!! Movie Memories: Owen Pallett picks ‘Stand By Me’ !!

Movie Memories is the ongoing feature in which we ask famous people to tell us the instance of movie male nudity that left an indelible impression on their once-impressionable minds.

This week, OMG.BLOG friend and violinista Owen Pallett remembers a scene from the 1986 coming-of-age film Stand By Me that will likely be familiar to many gay children of the ’80s.

“It wasn’t quite nudity, but it had a huge impact,” he explains. “Corey, Jerry, River and Wil are fighting in the swamp, and then they discover they’re covered in leeches. They all strip down to their underwear and pull the leeches off each other. Wil pulls out the waistband of his underpants, looks inside, says, ‘Oh shit’, then pulls out a blood-covered leech and faints.

“I wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies when I was five, so I didn’t Stand By Me until I was 12, same age as the kids in the movie,” he continues. “My mom had told me about that scene a few times; she thought it was hilarious. When I finally saw it, I didn’t get the joke. Finding a leech on balls isn’t a punchline.”

Watch the scene and read more after the jump.

“That scene marked a change in the way I looked at the world. That scene made me depressed for the first time in my life. I realized that, at the age of 12, I didn’t have any male friends as close as the friends in that movie. I know any boys with whom I could walk across a county to find a body, I didn’t know any boys who’d steal cigarettes and buy meat and stay up telling ghost stories. I hadn’t ever had a moment of prepubescent male bonding with anybody, least of all a kid my own age. And I had never, and could never, be close enough with any boy that we’d strip down to our underwear to pull off leeches without a moment of self-consciousness.

“All throughout my teens, I felt that this intimacy with other men was the Other in my life. Female nudity was nothing special, I’d seen a dozen naked pussies before I turned 15. But in Stand By Me, I’d seen a pre-sexual jouissance, and that was all that I desired.

“As for Actual Dicks, the only dicks I saw onscreen until the Internet got porn-ed out were, in order of appearance, Harvey Keitel in The Piano, Ty Henderson in The Competition, a shower-room full of naked men in Apt Pupil and Kevin Bacon in Wild Things. None of them were particularly erotic. Then again, I can’t think of a single time a dick has ever been erotic. Sorry. I know this blog is meant to be sexy. But dicks just don’t work like that, for me, anyway.”

Watch Stand By Me online here.