#Stand by me narrator movie
The movie (and the Stephen King story its based upon) takes place at a juncture with which everyone is intimately familiar, where the last days of naïveté start to give way to the terrible truths of the grown-up world. Rob Reiner’s 1986 film Stand by Me c elebrates its 30th anniversary today, and though it took in a relatively modest $52.3 million gross upon its original release, it’s aged into a staple of youthful nostalgia for its deft straddling of the line between childhood and adulthood. Enjoying this brief interlude of nothingness, one boy happily sighs: “This is a really good time.” The dated specifics of this scene root it in its setting of Labor Day weekend in 1959, but the not-so-innocent innocence of these pint-size hooligans is eternal. As they cool off, they listlessly toss little rocks into an old tin can a few feet away, and fill the empty air with idle speculation over whether or not Mickey Mouse Club cast member Annette Funicello has started to develop breasts. Just as Emily has had to play mother at times to help out her own mother, so the narrator has had to take on the role of father, especially when Emily’s own father walked out on them, leaving her to be both breadwinner and homemaker.It’s a scorching summer day, and four neighborhood boys are trying to beat the heat by lounging in the shade near a junkyard’s water pump with a refreshing drink.
Of course, although the narrator of ‘I Stand Here Ironing’, as the title makes clear, is engaged in one of the domestic and maternal tasks which a doting mother might be expected to perform in the 1950s, she is aware that her own efforts to perform multiple roles in the family unit have put a strain on Emily’s childhood. She is curious to discover what role her own parenting – as well as the genetics which led Emily to start physically resembling her absent father – has had in ‘making’ Emily who she is, for good or ill. Olsen’s mother character in ‘I Stand Here Ironing’ is interested in how the various details of her daughter’s early life should have led to this culmination, this arrival at a sense of self that is, oddly, about negating or removing one’s true inner self for the purposes of performance. Emily, who has already had to take on various ‘roles’ as a child (including, significantly, that of ‘mother’ to her younger siblings, to help their mother out), finally locates her sense of self in the world of drama and theatre: in other words, her identity is, ironically enough, founded on an absence of one specific ‘self’ which is authentically her.
It makes ‘I Stand Here Ironing’ not a story about Emily, or a story about her mother, but a story about both of them, and the ways in which they are both still forging their identities in relation to each other.
One of the distinctive things about Olsen’s approach is that she allows us to observe the nineteen-year-old Emily only through her mother, who acknowledges early on in the story that her own knowledge of her daughter is incomplete: she dismisses the notion that she possesses some ‘key’ to understanding Emily’s identity and behaviour.Īnd this narratorial stroke of genius works to do something else, too. In some ways, it makes sense to view ‘I Stand Here Ironing’ as a story about adolescence and coming of age, even if the narrator of the story is the mother, rather than her teenage daughter.
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