by Justin Query

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In 1986, one of the finest cinematic coming-of-age films — director Rob Reiner’s adaptation of a Stephen King novella, entitled for the big screen, Stand By Me — was released. It’s the story of four young boys (Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, Jerry O’Connell, and the inimitable River Phoenix) about to begin the next chapter of their lives: middle school. And while that tremendous benchmark looms in the final days of summer, these young friends embark on a hike that could potentially lead them to the body of a local boy who has gone missing. If successful, they’ll be heroes, famous, legends, the faces that will appear on both the nightly news and the front page of the daily newspaper. They’ll transcend the life of small town boys that they’ve known for too long. If they’re never able to escape the city limits, they’ll at least escape the mendacity of Castle Rock legacy, which at this point promises little for them. And along the way, they’ll grapple with the difficulties of growing up so far, the challenges that await them in young adulthood, and even mortality.

If you haven’t seen the film — stop. Go see it. I’ll wait for you.

And … welcome back.

Since you’ve been gone, I’ve been thinking about what this movie meant to the 12-year-old me who saw it for the first time then. Where best friends went, I had Mike and David and my brother Jason and his best friend Rob and (sometimes) Charlie and (more infrequently) Randy in my life, growing up. We were good friends, bound by a loyalty that meant that we put brotherhood above all else. And, yes, some of us would at one point in our lives attend an Outsiders-like rumble with a rival group of boys in defense of ourselves. And, yes, some of us would frequently ride our bikes across town and back again to secretly meet girls of varying degrees of ill repute. And, yes, at least one of us would end a particular afternoon of make-believe Vietnam war covered in leeches.

(That’s a story for another time.)

Meanwhile, Reiner’s young heroes were possessed with an insatiable need to discover the body of a dead boy. They too would end an afternoon covered in leeches. But their trek is also symbolic of their understanding of mortality — of simply growing up — that awaits us all. And when I saw the film, I couldn’t anticipate that some filmmakers would reinvent that transformative experience 20 years later. Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Superbad is one of the best coming of age films of the 21st Century, blending comedy — raucous, profane comedy — and pathos in a story of three friends who set out to discover something as well: alcohol and sex. They weren’t in search of a corpse. They wouldn’t be moved to understand their place in the universe. What they would discover, though, is the muted realization that making that transition into adulthood is more difficult than they could have ever imagined.

The film is about three friends — Evan (Michael Cera), Seth (Jonah Hill), and Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) — determined to buy alcohol for a high school party in the hopes of having sex. Evan hopes to start a legitimate relationship with Becca (Martha Maclsaac) as the school year ends. Seth hopes to have at least two summer months of sultry lovemaking with Jules (Emma Stone). And Fogell simply wants to prove that he’s an indispensable member of this awkward crew, even when dressed in a vest like Aladdin. Over the course of this one night, they’ll test the limits of their friendship and close this particular chapter, whether they intended to or not.

Throughout the film, contrary to Reiner’s Stand By Me, Superbad‘s protagonists are in a true hurry to grow up. Fed up with high school life, Evan and Seth look forward to the graduation parties that will announce their ascension. Evan is Dartmouth-bound. The stars have aligned for him. Meanwhile, his best friend Seth looks forward to the various porn sites his parents will unwittingly pay for while he indulges in everything stereotypically related to state college life. But what this couple doesn’t outwardly look forward to is missing one another, of being away from one another. That’s never been a part of their plan, never a part of their journey. For Evan and Seth, their friendship is transient, as momentary as high school. “I can’t imagine what you’re going to do without each other next year,” Evan’s mom tells the two as they head off to school that morning.

“Are you going to miss each other?” she asks, and suddenly, the boys’ defenses are up. “Yeah, I’m going to cry myself to sleep every night,” Seth deflects, “when I’m out partying.” And then the duo — like their Stephen King counterparts — retreat into jokes disparaging their mothers and fathers. Finding new and preferably disgusting ways to degrade a friend’s mother was always held in high regard. But there’s something very Caulfield-like in the behavior of both movies’ boys. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden outwardly claims to resent everything related to adulthood. Adults are “fakes,” Holden contends, “phonies,” and so on. Yet over the course of J.D. Salinger’s novel, Holden consistently puts himself in situations where he must behave like an adult, even when he’s ill-equipped to do so. He smokes cigarettes. He drinks alcohol. He tries to have sex. And none of these ventures are ever fully successful. Likewise, in Reiner’s film, for all of the boys’ blustering that they can look out for themselves as they seek out the dead body of Ray Brower, their bedtime conversations are endlessly juvenile: about the endless, weekly narrative of Wagon Train; the one food — that’s easy: cherry-flavored Pez, no questions about it — that they would eat for the rest of their lives; and the physiological origins of Goofy. If not a dog, what the hell is Goofy? And director Greg Mottola’s would-be heroes in Superbad aren’t far off from that mark either. They hilariously imagine why women won’t tolerate men walking around with perpetual erections, especially when they must endure women’s nude bodies on the covers of porno magazines. They debate the etymology of words that praise a woman’s sexual prowess. (Seth determines that a girl’s dick-taking ability is an advantage for her; meanwhile, Evan argues that the word choice is assuredly an insult.) In a matter of weeks, when they leave high school, these boys are poised to become young men, but they have little to no clue what it means to be a young man. Evan brags to Becca that he attends parties with adults, drinks responsibly with his friends, and frequents gentlemen’s clubs. He brags verbally, that is. Meanwhile, we see that drinking with his friends turns into premature vomiting, guzzling Tabasco sauce as his parents watch on, and gentlemen’s clubs don’t allow Evan and his friends admission. Here, as with Reiner’s film, the audience sees two worlds: the world in which these boys honestly live and the world in which they imagine themselves, if they weren’t simply boys.

They’re boys who both believe in the myth of the lethal mutt Chopper at the junkyard yet call the phenomenon of life-threatening goochers — everyone flipping tails in a coin toss — “baby stuff.” What might turn these babies into men, then, is the coveted driver’s license that will allow them to purchase alcohol for a teenage party. It becomes the symbolic gateway into adulthood for these boys. But Fogell isn’t capable of looking like an adult in the liquor store, no more capable of passing as a physical adult than defending himself against a liquor store burglar. Over the course of the night, Fogell befriends two police officers (Bill Hader and Seth Rogen) who recognize in him that part of themselves that they imagined lost forever once they grew up. Now adults, they opt to show Fogell that adults aren’t necessarily fake or phony, having grown up (and we’re looking at you again, Holden). They, in fact, show Fogell that friendship is more important than anything else, more important even than having anonymous sex. They demonstrate to young Fogell that just because the world demands that you grow up doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to abandon the child-like wonder that comes with being a kid. Chica, Chica, yeah, as Fogell would put it, dancing in a home economics classroom to which he was never invited. 

[Evan, Seth, and Fogell] weren’t in search of a corpse. They wouldn’t be moved to understand their place in the universe. What they would discover, though, is the muted realization that making that transition into adulthood is more difficult than they could have ever imagined.

It’s Evan and Seth that discover the most unintended growth. Evan — less concerned with seducing Becca with alcohol — simply hopes to announce his fascination to her. He simply looks for a relatively normal romance. Seth, meanwhile, insecure like so many high school students, imagines that only intoxication would bring him close to sex with Jules. But the boys are both wrong, demonstrating once more that they understand little of the machinations of the real world, that they’re fully not in control as young adults about to enter an adult world. And when they wake up in Evan’s basement on Saturday morning — perhaps a little hungover and a bit stuffed with pizza bagels — they don’t talk openly about the intimacy that they shared the night before, about their admission that they value one another, even need one another, and especially love one another, which they’ve never put into words — even in the face of a high school graduation that will pull them apart as they attend different colleges. It’s a conversation that will likely remain ignored, sadly, forgotten — like the heart-to-heart reveal shared by Gordy (Wil Wheaton) and Chris (River Phoenix) in Stand By Me — a revelation that both proves how vulnerable and similar they are. It’s disconcerting that it takes an evening of laundry detergent-laced beer to admit how much you need a friend, but it’s an admission that largely goes unsaid, a minimized conversation because that’s what life asks us to do:

Grow up. Move on. It’s no big deal. 

Seriously, man – really: Just grow up.

But watch closely as Seth descends on that shopping mall escalator and Evan watches him go, and you’ll see it. These two boys shared an adventure with one another, just as Reiner’s four protagonists did as well. But Evan and Seth didn’t discover a dead body. And they didn’t discover something unspeakably important about their mortality. Against a backdrop of raunchy humor that goes well beyond Reiner’s film, these boys quietly understand what they’re about to say goodbye to: the underaged liquor and the late-night snacks and those sleeping bag basement sleepovers that they shared, even if they didn’t realize it was the last time that they would do so.

And for my own part, for better or worse, that rival gang of boys never showed up for that rumble in the parking lot of the Methodist church in Mason City, IA, even though we anticipated it and oddly hoped for it and feared it too. We survived that day, and most of us would survive more days than that. Some of us survive to this day. 

But we were there together that day — and that’s what’s on my mind: a perfect moment to roll the credits, even when I’m reluctant to write that I’m ready for it — and I don’t know if any of us are ever really ready for it.

Superbad is currently available for digital rental and purchase on Amazon Prime and other platforms. Stand By Me is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

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This piece — written by Justin Howard Query — was originally published by another source.