Contemporary Traces of the Modern Soundtrack

9	Stand By Me	1987 - Rob Reiner (USA)
	Voice & memory	Ellegaic devices; flashback & voice-over narration; musicological effect; the past of Rock’n’Roll

Stand By Me does not take its title from the Ben E. King song for mere nostalgic effect. The film is a cinematised rendering of the interiority the song manifests through its aura. This is wonderfully anti-literary mode which cinema rarely employs despite cinema's propensity for the lyrical, the evocative and the immersive.

This mode of narration is openly declared as 45 year old Gordie (Richard Dreyfuss) sits in his pick-up, reading a newspaper headline about a man killed in a hold-up. Gordie is dumbstruck by what he has read; it has violently ruptured his present, pouring in the forgotten past when he was friends with the man - Chris - of whom he now reads. Rising from the soft countryside ambience is a delicate instrumental version of 'Stand By Me'. It is slow, measured, restrained; it drips with melancholy, yearning, loss. This is song as touched by rememberance, transforming its original energy into a distanced rendition. While Ben E. King's version throws one back into the past - to the moment of its release and effect upon young Gordie - this slowed-down reverie ushers the past into the space of the present, where mature Gordie hears things as differently as he perceives his past upon reflection

In Stand By Me, song is less musicological - referencing music's social contract in the act of listening - and more diaristic and interpretative - referencing the personal relationship one forms at a juncture of listening. Melding sound design with song placement and film score, the film's music actualises and mobilises memory as song is spatially rendered: on radios in cars, transistors carried while crossing bridges, on turntables in rooms. The acoustic quality of each space is fused with the song's emmission, just as the smell of a room can make one recall its wallpaper. As the story of Stand By Me is told in flashback by Gordie, the multiple manifestations of songs 'score' his memory, on top of which his voice floats. Gordie's voice is continually coloured by the moment of awareness, as if his remembering of the past as triggered by a tragic present puts everything into perspective.

Just as Gordie's words convey this, his silence is crucial in framing his awareness. Silence is what joins young Gordy (Wil Wheaton) with his buddies Chris (River Phoenix), Teddy (Corey Feldman) and Vern (Jerry O'Connell) when they embark on a trip to witness the body of a dead boy. Its dread mute presence marks their collective journey with an acute suppression which binds them to never tell anyone of their experience. Gordie's voice-over releases him from that which he had held within for too long; his unplanned memory of the incident now allows him to break its silence.

Nostalgia is an entirely inappropriate term to describe the narrative machinations of Stand By Me. Not once does one audit in Gordie's voice-over a simple 'reliving of the past'. Rather, the lyrical weaving of his voice with slivers, sheets and threads of songs from his childhood era - either acoustically diffused or thematically orchestrated - conducts an aching elergy that respects how songs of the past only ever return one to that which one has lost.

From the BFI book 100 Modern Soundtracks.