Missoula Notebook
You Can Go Home Again But There Might Be Late Fees Involved
By Sutton Stokes, 2-24-08
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| "I never had any computers later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" | |
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In what I hear is a relatively common experience these days, Amy and I often get all fired up to rent a movie but then find ourselves wandering the aisles of the video store for a half hour at an utter loss as to which movie we should get. We keep lists, of course, but have discovered that the inclination to see a certain movie can be fleeting, a phenomenon that our now-closed Netflix account threw into sharp relief: our queue tended to over-represent movies “we really should see” at some indeterminate point in the future, as opposed to movies we actually turned out to feel like spending a couple of hours with on a given night.
So it was something of an unusual event last Tuesday, when — as we scanned the display cases at the Eastgate Crazy Mike’s — Amy suddenly remembered a movie I’d mentioned wanting to see and it turned out that I still wanted to see it. Although with that kind of lead-in it may be a bit of an anti-climax when I note that the movie in question was Stand By Me, Rob Reiner’s 1986 adaptation of a Stephen King novella entitled The Body.
It’s not that I was expecting a brilliant, transcendent viewing experience (which turned out to be smart of me), but rather that Stand By Me has long been on an informal mental of list of mine containing various movies and television series that were popular while I was growing up but that I missed seeing for an assortment of reasons, including (1) parents who actually paid attention to MPAA-rating age limits, (2) lack of a television in the house when I was between the ages of 4 and 8 (and relatively restricted viewing thereafter), and (3) a sort of general pop-cultural tone-deafness resulting from the interaction of these and other factors.
In other words, a lot of stuff passed me by even as — I assumed at the time — it was handing over the veritable keys to the universe to many if not most of my peers, so that I have worried ever since that I am lacking important generational cultural building blocks. To give you just a sense of the ways in which my cognitive networks are deficient as a result, my list of “missed stuff” includes movies such as Sixteen Candles, Say Anything, Pretty in Pink and Flashdance, the made-for-TV movie The Day After, the mini-series V, and the first half-decade of MTV in general [FN 1]. Frankly, it’s a wonder my speech is even intelligible to anyone between the ages of, say, 30 and 40.
This suspicion that I was somehow missing out on the culture at large accompanies some of my earliest memories. I remember being in second or third grade when a classmate asked me if I liked Michael Jackson, to which I replied, “no, I don’t like country music,” which I now see was not an irredeemably bad answer but clearly wasn’t the right one. Then there was the family vacation when I joined a crowd of strangers in the motel’s pool-side hot tub (yes, they must have been glad to see me), only to have a middle-aged woman (or so she seemed to me then, meaning she was probably more like 28) ask if I’d seen E.T. the Extraterrestrial. I froze halfway into the water and looked at her quizzically, for I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about, only to have her tell me to leave because the hot tub was restricted for the next hour to people who loved E.T. It only occurs to me now how high she must have been to talk this way to a child.
I did eventually catch the Michael Jackson and E.T. trains while still reasonably young, and those were fun rides, but the sensation of the culture moving on without me still affected me off and on through my teen years. It popped up again for the last time in my early twenties in the form of The X-Files, which I missed the good early seasons of because I was spending long stretches of those years floating around the Bering Sea. I’m not sure if I wanted to see it more because everyone else was and I wanted to have it in common with those around me, or more out of loyalty to the sensibility and tastes I’d had when I was a kid, when a well-written and competently acted program about spies and aliens and shadowy government conspiracies would have put me over the moon. I think it was the latter, almost as if I were nostalgic about how I would have felt about that show if I’d gotten to watch it when I was little.
The kids today won’t have quite this sort of problem, of course. For one thing, the medication has gotten a lot better, but it also just seems like there’s such an overwhelming tsunami of pop-cultural amusements at this point that the sensation of most of it rushing past without you is just part of the experience. The message of all this abundance seems to be “find your niche” — culturally, politically, recreationally — and I guess we’ll have to wait a few decades before we can really evaluate whether this was a good development or not. Either way, of course, the medication is just going to keep getting better, so at least we will have peace of mind among the smoke and flames.
I have no idea how I’ll feel about some of the other movies and TV shows on my list of “missed stuff,” if in fact I ever get around to watching them, but I do wish I’d seen Stand By Me when it came out. I can tell I would not only have enjoyed it as a story but also would have connected with it in powerful ways, so that — aside from the air of prefabricated nostalgia Rob Reiner seems to specialize in (not so strange for a kid who grew up in Mayberry, come to think of it) — actual, genuine personal nostalgia would have dissolved me into a puddle of emotional jelly if this week’s viewing had been my second, not my first.
In 1986, when the movie first hit theaters, I turned 12, precisely the same age as the four boys in the movie and, therefore, the age Gordy, the main character, is rhapsodizing about at the end, as — now in middle age — he types out the last lines of his book, his words spelled out in green glowing letters against the black screen of one of those DOS-powered computers I remember using in school that very year: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”
I know just what Gordy is getting at with these words, although I come at this concept from a slightly different direction. The year I turned 12 was the year when the guy I’d thought of as my best friend or at least the best one I had stopped walking home from school with me in favor of walking about 20 yards behind and screaming insults at me. Being a little chubby and decidedly “nerdy” or “a dork” or whatever the preferred term was at the time, I had been a bit of a charity case in our circle of friends as it was, which meant that the others risked less by siding with him than with me, and so my last year of middle school was a lonely one.
The funny thing is that the archaic computer Gordy is working on in the last frames of the film is not only familiar to me from the background of that era in my life but is also actually directly related to the schism I experienced with my friend. The unforgivable offense, in his eyes, was that I had stopped regularly walking to school with him and started taking a ride from my parents, so that I could use the school computer lab for a half hour before the first bell. I don’t think those computers had any installed games, so all I could have been interested in was typing up little stories and seeing my words displayed in that glowing green type on that black screen, just for the thrill of feeling like I was participating in the technological moment in a way that I couldn’t otherwise do in my so-far computerless home.
I didn’t invite my friend along on these early mornings because he had a computer of his own at home; it simply never occurred to me that the situation had other elements worth considering. Only now can I see that his outbursts may not have been quite as insane as they seemed. Or, rather, they were clearly insane, but there may have been a comprehensible human emotion at their root, the same emotion that Gordy and his friends in Stand By Me feel as they look ahead to junior high and worry that their close bond will sunder there. I suppose my friend felt betrayed or left behind in some way, and he wasn’t going to just sit there and take it.
I left them all behind, as it turned out, when my family moved away after eighth grade, ending the longest period in which I lived in one place as a child. Six years had been enough to form some strong attachments to the people and landscape there, I now realize, but at the time I couldn’t wait to move from the suburbs, which I’d convinced myself I hated, and into the more urban-feeling neighborhood on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. that was our destination. But if I dream of my childhood now, it is that bland suburb that I am remembering, and somehow Stand By Me took me right back, almost as if I could feel the strong sunlight on my shoulders as I made my walk along a woods path to school, almost as if I could once again feel that childhood terror at the thought of losing a friend.
Footnotes
FN 1: For example, I remember absolutely loving the Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” when it first came out but having not the slightest idea of what the singer could be talking about when he intoned “I want my MTV.” And just to pile on the memories here, I’ll relate that I first heard this song at a middle school dance where I also witnessed for the first time in my life the spectacle of a DJ “scratching,” demonstrated to an awe-struck crowd of us huddled around his turntables. Having been brought up in a house where LPs were treated like sacred relics, and not understanding the mysterious properties of a cue-able DJ turntable, I muttered something like “he’s really ruining those records.” To be clear, I was as thrilled by the prospect of such recklessness as at least some audience members at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival must have been when Jimi brought out the lighter fluid.
For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.
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Comments
I have often wondered if "culture" "arts" "media" are for people who don't have kids, families, jobs, commutes, evening sports coaching, and the baggage of producing the generation that will support the DINKS after the next DOT-COM, Real Estate Flip, disaster and collapse comes.
Bearbait, thanks for taking the time to fit in a little Missoula Notebook. I look at it this way: culture, arts and the media are for those who would go crazy without them, which obviously isn't a category that includes everyone. But devoting time to family is a beautiful thing and you should be commended for your efforts, especially volunteering to coach (I think a lot of people don't realize what that takes and how much it can do for the players). I know I'm grateful to my parents for all the time they gave me as I was growing up. A much better gift, in retrospect, than the Millenium Falcon model I thought I wanted at the time.