Stand by Me, the classic Hollywood movie set in 1959 small-town Oregon and released in 1986, is characterised by director Rob Reiner in his DVD commentary as a personalised indulgence of his own youth: his favourite slang of the era, his favourite childhood TV shows, cartoons and comics, and indeed his favourite music from the 50s, expressed even by the Ben E. King song title doubling as the film’s. On the one hand, this saccharine summer blockbuster demonstrates the kind of broad-appeal, culture-affirming nostalgia that Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski’s The Worm at the Core exposes as textbook “distal defence” against our fear of mortality. What perhaps consummates it as “Terror Management” most complicated, on the other hand, isn’t just its sentimental memory of vivacious boyhood buttressed further by pop culture references glorified as ‘timeless’, but also in the film’s very explicit counterweight subject matter– the not-at-all unconscious context looming over all the romantic childhood camaraderie. Stand by Me is an adaptation of Stephen King’s novella “The Body”, about four twelve-year old boys on an overnight camp-out to find the missing corpse of a boy their own age. It’s a story about kids facing death and loss.

The opening scene begins with a mature man, played by Richard Dreyfuss, parked on a rural road and reading a newspaper about the accidental stabbing death of someone named Christopher Chambers. The man’s voice-over narration establishes a flashback structure that goes immediately back in time to introduce Chris– childhood gang-leader and best friend of Gordie, the narrator– along with close mutual buddies Teddy and Vern. While Gordie’s adult voice-over continues throughout the film and returns to a brief scene of him writing their story at the end, this foresight about Chris’s eventual but ‘too soon’ demise is only the fictional way that his tragic death haunts the story, since River Phoenix, the actor who plays Chris, himself died of a sensationalised drug overdose at the age of 23. Some eight years after Stand by Me helped establish him as a teen pin-up idol, Phoenix’s life indeed imitates art– quite inescapably the case when art is about death. Stand by Me explores this theme with three-part doo-wop harmony: first, in each of the brushes with mortality encountered by these boys on their journey, culminating climactically in their facing death somewhat literally, by finally fulfilling their aforementioned desire to see a dead body; second, in exposition about each of the four boys’ own varied losses, especially developed of Gordie, whose older brother died in a car accident four months before their adventure; and third, by their innocent and authentic relationships, providing both escape from, and genuine support in reconciling with, their troubling personal losses.

The odyssey taken by these boys is archetypal; the body’s location along the Royal River might evoke the River Styx, but their allegorical journey through the Valley of Death is especially in their route along train tracks to arrive to the corpse, not least of all since one of its passing trains exactly caused that boy’s death. Early on, Teddy insists on trying a ‘train dodge’, but Chris won’t let him dare something so suicidal; later, the boys are nearly killed by another train, caught by it as they cross the river on a long, high trestle. Never mind that the Aristotelian conflict true of all stories makes reminders of mortality inescapably common to them all, or that archetypes are inherent to stories because they are inherent to humanity: the rising action of this movie’s narrative arc is explicitly structured by scene after scene of death anxiety: from the boys realising that they forgot to bring food, to their taking turns around their overnight campfire to stand guard against a presumed pack of coyotes. Just before the climactic scene, which begins with discovery of the body, the boys receive a dirty baptism, becoming soaked in an unexpectedly deep mud-pool, leading to Teddy playfully dunking Chris while yelling, “You die, Chambers!” Suddenly, they realise they’re each covered in leeches. With disgusted and terrified screaming, they strip to their underwear and help each other brush the slimy creatures off, but Gordie’s horror becomes abject as he peers into his own underwear and pulls out a writhing, phallic leech on his bloody fingers, causing him to faint. The “worm at the core” is a worm in his Fruit of the Looms. Girlhood ends by finding blood in one’s underwear every moon, but to a growing 12 year-old boy, what could be more nightmarish than a baptism that castrates? Here, its ritual imitation is Gordie’s initiation beyond innocence, which prepares him for final confrontation with Kiefer Sutherland’s “dime-store hood” character, at the site of the body.

Added to the entirely male cast’s regular exchanges of misogynist and homophobic insult, such androcentric details are tempting to overlook as the insensitivities of the film’s era of production, of its 50s setting, perhaps ultimately of the proclivities of pubescent boys generally. Yet the pattern of these details clicks into unmistakable purpose during their early encounter in a junkyard, which legendary rumour claims its owner protects with a vicious junkyard dog that is directed towards an offender’s male body parts by a command of “Chopper, sick balls!” The formative losses of Chris and Teddy both, already in the first minute of flashback, were introduced with voice-over backstory that casually highlighted their absent and abusive fathers, but this junkyard scene includes on-screen aggression by yet another adult man, with Teddy the most pointed victim. Having escaped the junkyard and its less than alpha dog, the boys safely tease the dog and owner through a chainlink fence, but the owner recognizes the boys and threatens them in return, meeting their emasculating bullying with ugly grown-up mastery. He says he knows and will contact all of their fathers– except Teddy’s, he says, since he’s “in the looney bin”. Teddy becomes apoplectic, yelling that his dad “stormed the beaches of Normandy”, which delights the man into mocking the boy even more mercilessly. He repeats the intro exposition that Teddy’s dad once almost burnt his ear off by violently pressing it to a stove, and tauntingly sing-songs, “looney, looney, looney,” as Teddy’s friends drag him away. Immediately in retreat, Teddy reveals himself as the child he still is, breaking into tears as the others console him. Reinforcing Teddy’s own bulwark of self-esteem in the laudable masculinity of his dad’s war heroism, Vern asks, “You think that pile of shit was at Normandy?”

Since Chris’s betrayal by adults is revealed as not only by his father but also by a female teacher, the primary, unifying loss managed by all of these tweens is of dependable adults generally, nonetheless requiring that they seek their self-esteem in masculinity, boys manning up. Indeed, the movie’s phallic suggestion climaxes with Hollywood’s hands-down, hands-up favourite, a handgun, brandished by Gordie in their defence against Ace. Ace is portrayed as a real dick, alpha asshole to everyone including his boys, and just proved his ultimate power in his previous scene– an homage to another sensationalized Hollywood casualty, James Dean, in a game of chicken with a logging truck. Gordie’s courage to stand up to someone as intimidatingly death-defying as Ace illustrates The Worm at the Core emphatically: even a sensitive boy like Gordie must eventually buck up and grow up; he must learn to cock his gun against Ace’s erect switchblade, summoning similarly seasoned masculinity. “Suck my fat one,” he tells Ace.

Yet Gordie is motivated here by something not emphasised in pure Terror Management Theory. The macho gang antagonism of those older boys, who include both Vern and Chris’s older brothers, is contrasted with Gordie’s idealised older brother Denny, illuminated by further flashbacks within the flashback. Denny, played by John Cusack, listens to Gordie when his father will not, even proud and encouraging of Gordie’s writing of stories. The effect of Denny’s sudden death on his whole family is portrayed plausibly, his parents preoccupied by their own grief, neglecting that of their remaining child. But as emphasised by Gordie’s loss of this one genuine, loving relationship with a wholesome, older-male role model; the secondary loss of his emotionally absent parents; and of course especially in the often tender relationship of these four friends to each other, Gordie is not simply standing up to a bully in culturally approved defiance of death anxiety, is not only defending himself. He secures trustworthy attachment elsewhere. He indeed finds self-esteem in brotherhood, but he points his gun also morally, in a way that would do his brother proud– facing death to protect his dear best friend.

A moment earlier, after finally seeing the body, Gordie had been discovered by Chris sitting alone nearby. “Why did he have to die?” says Gordie, clearly referencing his brother. A good companion in grief, Chris does not pretend to know. Instead, he only comforts Gordie in his loss, as Gordie has done for him. When Gordie goes so far as to say, “Should’ve been me. I’m no good. My dad said it. He hates me,” Chris finally objects, continuing to support his friend’s self-esteem in a manner absent from the adults who have abandoned them. “No! He just doesn’t know you. You’re going to be a great writer someday, Gordie.” As has been suggested of the boys throughout, support can be counted on only among themselves. Indeed, the film portrays poignantly the importance of peers at this stage of development. McCoyd et al. cite research suggesting that loss of childhood, especially through abuse, may precisely lead to kids becoming “parentified”, taking on “the responsibilities, concerns, and burdens of adulthood before their time” (2021, pp. 90-91). While Gordie likewise parents Chris, encouraging him to defy his family’s reputation and enrol in the junior high stream toward college, Chris especially fulfils this role for Gordie, even defending his right to do so– by both his own protective, loving intention and its absence otherwise– when Gordie sarcastically calls him “Dad”. Reiner suggests something more moral than mere worm at the core, something sweeter than the phenomenological or mortal suggestion of Stephen King’s original title. His own twist depends on the words of a different King, a King of Soul, a King who sings– Ben E. King. Chris’s leadership style models for and requires of the boys this movie adaptation’s alternate title, the song lyric’s imploring exchange of vows– to relationship. To the shared strength in loyal commitment– to not cry, to not be afraid, “Just as long as you/ Stand by me”.

Singing along to “Lollipop” by the Chordettes, defending Superman vs. Mighty Mouse, horsing around with your best pals– such sugarbuzz behaviours seem too frivolous to claim as motivated by ‘defensive drive for self-esteem’, either. If life is inherently impermanent, a constant adaptation to loss, then facing inevitable grief with occasional debate, as do these boys, about candy as a favourite food, or whether Goofy is a dog, better qualifies as unguarded play. It serves as the positive, affirmative side in the natural oscillations of the dual processing of grief, innocently restorative for kids and adults alike.

“I never had friends later on like I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” types adult Gordie at the end. But is this question cynical, rhetorical? Or is it earnest wonder about one’s relationship bases as an adult, especially as a man? In fleeting gesture to religion on even such superficial level, is Jesus addressed here in vain– or in prayer? These friends of Gordie’s, the best he’s ever had, represent dependable relationship, which indeed shares gender-based, culture-based, and other such ego-based reinforcements of esteem, but at its best also models and shares secure attachmment– unconditional commitment– captured by the sweet vows of a song.

And what if this meaning-making to resist mortal terror were sensitive to something yet more uncanny? The morning after Chris and Gordie have shared most vulnerably about their losses, Gordie is sitting alone on the wooded tracks reading a comic book, the other boys still asleep, when a deer wanders into the frame’s negative space with him. The pistol is displayed clearly by Gordie’s side, but he does not move for it. Instead, accompanied only by the barest diegetic sound of meditative birdsong, close-up shot-reverse reaction shots are exchanged suggesting eye contact between Gordie and the doe, him smiling with subtle wonder as his head turns to watch her leave his presence and their shared final frame. Not until the next scene begins does adult Gordie admit in voice-over, “It was on the tip of my tongue to tell them about the deer… but I didn’t. That was the one thing I kept to myself.” Perhaps, Gordie is shy to admit to his boys that he was not so masculine as to take a clear shot. Yet the magic of the moment, so affirming as to keep private, the film suggests– perhaps inescapably unspoken, as beyond words– is of absolute innocence, requiring no explanation. Deeper than one’s most intimate defences, such experiences disarm existential anxiety, too– with existential awe.

References

Solomon S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Random House.

McCoyd, J., Koller, J., & Ambler Walter, C. (2021). Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan: A Biopsychosocial Perspective (3rd Edition). Springer Publishing Company.