in at only number 41 on that list, because that’s the more or less the order in which I thought of it as I was dredging up titles. Obviously, it’s not in the forefront of my brain.) I’m not saying it’s not a great movie. It is, in my opinion, and it’s a damn shame they don’t often make films like it anymore, i.e., mainstream pictures that are modestly budgeted and appear to have small ambitions but end up saying a lot while still being immensely entertaining. For some reason, however, this film occupies a relatively smaller plot of my mental landscape than something like, say, Raiders. I haven’t watched it a hundred or more times, and I don’t have it memorized as I do so many others. I have no particular memories of the first time I saw it. In fact, I have no memory of the first time I saw it, which is kind of odd for me when it comes to these things. (By way of contrast, I can still tell you the circumstances of my first viewing of Tron. It was with my mom at the long-departed Regency Theater, near the mouth of Parley’s Canyon, and I saw one of our local TV newspeople in the restroom. I was all of 12 at the time.) My first viewing of Stand by Me was probably on home video — by which I mean those clunky, archaic videocassette things you may have heard of — and it was likely a year or two after it was in the theaters, because that’s how the release schedules used to work, kids. But I really don’t know.
It occurs to me that maybe the film’s relative lack of prominence in my memory is the reason behind my strong “oh my god, that can’t be!” reaction to its anniversary. Because I don’t have strong memories of my first experience with it, I don’t associate it with any given period in my life. Star Wars and Raiders are films from my childhood; Ferris Bueller is locked firmly to my senior year of high school. Dances with Wolves and a whole raft of others are from my college years, which overlapped the period I worked for the multiplex. But Stand by Me is timeless for me, both in the usual sense that it remains as relevant as ever, and also because it just seems to have always been around. Learning that it is, in fact, a specific number of years old, and quite a few years at that… well, it’s just driven home how advanced my own years are becoming, I guess.
Like I said, though, it’s a great movie no matter where it falls on some silly, arbitrary list. On the surface, it appears to be a simple, nostalgic little coming-of-age story set in a more innocent time. And it is that. But it also has a lot to say about friendship and courage and self-image and how people and events can alter the course of your life and stay with you even if you’re not aware they’re still there, until something happens that yanks them back into the light and floors you with the unexpected intensity of emotions you never imagined were still there. And the thing that makes Stand by Me so great is that these points are made subtly, during a story that slowly builds to a devastating conclusion (assuming you don’t already know how it ends). Just writing about it now, I find myself really wanting to go watch it again. Because I may not think of it when you ask about my favorite films, but when I do stumble across it on TV or am otherwise prompted to see it, I always rediscover just how much I really love this movie.
Wil Wheaton, who starred in the film when he was just twelve years old, has some lovely thoughts about it and especially about his late castmate River Phoenix, who’s been dead and gone for an astonishing 18 years, here. (For the record, I always liked and identified with River in his film appearances, and I still believe he would’ve become one of the all-time great actors had he lived. His death of a drug overdose back in 1993 devastated me.) Wil also gave an interview to NPR about the film’s anniversary, and that includes a number of interesting tidbits that weren’t in his blog entry. You can listen to it here. If you’re even a mild fan of Stand by Me, I recommend you check out both of those pieces.
Incidentally, what the hell is Goofy anyhow? I never have gotten an answer to that question…
