For anyone who was coming of age during the eighties, St. Elmo’s represented the height of hubris. It represented the height of yuppiedom and suburban sprawl. It represented the height of making America great again (the Reagan version). One can trace the arc of an entire decade by way of the Brat Pack’s ascension and undoing.
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Forty years down the line and here is what you need to know about St. Elmo’s Fire: The movie opens with a car crash, and it doesn’t get any better from there. A case in point (from act one, scene one). We fade in. A pair of doors burst open. Four of the movie’s main characters start moving briskly toward a hospital’s intake desk. Kevin (Andrew McCarthy) is on the far left, and he is smoking. Alec (Judd Nelson) is front and center, and he introduces himself to a police sergeant by mentioning that he is a congressional aide. Kirby (Emilio Estevez) is on the far right, and he introduces himself by mentioning that he is a lawyer. Leslie (Ally Sheedy) gravitates almost immediately to Jules (Demi Moore). Within minutes, the audience has been introduced to every member of the lead cast. What’s more, the dialogue makes it apparent that each of the male characters is inclined toward chauvinism and each of the female characters approaches landing a man as if it were the key to success. Alec is the gold standard. Alec is also an adulterer, and he is attempting to transition from being a young Democrat into being a young Republican. All of the main characters in St. Elmo’s Fire are young Republicans, even though a few of them may not be aware of it yet. To a person, these are narcissists, and, as such, they base their decisions almost entirely on an inflated sense of importance. Upon commencement, all seven emerge along the Georgetown campus. They are young and they are beautiful and they are wearing crooked mortarboards over open gowns. They are a picture of Dorian Gray, and they are aspiring toward a lifetime filled with black-tie gatherings and summer lawn parties along the cape. Are they a sketch? For sure, although they are also an apt reflection of a moment when youth and excess ruled the till.
St. Elmo’s Fire was released smack-dab in the middle of the eighties – mid-year and mid-decade, approximately six months into the second half of the Reagan presidency. The Breakfast Club had been released four months earlier, and Pretty in Pink had already wrapped its production. New York Magazine had just published a cover story about a fresh young crop of twentysomethings, the lot of whom were riding high on the budding wings of stardom. That story, entitled “Hollywood’s Brat Pack,” focused almost exclusively on Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe, and Emilio Estevez; on the Sunset Strip and a shortlist of its vices. David Blum, who had written the piece, relied on a sensationalized blend of reportage and observation to imply that Nelson, Lowe, and Estevez were all hedonists; that they were drunks, and that they might be part-time cokeheads – claims that rained down on the tabloid universe like so much ticker tape. But who made who? That was the question. Had David Blum pulled back the curtain on young Hollywood, or had he exploited a trio of hardworking actors to bolster his own reputation? In the end, it was that label – the Brat Pack – that became a staple of the culture. The label lingered, and it came to signal pettiness, if not entitlement. Over time, it even catapulted a certain subset of that faction into the high-risk category, also known as the dark waters.
I was aware of almost none of this back in 1985. I was 11 years old. I was an altar boy and I had just graduated the sixth grade. My appreciation for anything Brat Pack-related had been relegated to a handful of movies and what I saw on MTV. Everything those actors did seemed to radiate. The seas parted for them; the flashbulbs followed them like strobe lights. As a preteen, my favorite Brat Pack movie was The Outsiders (1983). I was fascinated by the way that film presented the rich kids as the undesirables. That was an epiphany, and there was a romance to it. I was an upper-middle-class product of the suburbs, and, as such, I could only dream of being from the wrong side of the tracks. The Greasers, well, they were all cigarettes and unwashed denim. They had grit beneath their fingernails and they had plaque between their teeth. The world that I knew had a lot more in common with The Breakfast Club. I am fast-forwarding here to the end of the eighties, to a point at which I had learned what it was to spend my Saturdays in detention, just as I had learned what it was to be the reluctant athlete who felt unduly pressured by his father. I could connect with The Breakfast Club because it spoke to getting even with authority; I could connect with The Outsiders because it spoke to running away. And that was what I wanted. I wanted to go elsewhere. I wanted to watch the sun sinking down from a different coast.
I was a senior in high school the first time I saw St. Elmo’s Fire. I was dating a sophomore named Terri and the two of us sat through the movie in her parents’ basement. Terri broke up with me a few months later. We were kids, and it was a brief affair, yet I still tend to think about Terri whenever I hear the St. Elmo’s soundtrack. So sappy, like a blend of adult contemporary that’s more appropriate for adolescents. I cannot recall the how or the why of it, but I acquired a VHS copy of St. Elmo’s when I was a freshman at Penn State. It became one of a handful of movies I would fall asleep to whenever I got drunk. Call it a yearning, or perhaps the need for nostalgia, but I kept going back based on the assumption that I might have missed something along the way. I wanted for that movie to be so much better than I had remembered it. Or perhaps I wanted for my past to be so much better than I had remembered it. Regardless, I came to appreciate St. Elmo’s for its cinematography, particularly the exteriors, a lot of which had been filmed outside the Georgetown campus. St. Elmo’s felt like autumn, or it felt like the academic fall, to be more precise. And it had that cast, including several members of the Brat Pack. Only it was poorly conceived, and even more poorly executed, and there was some weird subtext involving existentialism. Kevin, who is single, spends the opening third of the movie spouting “love-is” platitudes to anybody who will listen. Kevin is a writer. He pens obituaries for a local newspaper. Kevin is also a cynic, and he has been miserable since graduation. Everything changes at the exact moment when Kevin confesses his love for Leslie. The two of them are plastered, and they wind up pawing at each other on the top of a coffin inside his apartment. Shortly after, Kevin earns his first byline, an editorial entitled “The Meaning of Life” that runs on the front page of the newspaper (beneath the fold). It’s preening nonsense, much like the majority of what passes for intellectual stardust in St. Elmo’s Fire. This is a story about a septet of prima donnas, all of whom would benefit from nothing more than drifting swiftly and irreversibly apart from one another.
St. Elmo’s does not present well, and it does not provide the audience with any main cast member to admire. Nevertheless, certain films endure based on what they allow the public to reexperience, whether that be a lost love or a rite of passage, some loose connection to what they felt at a certain place and time. For anyone who was coming of age during the eighties, St. Elmo’s represented the height of hubris. It represented the height of yuppiedom and suburban sprawl. It represented the height of making America great again (the Reagan version). One can trace the arc of an entire decade by way of the Brat Pack’s ascension and undoing. In the years leading up to St. Elmo’s, for example, there was The Outsiders (1983), Sixteen Candles (1984), and The Breakfast Club (1985); in the years after, Pretty in Pink (1986), About Last Night (1986), and Fresh Horses (1988). All the while, the state of a nation kept pivoting. By the early nineties, a lot of the Brat Pack’s demographic had entered its thirties. The US was on the verge of a war in the Persian Gulf. Bret Easton Ellis, himself a member of what had become known as the Literary Brat Pack, stood at the center of a controversy involving his as-yet-unreleased novel, American Psycho. Twin Peaks had become an unexpected phenomenon, and Jonathan Demme was putting the finishing touches on a psychological thriller entitled The Silence of the Lambs. School was out. The worm was turning.
All things must draw to a close, and if there is any aspect of St. Elmo’s that speaks to impermanence it is the final five minutes. The autumn has given way to winter. The main characters are wearing overcoats. Billy (Rob Lowe) has just hopped a bus bound for New York City and Leslie has decided that she would like to spend some time away from both Alec and Kevin. All six of the remaining characters are together, and they are walking, and they have come to a halt outside of St. Elmo’s Bar. This was their clubhouse; it was their Central Perk, for lack of any better way of putting it. Inside there is a different crowd now, or perhaps it is the same crowd bearing different faces. “How about brunch on Sunday?” Leslie asks. She does this as a way of acknowledging that their college days are behind them. Alec suggests that they all meet at Houlihan’s around 12:30, and the others agree. The main cast exits, and the credits roll over a long shot of the bar and its marquee. And that is where we leave these cretins . . . or is it?
During a July 2024 interview with Entertainment Tonight, Rob Lowe admitted that he and several other St. Elmo’s cast members had recently been approached about reprising their roles in a sequel. It is worth noting that this story was developing during the peak of what Charli XCX had dubbed “brat summer” – a reference to her multi-platinum LP Brat – and it is also worth noting that this story was developing approximately six weeks after the premiere of Andrew McCarthy’s straight-to-streaming documentary, entitled Brats. Throughout that documentary, McCarthy behaves like a man who has been suffering from PTSD ever since the go-go eighties. Amid conversations with Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Demi Moore, McCarthy consistently circles back to the idea of assigning blame, of reaching some sort of consensus about who had done them dirty back in the day. Moore, in particular, makes it known that she is entirely at peace with the direction that her adult life has taken, and why wouldn’t she be? Of all the actors who had emerged from the Brat Pack (or who were Brat Pack adjacent), Moore was the only one who had been able to continue starring in mainstream motion pictures well into her forties.
And so now here we are, touching down during a pop-culture moment when “brat” is no longer considered a pejorative and Demi Moore has finally become a Golden-Globe winner at the age of 62. Brat is back, baby. Collins Dictionary even declared brat as its official word of 2024. To be brat in the modern era means to be completely over it, or to be independent, or to be brimming with self-assurance. Will there be a sequel to St. Elmo’s Fire? The demand is there, albeit among a white-and-aging demographic. Perhaps a limited series called Brunch at Houlihan’s, or better yet, a spinoff about Jules entitled Pineapple & Pearls. Pitch it to the bigwigs at SONY. Tell the execs there that you’re interested in developing an ensemble drama that prides itself on reinforcing the way that people who despise beautiful people think that beautiful people behave. It worked once. I know because I was there and I remember it, or at the very least, I remember how it made me feel. Every time I have watched St. Elmo’s since then, it has caused me to cherish something about a period in my life when matters weren’t so good. St. Elmo’s is a shallow piece of cinema, yet it is just shallow enough that it allows me to remember what I want to remember, and not to get weighed down with all of the other hokum from my past.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
