Time Stand Still: My Interpretation of ``Stand By Me''
1.9.99
``It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of our lives like busboys in a restaurant. I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody?'' (From the movie ``Stand By Me'')
Friendship and relationships differ in various stages of life. When you are young, people relate to you in a different way than they relate to you when you are old. This is key. People change perceptions of each other given the state of development they are in. The attachments that younger people develop with their peers differ than attachments that older people form with their peers. Fromm's work poses the theory that because of our sense of self, we become dissassociated with the world. He further proposes this causes a vacuum that affects our psyche, and that at an earlier state of development (i.e. childhood) this vacuum is filled by the concepts of our place in society.
This emotional gap is filled by our concepts of who we are in relation to others. In essence we define ourself from who we know because we don't know how else to define ourselves. - Some people never grow out of this stage. Interpersonal relationships become all encompassing at this point, because they delimit what a young child can or cannot do, or what he/she is exposed to. This is necessary at the beginning step towards seeing the world. The problems occur when this method of expanding one's horizons turns into a prison cage made of fear. In other words, when we become so afraid of losing our childhood relationships that we cling on to them at the cost of losing out on new relationships. This leads down a slippery slope in which people do not ever break out of their middletown shells. My ``friends from home'' are divided into 2 sets. Those who left, and grew up, and those who remained in never-never land. Of those who stayed, three still live at home and one is in Blythe Correctional Facility. These rejects are where they are because they believed that their childhood interpersonal relationships were the most important things in the world. To them, hanging out and doing drugs and committing crimes to keep the childhood clique going was more important than lets say, going to college or getting a job. Thus George, age 22 lives at home, sans GED - Luper, age 29 lives at home, currently on parole, and Walter lives in Blythe, awaiting parole. The hive mind, prevalent in most gangs, took them over and basically each spent their lives trying to ``out-cool'' one another to the detriment of their police records. Rather than redefining themselves in terms of what they had accomplished on this earth, they decided to keep the childhood delusion that they were nothing more than the sum of who they knew. For them, time stood still.
``It is the folly of adolescence to belive in eternal youth.'' - Dos Passos,
The Big Money
Some of my hometown acquaintances stopped aging after adolescence. The movie, ``Stand By Me'' touched upon this by the character portrayed by Keifer Sutherland. This was a boy who held his childhood interpersonal relationships more important than his accomplishments in life. He held the concept of impressing his friends higher than actually doing anything with his life, and thus he remained, a degenerate waste of human existence. The movie ends with a warning, that those who fall into the trap of the material glory of childhood relations become at best nothing more than blue collar workers doomed to work for minimum wage and dying in ignominity. At worst, they end up in jail. The cry is held clear by the protagonist's statement ``Will I ever get out of this fucking town?'' - a cry heralded by many youth. It is this spirit of wanderlust that those who grow up follow, and cast aside the manacles of childhood delusion. This is what the deer scene symbolized in the movie. It showed that the narrator of the film was willing to forego the delusional relationships of youth for the serenity and the more introspective values of maturity.
``Memories are meant to fade.'' - From the movie ``Strange Days''
As we grow older, this delusion of self changes, as we realize that people cannot me materialized. To paraphrase Aquinas, immanetizing the transcendent is a cardinal sin! Human relationships cannot be materially quantified. They are transcendent, much like the errosion of granite by the river of time. Basing your meaning of life upon them is pure folly. - Much like the people in Malibu who built their million dollar mansions on stilts and then cried when they fell down. Sadly enough, the decadent bourgeoisie culture in which we exist in glorifies ``those early days of yester-year'' with such media propaganda as ``That 70s Show,'' ``The Wonder Years,'' or ``90210.'' This is propaganda to push the value of childhood glorification. In them, childhood relationships are glorified as the most valuable things in the world, and thus each of the characters in any one of these shows are mindless one dimensional caricatures of todays decadent youth. Hopefully, at some point, one learns to base their sense of self worth on what they have done in life. And at that point, interpersonal relationships redefine themselves and mature. No longer is one basing their self worth on who they know, but rather on their accomplishments in life.
Yes. I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Thank God.