STAND BY ME: A Masterpiece that will Leave You Speechless

Do you remember that strange, frustrating, highly irritating and wonderful time when you were twelve or thirteen? Especially in the summer. It is vacation, you have the whole two months to not think about school at all. You are no longer children, of course, in fact you consider yourselves completely grown-up. Stand by Me.

What was close and exciting two years ago… is basically still close and exciting, but of course in a carefully constructed way you feign indifference, because that is childish. You still want to play, but of course you will not tell your mother that you are going to play with your friends. No, you are going to meet up with the boys, chat with the girls, to Hania’s for a bonfire or on an expedition. Will there be adults? Of course, Mom. Will you be back for dinner? Sure, Mom. Does his dad know about it? Stop it, Mom.

You rush joyfully over the threshold and the whole world spreads before you – tempting, full of challenges and adventures. You feel strength and confidence within yourselves, everything is transparent, clear, and within reach. You are unbeatable, you are rulers of the universe. A cigarette swiped from your father – you are very careful not to choke, although it burns like hell. The small shop where they sell the best cold orange soda. The neighbor’s garden, from which you can swipe unripe cherries.

The bicycle is the best friend, the knees are eternally scraped, and with these two or three people you are bound by an inseparable pact, a lifelong bond, the purest and truest friendship, which you will never again experience in that form, although you do not know that yet and it would seem impossible if someone told you that. You are carefree and self-assured, you do not worry excessively about anything. To delightful exhaustion you provoke one another into next challenges – who will climb higher up the tree, leap full-speed into the icy water, tease the neighbor’s vicious dog…

Many years later, when you already have a family, these memories will send a shiver of fear down your back. Such irresponsibility! And such joy. Somehow we did not break our necks. Somehow we survived. There were also various secrets, sealed with all kinds of rituals guaranteeing absolute honesty and silence to the grave. Sometimes silly and innocent, sometimes more dangerous than parents or we ourselves realized. And of course, difficult, intimate problems that could not be escaped.

Parents’ divorces, arguments at home, the father’s coldness, the mother’s indifference. A beloved grandmother who died too soon. A dog that had to be put down. That they mock you at school because you are fat, slow or simply different. That you miss your brother. That basically you are afraid of growing up and somewhere beyond the threshold lurks a totally different world for which you have no solution. That at heart you would like to remain a child and somehow magically make that summer last forever.

You do not even have to talk to them about it, they know anyway. Gordie, the storyteller with a talent for writing and narration, Gordie who has felt invisible since the parents sank into grief after his older brother. You see, he too misses his brother like crazy, but who cares about that? The worst thing is that he is not like him. That he is not him. Vern, good-natured Verno, round and shy, constant victim of school bullies. Teddy, crazy, eccentric Teddy, whose own father pressed him against a heated stove. Constantly challenging fate to show that he is stronger, that he will manage, that he will survive and win against everyone.

And then Chris, because every gang must have its leader. Chris, who finds it difficult to open up, although he has too much bottled up inside. Son of alcoholics and losers, eternally beaten by his father and disregarded by his brother. A thief, scum, nothing good. Why do you keep company with Chris? Why do you spend so much time with Chris? Can you not have normal friends?

We no longer play, of course. We go on expeditions. For example, to find a human corpse. We will be heroes, gentlemen, they will show us in the newspaper or even on television. You carefully hide from your friends that you are terrified of the sight of a corpse. You carefully hide from yourself what feelings arise in you at the thought that this corpse is a boy exactly your age. The train and the end, just like that. And there is no more wondering what will come next. The summer, admittedly, will in some way last forever, and you will remain a child forever, but after all… you want to live. You want to see what comes next.

You do not want someone to take that away from you. It is unfair that someone — chance, a combination of circumstances — took that from him. And suddenly you are ashamed that you approached it so carelessly. That you made a joke and a game out of this death. Because death… is sometimes so terribly unfair. And inevitable. For the first time you feel responsible and for the first time you see that guilt and obligation weigh upon you. And this is the moment when you truly stop being a child.

Stand by Me is a film from 1986, its content is the adventures of boys in 1959, I personally reached their age in 1992. And yet we are all in some way the same, like many before us and many later, because the mechanism of growing up does not change, even if the conditions and the world around change. There is always this transitional period of carefreeness and the sudden moment when you step into unknown waters and you can no longer step back. You grow up. Whether on a bicycle, or on a skateboard, or with a smartphone in hand… We all knew that being a child is wonderful and at the same time not so bright, simple, and carefree as it is usually considered. Because we had secrets. Because we had problems. Because it hurt us.

This is exactly what Rob Reiner’s film, an adaptation of Stephen King’s story, is about. One of the most beautiful, funniest, and saddest stories about growing up that I know. With the brightest point in the form of the very young River Phoenix, in whom even then one could already see a strange sadness, premature maturity, as if some fate hung over him, although ultimately he brought it upon himself. It was the beginning of a great career and a sign of extraordinary talent, but it was to last only seven years longer. River, just like his character Chris, was the first one to go. There is some tragic and piercing irony in that.

Regardless of how old you are, treat yourself to a screening of Stand by Me. Remember the torn jeans, acrobatics on the clothes rack, disgusting stories full of physiological secretions, the first beer drunken secretly (which tasted awful, but so what) and the porn magazines stolen from the older brother. Remember how different it all once was, and difficult, and stressful, and full of question marks, absolutely unbearable. And how incredibly, incredibly beautiful.