Nearly 40 years after its release, Stand by Me had a rather surprising impact on Julia Roberts‘ daughter: It made her realize she didn’t want a smartphone.
At a time when ditching smartphones is becoming a bit of a soft Gen Z trend, the superstar says her daughter Hazel Moder (now 20) was inspired to ditch her own phone years ago after seeing director Rob Reiner’s coming-of-age classic (which is based on a novella by Stephen King).
Speaking to The New York Times about her new film After the Hunt, Roberts noted that “people don’t realize how much they miss talking.”
“For some reason, I was thinking this morning about when my kids were young and we showed them Stand by Me, and our daughter said to me, ‘I’m going to give you my phone,’” she recalled. “And I said, ‘OK. What do you want me to do with it?’ She said: ‘You just keep it. I don’t want it. Seeing that movie, I just thought if those boys had phones, they wouldn’t be talking to each other like that. They wouldn’t have gone looking for that body, they wouldn’t sit around the fire and shared these stories.’”
Roberts added: “She could see how it was getting in the way of things. All that’s to say, we love talking to each other, and sometimes we forget how important it is.”
In Stand by Me, four teenage boys (played by Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell) go on a day trip in 1959 to search for the dead body of a missing classmate and bond in unexpected and heartfelt ways. The film was a box office and critical success when it was released in 1986 and also showed that King — then known almost exclusively as a horror author — could deliver non-supernatural dramatic storytelling as well.
Ditching smartphones for either no phones, or “dumb” flip phones, has reportedly been a bit of a trend, though it’s unclear how widespread this is. There has been a documented decline in social media use for the first time — though not in the United States. As reported by The Atlantic, chronic smartphone use has been linked to diminished cognitive capacity, social isolation and poor mental health.
After the Hunt is a psychological thriller about a college professor (Roberts) caught in between a sexual misconduct accusation involving one of her students (Ayo Edebiri) and a colleague (Andrew Garfield).
