Last night I watched The Lost Boys. I don’t know why. Week before that I was compelled to see Stand By Me for easily the first time in ten or so years. Pretty good flicks, I thought. Both are about boys, and you know how I like boys. Both are Kiefer-tastic, both involve Corey Feldman (Lost Boys has a bonus Corey in Haim form, as well as what looks like the entire membership of Winger. But Stand By Me has the young River Phoenix, so I guess it all evens out somehow). Both came out in the mid-to-late eighties and involve protagonists who were my age at the time. Both had pretty kicky soundtracks, although I was much more about the oldies at that time in my life, if I recall correctly. I did love that cry little sister song though. I got all shivery listening it to it during the opening credits and everything.
I went to go see Stand By Me in sixth grade (twelve going on thirteen, just like in the movie!) for a class assignment. I don’t know why Mrs. Yehle had us go see this, exactly; maybe she thought it would be cool for us to see kids our age portrayed semi-realistically. I remember thinking that the kids had a lot more freedom than I did at the time–they got to go camping by themselves and smoke cigarettes and they got to swear all the time—but that their interactions with each other were pretty realistic. Actually, no, it’s my grown-up self that thinks their interactions with each other were realistic, while my twelve year old self didn’t know any other ways that twelve year old boys would interact. My twelve year old self didn’t know much about boys, period. To some extent I treated the movie as a documentary about what boys did when I couldn’t see them. Also, as a chance to develop a pretty serious love for young River Phoenix. It was sort of sad, at the end, to see him faded out of the picture, knowing that in ten years or so he really will die. And certainly it’s sad to watch it knowing that Corey Feldman will turn out to be…Corey Feldman. But as far as I can tell, the movie gets right that weird indefinable sense of being twelve, the swearing and the hazy notions about sex and the deep passions that grownups don’t take seriously. The idea that you can see the world pretty clearly and know what’s right and important; the constant tugging for freedom. When River Phoenix cries and cries, all with the gun keeping watch? That’s everyone’s inner child screaming to get out of the town where no one understands you and nothing makes sense and you hate everything anyway. Well, okay. My inner child, at least.
Lost Boys is a little different, in terms of its effects on me. It was the first dark movie I ever remember liking, and I thought that made me pretty deep. Except, does anyone have a couple of issues of Seventeen handy? Am I correct in remembering that they wanted us to wear those Sgt. Pepper jackets? Out in public? Had I access to one, though, I totally would have worked it, because Jamie Gertz as Star was my Style Icon for a long time, what with the long wild brown hair (like mine!) and the crazy long skirts (like mine! I wished!) and the funny name. And the bangles. I totally wanted to be her. I wanted to live dangerously and ride a motorcycle and live in a cavern with a big poster of Jim Morrison in the background, even though I had no idea who Jim Morrison was. I was really attracted, though, to the idea that a bunch of kids could do something big and huge and important, like rid their town of vampires and I thought it made perfect sense that the Frog Brothers would be anti-vampire vigilantes who actually killed yet not be able to drive. (I think this is the hook of Goonies too. Kids sve the world!) I think I thought, for some reason, that I would get to high school and have to do something big and important myself, maybe, that there would be a big adventure waiting for me to embark on with my plucky band of friends. It made sense to watch movies that would show me how it was done.
Now, I don’t know if it’s just because I haven’t done anything adventuresome like that, that all my movie-watching went to waste, but can I tell you that I could really tell I’m much more on the grown-up side of things now? I kept thinking “Why doesn’t someone call CPS? Someone needs some grief counseling! I hope those two are using a condom! They need to be wearing helmets on those motorcycles! Oh my goodness, however are they going to get all that blood out of the cushions?” I was and I wasn’t able to just live in them the way I used to…and these used to be two of my favorite movies, let me tell you…I kept noticing things like funny eighties’ clothing or obsolete technology but at the same time I was watching sincerely and objectively, taking the movies for what they were, as if it was still 1988 or whatever, as if everyone in those movies hadn’t gone on to career obsolescence or death by overdose or a TV series or whatever they went on to. It was strange, these two parts of me trying to watch at the same time. I think the grownup part of me ended up winning, which is, of course, sort of sad.