My Teenage Crush Was Mystifying and All-Consuming. Decades Later, I Finally Understand Why.

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When he filmed Stand by Me, the 1986 Rob Reiner adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Body, River Phoenix was only 14. In 1990, the year my middle-school friends and I watched a rented VHS copy of that movie at every sleepover, we were 13. If you’d asked us at the time, we wouldn’t have been able to explain why Phoenix’s character, Chris Chambers—the brave, wrong-side-of-the-tracks leader of the boy gang on a quest to see a dead body—did it for us. To be sure, Phoenix always had a foxlike, sincere handsomeness. But the other actors we liked played dangerous, older, more explicitly romantic characters—Christian Slater’s J.D. in Heathers, Patrick Swayze’s Johnny in Dirty Dancing. Why would we spend every Saturday night watching young Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell wrestle, bicker, tell ghost stories, and get leeches on their testicles in the middle of a forest? Why did we buy the Stand by Me soundtrack (“lollipop, lollipop, oh lolli lollipop”) and copy its songs onto blank tapes for one another? Why did we rate the boys at our school against Chris Chambers, and find them all lacking?

I was a Gen X tween, without a LiveJournal or a Tumblr to pour forth my obsessions. My love found expression mostly in the purchase of reams of teen magazines and movie posters, to be collaged into a mosaic of River for my wall. Over the years, this old teenage crush became a party anecdote, its power lost to me. But recently, having given up on shielding her from swears, and promising to warn her ahead of time when the dead body would be revealed, we screened Stand by Me for our 8-year-old. “Your mom loved him,” my husband informed my daughter when Phoenix came on the screen. “Mom!” she said, with shocked disgust. “He’s just a kid!” (She cannot imagine me any other age than I am.) She loved the movie; the leeches scene killed. At the end, when Chris Chambers walks off the screen and vanishes, as Richard Dreyfuss’ voice-over describes the character’s heroic death, I cried and cried. “The actor also died very young,” I tried, and failed, to explain.

On Letterboxd, where I went to rank the movie five stars after this rewatch, many fans of Stand by Me say that they either watch the movie and remember their middle-school friends, or think about the good friends they thought they would have, but never did. (The film’s iconic line—”I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?”—doesn’t hit as true for everyone but still retains an elegiac, universal ring, which is a very neat trick.) Then, one reviewer wrote: “river phoenix is so sincere & gentle…it’s like there’s a wall he’s always able to break through to provide a sense of comfort.”

This comment made me realize something. We loved Chris Chambers, and River Phoenix by extension, because there are parts of the movie where Chris is a typical annoying early-teenage boy, engaging in the same tedious games of one-upsmanship with his friends that always seemed tiresome to us girls looking on, hoping to see in our male peers something, anything, to find attractive. (The movie has vanishingly few girl or woman characters; it’s a fully homosocial world.) But as the film unfolds, Reiner alternates this joshing and arm-punching with sincere, deeply felt scenes between Wheaton’s character Gordie and Phoenix’s Chambers. This contrast was what we were looking for—and what brought us back to Stand by Me, again and again.

In one sequence, Feldman and O’Connell’s characters, Teddy and Vern, walk down the railroad tracks as a pair, furiously debating whether Superman could beat Mighty Mouse in a fight. This was one vision of boyhood—the one we knew well. Behind them come the second pair, Chris and Gordie, having a conversation about whether Gordie should join the other three friends in shop classes, or stay on the college track. Chris starts to get worked up, rightfully blaming Gordie’s parents, who can’t get past the recent death of Gordie’s older brother, for not supporting his dreams of being a writer. “You’re just a kid, Gordie. I wish to hell I was your dad,” Chris says (and Phoenix delivers the lines with forceful sincerity). “Kids lose everything unless there’s someone there to look out for them. If your parents are too fucked up to do it, then maybe I should.” This is not a traditionally romantic movie, but these are the kinds of swoon-worthy lines that, if we had read them in a book, we would have underlined twice and annotated with hearts.

Recently, the idea of the “black cat boyfriend” went viral, with Conrad, of the hit show The Summer I Turned Pretty, as the archetype: “brooding, loyal, and weighed down by grief,” as GQ described the character, played by Chris Briney. “Moody but devoted,” the description goes, “embodying a quieter strength rooted in humility and care.” Past “black cats” mentioned include Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson character in Titanic, Milo Ventimiglia’s Jess Mariano from Gilmore Girls, and Ben McKenzie’s Ryan Atwood from The O.C.

Reading about this invented archetype, not only did I want to insist that Chris Chambers should be on the list, I also realized how definitively this one character, a tween from a movie with no kissing, had changed my taste in men. In middle school and high school, a time when I had very little ability to actually speak to boys, I often developed crushes after hearing through the grapevine that a person had dealt with something serious. This wasn’t just about “bad boys,” though that serious thing could be drugs, or legal trouble. It could also be the breakup of a previous big relationship, a crisis one of his close friends had had, or an illness in the family. I just needed to hear that the guy had been through some shit, and hadn’t backed away.

I sparked to these stories because this was the kind of boy I wished my peers would show themselves to be: principled, smart, a chip on his shoulder; a person whose understanding of the stakes of life went deeper than sports, farts, and cartoons. Later, these men would get easier to find. But early on, the character of Chris Chambers made my friends and I believe that behind the scenes, in their private selves, maybe some boys could be like that. We just needed to figure out which.