Classic Movie Review : St. Elmo's Fire (1985)

No one ever tells you that life becomes complicated once you finish school. That losing a structure you've known all your life and where the course is more or less predetermined for everyone can mess you up. You spend most of your life preparing for tests and choosing a course in a domain that might not even provide you with a viable future and then you're on your own. Forever. This is what Joel Schumacher's iconic movie St. Elmo's Fire is about on paper, but it's unwittingly about much more than that.

St. Elmo's Fire tells the story of seven friends who are all struggling to adapt to adult life in their own way after finishing college. They're orbiting by ambitious Alec Newberry (quintessential eighties actor Judd Nelson) who's obsessed with marriage and politics. There's also the handsome and rebellious Billy (Rob Lowe) who can’t seem to keep a job, the unfortunately named Kirby Keger (Emilio Estevez) who spends the movie obsessing over and old crush and the girls who have to deal with these psychos.

Pardon me this emperor-has-no-clothes moment, but I hadn’t ever seen St. Elmo's Fire prior to this viewing and… is it me or this movie is wildly misogynistic? I don’t think it means to be, but it is. For example, Billy attempts sexual assault on Jules (freakin’ Demi Moore) after she tells him "no" over and over, minutes later he rescues her from the lamest suicide attempt ever and tells her that all her problems are self-created and it’s framed as a heart-warming moment? This is wild even by eighties standards.

Kirby is also pursuing a girl (Andie MacDowell) who lives a perfectly fine life without him, doesn't accept that she has better things to do than to fuck him and kisses her without her consent. Leslie (Ally Sheedy) has to constantly tell her boyfriend Alec that she doesn’t get married and even then he pressures her into accepting, Kevin (Andrew McCarthy) wants to fuck her too (and does), there's a whole girls-trying-to-survive-boys-who-are-supposed-to-be-their-friends unspoken angle to this movie.

So yeah, St. Elmo's Fire feels quite dated in a fascinating way. The young women in this movie have to navigate post-college life and figure out who they are outside of accessories to their male friends and boyfriend’s lives. Wendy (Mare Winningham) even has to deal with her overbearing father who way too excited for her to get married and become pregnant so that she can finally drop this silly idea to have a career. Which kind of ties up with what the movie actually means to say.

Perhaps the most interesting and level-headed character in St. Elmo's Fire is Leslie, who's learned to see and understand herself through men's eyes. She's been the girlfriend, the prom queen, the catch-that-is-also-wife-material and her character arc in the movie is about moving on from that self-definition and finding who she is on her own. That is the task that befalls young adults after college as suddenly, there's no one to tell them what to do and who to be. St. Elmo's Fire makes he argument through her evolution.

Billy also has an interesting arc as he misses school, where he was a countercultural figure and where the stakes were incredibly low when he was acting up. As he cycles through odd jobs keeping up with his disturbing behaviour, he circles back to school where he realized that he felt validated over there for the wrong reasons, enabling him to move in. That’s a lot better than Kirby’s arc where he basically just learns not to go where his dick leads him or Alec who consistently remains an asshole throughout.

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Even if it's wildly dated and misogynistic, I couldn't bring myself to hate St. Elmo's Fire. It's still a labor of love written by two men who really cared to make a point about the transition to adult life. There are too many characters and it gets clumsy at times, but it has heart. Some scenes might piss you off, but it's also difficult to watch St. Elmo's Fire and be a little moved by these young adults experiencing failure and earning their wisdom. This is a movie that could use a modern day remake featuring unperverted male characters.

6.3/10

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