It may seem that everyone loves Stand by Me, the Stephen King short story that Rob Reiner adapted into a 1986 film classic. But over the years, the movie has had its share of critics.
The New York Times reviewer Walter Goodman in 1986 mocked the movie as “trite.” In Goodman’s Times obituary years later, his employer would note Goodman’s mission involved the deconstruction of “stereotyping,” which could be a hint as to why he was bugged by Stand by Me.
Goodman lamented, “Rob Reiner’s direction hammers in every obvious element in an obvious script.”
“You’ve never seen so much handshaking, so many hands placed meaningfully on shoulders, so many exchanges of understanding looks,” Goodman complained. “Mostly, there is a lot of boys’ talk and good fellowship…”
Boys’ fellowship? Who needs that?
This 1986 knock on Stand by Me starts to look familiar to anyone who lived through the feminist and critical theory movements from 2010 to 2022.
It was just too bro-ish for some. Later critiques sounded this theme.
Already by 2002, the liberal media were dismissing Stand by Me as yet another “stor[y] about white guys.” By 2017, it was an example of “outdated 80’s misogyny,” because none of the characters were girls or women.
Guys hanging out with guys, barely even thinking about girls, with almost no girls in the movie — what sort of representation is that? Throw in the affection between these guys, and you’ve got a bit too much bro-ism.
I’ve written recently about how this sort of thing offended some modern sensibilities:
“Before the sexual-assault claims against Justice Brett Kavanaugh totally fell apart, one of the knocks on him, wielded almost as evidence of his guilt, was that he went to an all-boys school.”
“When NPR set out last decade to define a ‘bro’ (‘a specific kind of fratty masculinity’), one of the criteria was a tendency to hang out with other dudes…”
“When an all-boys charter school opened in Washington, D.C., the American Civil Liberties Union tried to block it. In recent years, the Boy Scouts, in the name of exclusivity, started taking in girls…”
“Two-thirds of Democratic women in a recent Pew Research Center survey agreed that ‘all-female social groups have a positive impact on society,’ while only one-third of these women believed the same about all-male groups.”
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Of course, one of the greatest plagues among American men today is their lack of bro-time and their lack of male friends. Today, feminists are complaining that they need to do all the emotional labor of being their boyfriend’s or husband’s friends because somehow millennial guys ended up without a group of bros.
This was, it turns out, foretold back in 1986, at the end of Stand by Me. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve,” says adult Gordie, the narrator. “Jesus, does anyone?”
