Like Busboys in a Restaurant: Mourning Innocence in ‘Stand by Me’
Stand by Me is my favorite film, though it is admittedly tied for that position with John Carpenter’s Halloween. This is the film that resonates with me on a spiritual, emotional, profound level more than any other and as such it has always been extremely daunting to even consider writing about it. I will admit, right out of the gate, that I am an easy mark for this movie. It is set in a town very much like the one I grew up in. I was born and raised in Maine and even though the film changes the location from the novella to Oregon (more or less simply because they got their Portlands mixed up) those changes are cosmetic and barely noticeable. I was a skinny, quiet kid, like our protagonist, Gordie, and like him I was a writer. If I were younger, I would look back on that time and say that I was a kid who wanted to be a writer, but that’s not true. Just like Gordie, I was writing already. More than anything, though, I resonated so deeply with Stand by Me because I had those friends.
As much as I could relate to Gordie, there were friends who — at least as kids — reminded me so much of Chris, Teddy, and Vern. Some of them were, in fact, spookily similar. These things are not only why the film has occupied such a necessary place in my heart for most of my life, they are also why I fought against some of the movie’s major points when I was young and insisted why some of the most important things it has to say were simply not true, because as a child I refused to believe them. And I refused to believe them because I already knew they were true.
Based on the novella “The Body” by Stephen King, collected in Different Seasons, Stand by Me tells the story of four boys — Gordie Lachance, Chris Chambers, Vern Tessio and Teddy Duchamp — who embark on a hike to find the body of a boy who had been hit by a train, believing that upon discovering him, they will be hailed as local heroes. It is a grim subject matter for something so often hailed as one of the best coming of age movies of all time, and there’s a very good reason for that. This is a film very explicitly about looking back on childhood with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia, remembering both the good and the bad, a time when you felt invincible and the first time you realized that was going to end.
The body is not separate from this. Neither King nor director Rob Reiner could have swapped in something else for these boys to go into the woods to find, something more palatable. That would never have worked. This narrative sense of mortality is also represented in a more immediate form by the bully Ace Merrill, a supposed teenager who is perfectly willing to kill children, ironically enough, to claim the finding of a child’s body for himself. Stand by Me expertly uses mortality to talk about age, to explore how growing up by its very nature means the death of childhood.
That is the thing that resonates most for me. Stand by Me is about a great many things, loneliness, friendship, expectations, even love, but it is first and foremost about the first time you realize, as a child, that your childhood is going to end. And it is, for my money, the best film ever made about that subject. That was the thing that I fought so hard against believing when I first fell in love with it. I was exactly the same age as these kids the first time I saw Stand by Me and was enamored by it, but there were very specific things that made me outright angry, and that I refused to believe.
After coming back from their journey, adult Gordie (who narrates the entire film) notes that after this adventure, their last weekend before junior high, Teddy and Vern became nothing more than faces in the hall. He stopped hanging out with them completely. There’s a line that says “friends come in and out of our lives like busboys in a restaurant” and I hated that the first time I heard it. Knowing nothing about adulthood I remember being physically upset by that, because my friends — those very friends who reminded me so much of the boys in the movie — were my whole world. I hated it because it was true, of course, and subconsciously I already knew it.
By the end of middle school, my friends didn’t even like each other anymore. The only thing they had in common was me, and that became completely obvious at my eighth grade birthday party, where tensions were unbearably high and I found myself spending the entirety of my own party playing peacemaker. By high school, that friend group had evaporated entirely and of the several friends I had all through elementary and middle school, even the ones I had been extremely close with throughout my entire childhood, only two or three were friends I regularly hung out and interacted with. Even when I didn’t want to believe it, in middle school I was mad because I knew it was coming. In high school I was mad because it had come.
These sentiments are stated fairly directly in the film, especially when it leans into moments that highlight another adolescent truth — that not all friendships are created equal. The concept of Friends vs. Best Friends is not new by any means, but it is something very much at the core of Stand by Me. You love your childhood friends, you have a blast hanging out with all of them, but there are a couple of people you share your soul with, just a few and that’s if you’re lucky, and that’s all you get. In the film, that closeness between Gordie and Chris separates them from Teddy and Vern. When Gordie remarks on Teddy’s weirdness, Chris highlights that adolescent impermanence in a morbid way that’s appropriate for the movie, by suggesting that Teddy “probably won’t live to be twenty.” In another scene, Chris speaks plainly about the end of these adolescent friendships by saying that Gordie, who is on another academic level than the others, will enter junior high and be placed in the college prep courses and will therefore also go to college, whereas they will not. Gordie immediately refutes this, but it’s mostly true by the end of the film.
True to form, the only thing Chris is wrong about is himself. For a child so perceptive, he cannot see his own value. He comes from a cursed family and believes he’s just like them, destined to amount to absolutely nothing. Chris and Gordie need each other. Those are the friendships that survive. All of this carries so much weight when we know that the reason Gordie is even reflecting on this story as an adult is because Chris, his childhood best friend, has died. Gordie mentions that they hadn’t even seen each other in ten years, but for a middle aged man that’s still something of a marvel. Ten years is barely a blip in time by that point in your life, and it is clear that the friendship remained. Gordie’s not mourning a guy he used to pal around with on the weekends in fifth grade, he’s mourning a brother, and the relationship we see between those boys establishes that perfectly.
Chris is completely correct about Teddy and Vern, nonetheless. Within weeks of returning from their transformative trip, Teddy and Vern become nothing more than faces in the hallway. Even though they nearly died together on more than one occasion over the course of this adventure, that’s where they wind up. That’s how it goes. That mortified me as a child, but as an adult I understand that it’s simply growing up. It happens fast, sometimes in the blink of an eye, and it’s nobody’s fault and it’s nothing we ever have any control over, especially when we’re young. It’s just time.
It moves in one direction and we move with it. When we look back, we see the things we almost didn’t survive — the trains, the Choppers, the leeches, the Ace Merrills — and we also see the reasons why we survived them, and we remember their names. That’s what those friends are for. You only get them for a short time, but they mean everything. That is what Stand by Me is about.
Stand by Me is a film that understands that childhood, on some level, is an entire lifetime lived, and it ends because all lifetimes end. For all of us, there is a moment as children when we see that end coming even if we pretend we don’t. We start to worry that seeing the end of the journey makes the journey worthless, but it doesn’t, it makes it beautiful. It means we made it, and we made it together. You don’t give up on these people by growing apart when you reach those teenage years, because all it really means is that they delivered you to exactly where you needed to be, and they delivered you intact, as you delivered them.
If you’re lucky, not all of them become faces in the crowd, and a few of them stay on for the next journey, and the next. Even though you stop seeing each other every day, or every month, or every year, you find you’re in it together for the rest of your lives. That’s how it was for Gordie and Chris, and for all of us who have ever been lucky to have a friend like that.
The film does something brilliant at the end. While so much of this story has been narrated as Gordie has been writing it, he leaves us with the last line as a shot of his computer screen, for us to read for ourselves so that we can truly absorb it. The now-iconic line is: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” You could almost think that line undercuts the movie’s bittersweet look at childhood, or that it carries a sadness suggesting that everything is downhill once you become an adult. I don’t think it’s a contradictory line and I don’t think that’s why it resonates so powerfully, at all.
It is a hopeful line, it is the reason Gordie is sitting there writing this and commemorating Chris in the first place. Because it means that those childhood times talking about dumb things that felt like the most important things in the world, were the more important things in the world. None of it meant nothing because the laughter, the excitement and the love felt in that moment are still felt as an adult. Time is linear for everything except for the heart, where you remember a dumb joke that made you laugh, a story your friend told that scared you, a crush you ached for, and you feel exactly the way you felt it then. Where you felt a closeness and kinship you can’t say you’d never feel again, because whenever that memory stirs you’re still feeling it, and no friend is reduced to a face in the crowd because you feel that kinship twenty years later, right now, just as you felt it then. Where a boy in the past asks you if you want to see a dead body, and morbid curiosity hits you like a lightning strike just like it has a thousand times before, feeling like it’s the very first time, and you, in the present, say “Yes.”
