Even yesterday's film, "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," is something I cannot separate from my experience growing up in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Is it the best Kubrick film? Who the hell knows? It's the best for me. And in the end that's all I really care about.
Which brings me to Rob Reiner's 1986 classic, "Stand By Me."
I know I mention Stephen King probably way too much on this blog, but I can't overstate the seismic effect he had on me when I was 12 or 13. He was the first guy I read who made me believe I could do it, too.
But before I ever read a single word that he committed to the page, there was "Stand By Me." Based on King's superlative novella "The Body" from his 1982 collection "Different Seasons," Reiner's film is a truly wonderful meditation on childhood, growing up, life, death, blah blah blah.
Fuck all that.
This movie is about me.
I don't mean that I relate to it, or that I see shades of myself in it. I mean it is about me.
Like, specifically, ME.
I am Gordie Lachance.
I first saw the movie maybe a year or so after it was released, and I was left dumbstruck by it. The parallels between Gordie (Wil Wheaton) and me completely freaked me out. I, too, was an oversensitive budding writer (10 or 11 when I saw the movie, which put me right around the same age as him). I, too, was gripped by an imagination that, at times, almost scared me with its sheer vividness. I, too, had a somewhat distant older brother (mine wasn't dead, just 12 years older than me and off doing his own thing). I, too, grew up in a small mountain town, where the woods behind my house became an entire world unto itself, within which my friends and I were able to explore, transform, and rule as kings.
And I, too, had a friend like River Phoenix's Chris Chambers — the brooding tough kid to my sensitive inner poet, with whom I shared an intractable, at times overpowering bond (although, in truth, Chris was the friend I wish I had — mine was a bit more Ace Merrill than I would have liked to admit at the time).
I have no doubt that if we had heard about some dead kid in the woods, we would have gone looking for him, too.
But more than the particulars (and, to be sure, there are differences — not the least of which is the not-dead brother and the fact that I am a child of the 80s rather than the 50s), I saw the world the way Gordie saw it. His filter was my filter. He was weird the way I was weird. He was sad the way I was sad.
It wasn't until three or four years later that I read the novella, and again I was gripped by that sense of almost vertigo and deja vu. I was just old enough at that point to respond to King's darker vision of childhood — equal parts nostalgic and acidic. And I saw even more of myself in King's Gordie than I did in Reiner's. King spends a great deal of time exploring the writer's side of Gordie's brain, showing us how he interprets the events of his life and then repurposes them into his fiction. It was the first thing I ever read that felt like an explanation of how my own brain works.
In retrospect, I can see that Gordie was King. Which is probably why — even all these years later — I cannot not see King as an almost spiritual mentor, the perfect guide for me at a very specific time in my life. Whatever path I'm taking, he went that way before me.
Reiner's version is a bit sweeter than King's, with less bite and not quite the bitter aftertaste, but overall he did an admirable job of capturing what King was going for. I like the movie quite a bit, but even now I simply cannot judge it on its own terms.
I might as well try to judge my own reflection in the mirror.
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