Summer Song Challenge, Day 16: Joe

Prompt: "A song that makes you think of your favorite movie"

Selected by Joe

"Lollipop"

The Chordettes

single, 1958

I. Gordie

It's crazy how as a teenager you can love something while also so thoroughly misunderstanding it at the same time. So it went with Stand by Me, the 1986 coming-age-film, directed by Rob Reiner, based on Stephen King's novella The Body, and beloved in my youth by me and those in my intimate social circles. On its surface, it's the story of four loveable pre-teen kids who go on an adventure to find a dead body and all the fame and fortune associated with that, infamously following the train tracks to their destination. That's the movie I originally fell in love with.

So we attempted to make a plan to walk the tracks ourselves. Not to find anything, but just to find out where they went. It never happened, of course—back then, even more than now, I was so full of big plans and hot air—but I feel like it might have gotten to a planning stage in that it was on a summer calendar somewhere. Dumb plan (especially because we could just look at a map if we really wanted to know... and unfortunately the train tracks we'd be following just basically went to New York). Who knows if there was ever actually a chance that we were going to do it. I doubt anyone wanted to sleep outside, and I doubt that our parents would have collectively been so uninvolved in our lives that such a journey would have gone unnoticed.

That last point is really how we misunderstood the point of the movie. Gordie, Chris, Teddy, and Vern weren't walking the train tracks to find something, not really; they were walking the train tracks in an unconscious attempt to escape. Each of the four kids had their own troubles at home—abusive parents, neglectful community members—and each, in his own way, was out there trying to find a piece of themselves that they had lost in the emotionally haunted town of Castle Rock. E.g. Chris was assumed by everyone in town to be a thug and a thief, and he was out here trying to prove that he was a good guy, that he wasn't like his brother and deadbeat dad, that he had value in this world. E.g. Gordie had been recently completely ignored by his parents, after his older brother passed away the year before, and he was trying to find the body because in some fucked up way it was going to help him grieve and cope with the loss of his one true role model.

There was nothing like that around here, at least not with me personally (can't speak for any potential pals for the hypothetical journey, but I'd like to think I knew my friends pretty well, and would have known if there were any fucked up Stephen King-esque shit happening in their lives). There was no escape from anything. A couple years later, I'd enter undergrad at a university 20 minutes away from the home I grew up in—there was no ideas of or need for escape, not really.

So that whole thing about walking the tracks and seeing where they went? A complete misreading of Stand by Me. This wasn't just something cool they wanted to do. This was a journey—physically, emotionally—that they needed to take. This was a matter of life or death on multiple levels. They weren't just some punk-ass privileged upper-middle-class kids bored out of their skull in a quiet corner of a big city.

I know that now, and—probably for the best—I'm probably too old for it to matter anyway.


II. Teddy

In my Practice with Children and Adolescent class (the same one I wrote that slumber party essay for), we had to take turns presenting a case that we were currently working on in our field placement, and just kind of talk with the class about a child and what was going on with that child and what you were working on with that child. Not everyone in the class was necessarily working with children at their internship, so the assignment had a certain measure of leeway. I took that leeway to its extreme and decided to pretend that Teddy from Stand by Me was my client.

The joke was that I would play it completely deadpan, and not tell anyone that I was talking about a fictional character. I would just talk about Teddy as if he was a child I was actually interacting with on a day-to-day basis, and then see how long it took people to notice (if anyone—there was a chance that no one else had seen this movie, I guess).

In my class of seven other people plus the teacher, only three people (including the teacher) got the joke, and only then when I explicitly mentioned the trauma of finding a dead body on the train tracks. So there were a lot of laughs by the two students (who I should mention were not coincidentally the two oldest students in the room besides myself), and the professor claimed like he felt like he just got catfished. Everyone else was just puzzled. It was a good time. Here are the PowerPoint slides. (You might have to click on them to zoom in—yes, this fifteen-year-old blogging interface sucks, I know!)

III. Chris

But was it a misinterpretation of the film? It depends on who you ask, and from what perspective you are viewing it. First off, it is my firm belief that art mostly earns value from the audience's interpretation of that art, and so if a teenager who is unhaunted by any specific childhood trauma wants to still find a connection to the four young kids in Stand by Me, then so be it.

But secondly, I think we need to consider the fact that the narrative framework involves Gordie as a middle-aged dad, and this is him being nostalgic for the past, writing about a specific adventure (literally and spiritually) that he and his friends took when they were kids. So this isn't just an exploration of trauma and the need to escape or grieve. It's also rose-colored. It's about how Gordie and Chris and Teddy and Vern actually did find that escape, through each other. And it's about the value of friendship, both in that type of situation and otherwise.

I think maybe if we had walked the tracks, there's a good chance that it would have been a let down. There would have been no dead bodies to speak of, just an endless walk through a bleak cinderblock-blasted suburbia. But maybe there's a chance too that it would have been a bonding experience for whichever brave/dumb friends who wanted to take part. That's basically what we were doing anyway every weekend otherwise, no? Hanging out and shooting the shit and escaping our humdrum NEast-y existence and bonding and proving the maxim that no one ever has friends like the ones you had at that age.

IV. Vern

Stand by Me isn't my favorite movie—easy top three, though—but Dazed and Confused has been relitigated on this blog too many times already, and I thought we should maybe mix it up a little bit. But if I was trying to be boring, I probably would've gone with "Tuesday's Gone" and talked about keg parties in the woods or some shit.