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The video makes me want to barf on so many levels, too many to count, much less explicate. Highlight of disgust: the light pats by Boy X across the waist of Man X. I wanted to see – we all wanted and expected to see – what AI thinks Phoenix would look like now. Not provided. But perhaps that’s not a meaningful expectation: exactly how drug-addled would he have turned out? Poor Rob Reiner. Politically insane, murdered by his even more insane son. It's just horrible. But "Stand By Me" was a remarkable achievement. It captured a boyhood, a boyhood going extinct, and one decisively pretty much lost when the movie came out. Everybody knew it; the timing was perfect. The story was intimately sentimental, situated within the imaginative reach of both the old and young: if one had not experienced such a childhood, one certainly knew it had once been, and longed for it. Norman Rockwell had documented the same a few decades earlier, not so much in individual works as across his career: the dying stage of Western boyhood. This one marvelously silly illustration of skinny-dipping boys fleeing some enforcer of the "No Swimming" sign is especially a propos: https://images.freeart.com/comp/art-print/fan15070002/no-swimming.jpg?pw=8.0&ph=8.0&fit=True&print_finish=matte&size=large With "Stand by Me," Reiner, like Rockwell, captured not boyhood per se so much as the aesthetics of its deconstruction. Both artists get away with it by exploiting the fact that boyhood itself includes the logic of its own destruction. The category error is momentous, but Reiner and Rockwell both commit it. The pederastic impulse that drove them to such error and denial goes unnoticed or ignored, as does their betrayal of that impulse. If only Rockwell had illustrated Twain's Tom Sawyer, chapter XVI! After breakfast they went whooping and prancing out on the bar, and chased each other round and round, shedding clothes as they went, until they were naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the shoal water of the bar, against the stiff current, which latter tripped their legs from under them from time to time and greatly increased the fun. And now and then they stooped in a group and splashed water in each other's faces with their palms, gradually approaching each other, with averted faces to avoid the strangling sprays, and finally gripping and struggling till the best man ducked his neighbor, and then they all went under in a tangle of white legs and arms and came up blowing, sputtering, laughing, and gasping for breath at one and the same time. |