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Stand By Me Theme

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Stand By Me Rough Draft
This film is a coming-of-age movie based on the novel The Body by Stephen King. The main characters are four twelve-year-old boys who are going to begin junior high school soon. The boys’ head out on an adventure that helps them leave their boyhood days behind forever. They are on a journey to find the body of a missing boy, Ray Brower, whom a train hit. They are all going through their own struggles and personal demons and work through them by sticking together and helping each other. Throughout the movie the boys grow into maturity through every obstacle they overcome. This main theme in this movie is the loss of innocence you experience growing up and how each of the boys must confront and deal with their personal …show more content…

As pointed out in a study guide by the Film Education the group of elder boys are significantly bothered about the younger boys. It stirs up the question as to why this is: Why don’t they simply ignore them? (Education, 1). There is an obvious difference in the way that the young boys relate to each other in their group and the way that Ace and the older boys relate to each other. The older boys are constantly rude to each other and don’t really act like friends at all. The younger boys also tend to ridicule each other but they do it in a loving, joking type of way. I think that the Gordie and his friends remind Ace of what his childhood friends were probably like and he is jealous of their carefree ways and that is why he despises them so much. They remind him of a time when things were much easier and he didn’t have to constantly be on edge and feel like he has to prove something. Dr. Steven Hanley, a psychologist specializing in male friendship discusses how when young, the love and intimacy felt towards a male friend seems natural and uncomplicated. How it is only with age, especially past puberty, that these feelings become trickier to understand and navigate. His research suggests that adult males have fewer and less fulfilling friendships than previous generations. He says that as men age they are socialized to believe that they …show more content…

In an interview done by NPR entitled ‘Stand By Me’: A Love Letter To Childhood Innocence” Wil Wheaton (Gordie Lachance) discusses his relationships with the boys, most importantly with River Phoenix (Chris Chambers). The two boys were best friends in the movie as they were in real life, for a while. Wheaton discusses how all of the boys bonded during the filming of the movie and how he grew especially close to River Phoenix. “We stayed friends after we worked on the film, and I went and visited his family. I guess around the time that I was turning maybe fifteen, we just drifted apart, and I always felt really sad about that” (NPR, 1). Even though Stand By Me has a lot of different themes and conflicts throughout the movie such as abuse and death, Wheaton sees the film as a love letter to childhood innocence, as do I. Wheaton talks about how when we are young and full of innocence our lives at the time seem complicated to us but as we get older we realize that these problems were actually incredibly simple. Wheaton says, “…and we get the tremendous gift of not knowing that it’s never going to be like that again for the rest of our lives, so it’s just pure and it’s uncomplicated” (NPR, 2). That is why as we get older and look back on our friendships we often become sentimental and a little disheartened, as Ace does when he sees the younger

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