September 27, 2023: Cultural Falls: The Body and Stand by Me

[As the leaf-peeping begins in earnest (seriously, that’s a thing we do here in New England), a series on some iconic American cultural representationsof the loss of innocence that we so often associate with autumn!]

On the novella that’s explicitly about the “fall from innocence,” and thefilm adaptation that’s less so.

In 1982, frustrated by his inability to publish works that weren’t part ofthe horror genre in which he had risen to fame, Stephen King decided to releasefour such novellas as one collection, Different Seasons, with each novella linked to one of the four seasons.The most famous, thanks to its cult classic film adaptation, is almost certainly thecollection’s first piece, Rita Hayworth andthe Shawshank Redemption (seasonalsubtitle: Hope Springs Eternal). Butnearly as well-known, thanks in large measure to its own popular filmadaptation Stand by Me (1986), is the collection’s third piece, The Body (seasonal subtitle: Fallfrom Innocence). (The collection’s summer novella, Apt Pupil: Summerof Corruption, has also been made intoa film, and is, in itsportrayal of a teenage boy corrupted by a former Nazi war criminal, a candidatefor both this week’s series and thisone on Nazis in America.)

On the surface, The Body and Stand by Me are almost identical: ineach forty-something novelist Gordie Lachance narrates the story of a teenageadventure with his three best friends, a trip that the four boys take afterhearing about a dead body out in the woods near their hometown. Moreover, eachends with (among other things) Gordie informing the audience that his best bestfriend, Chris Chambers, worked his way out of a poor and violent upbringing toreach college and law school, only to die in a random and tragic stabbing, adetail that certainly symbolizes the loss of childhood innocence as theprotagonists move into the often brutal and cold adult world. Yet the change intitle from the novella to the film illustrates a broader thematic shift: RobReiner’s movie is far more centrally concerned with the camaraderie and joys ofteenage friendship (its last line is “I never had any friends like the ones Ihad when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”, which appears in the middle ofKing’s book and is thus emphasized far more in the film); while King’s novelladepicts the world’s brutalities much more consistently, including a savagebeating that all four boys receive at the hands of an older brother and hisfriends.

Which is to say, at the risk of oversimplifying the two works, Reiner’sfilm is ultimately pretty nostalgic about the world of childhood, while King’s novella complicates and to my mindultimately rejects that kind of nostalgia. Concurrently, the two could be readas depicting the loss of innocence in very different ways: Reiner’s filmportraying it as a moment of genuine shift, from one kind of life and world toanother; and King’s as more of a realization about the darkness of the world wehave always inhabited, even as young people. I think there’s a place in ournarratives and images for both stories, and that they complement each othernicely; but I also think that King’s story is a bit truer to the world of youngadulthood, which while certainly free of various adult responsibilities andpressures can still be (as the Knowles and Cormier books from Monday’s postillustrate) as fraught and perilous as the darkest realities of adult life.

Next fall tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Images of fall, or The Fall, you’d share?