Playing hooky to 'St. Elmo's Fire'

I saw St. Elmo's fire in the Spring of 1986, and I can recall very few movies so clearly, but seeing it was an act of rebellion, because I was graduating from Uni High, and was taking the day off, being a bad boy (ha!). I wasn't doing much more than a lot of derelicts were doing on a day to day basis, but they were more into taking bong hits, not that I didn't like that, but I put an artistic spin on all of my pursuits, because I was a failed athlete turned artist, a cliche kind of like Hubble Gardner in the movie "The Way We Were," a top ten movie for me, that I all but have memorized, because it was like watching a refraction of my life. 'Everything came too easily,' to me too, like Hubble wrote about himself in his story for Freshman English that garnered him rave reviews.

"The Way We Were," may have been the first cheesy love story that I was into, but that's really diminishing it, because it was one of the greatest movies of all time, and a gift that my Mother helped give to me, though I would've watched it on my own, and did many times, but just a beautiful story, that lives forever. I'm not sure whether it started out to be this way but "The Way We Were," just sort of turned into one of those all time classic love movies that have come to define the French, and it came out around the time of "A Man and a Woman," a movie I could never get into, but admit is great. The "Way We Were" is great too, in league with Redford's and Streisand's best movie, and I want to say it was THEIR best, and what made it such a great timeless enduring sappy stupid love story, that I've come to watch more than any other, a real treat, and much more than a 'chick flick' like the fictional character Samantha Jones said on "Sex and the City." You could watch that movie a thousand different times and see it a thousand different ways, and I know that because I've tried. It's more complex than the "Graduate" that I wrote about, because that is just too simply a great work of art, but the "Way We Were," is not so pure, whether by design and accident, but equally as good, and therefore more tantalizing as I grow older, and bend out of Benjamin Braddock, the "Bar Mitzvah Boy," as I called him in my blog.

"St. Elmo's Fire," was edgy when it came out, easily an R rated movie, that took it to the limit for my stunted generation, but R was pretty cool. I'm not sure I judged it like a critic and I'm thankful for that, and this ties into something I posted on FB recently, that I was afraid that the 'art' of the going to the movies was lost, because a lot of the enjoyment had to do with getting out of the house and going to a movie theater, whether alone or on a date, because they worked well either way, but were very different experiences. I'll forever equate "St. Elmo's Fire" with one or two of the 'bad boy' experiences I had in high school, because on outward appearances I lead a pretty normal life, due to pressure from my conservative family, but on the inside I was going crazy, so I was forced to express this through rebellious acts like seeing "St. Elmo's Fire," in early June with a good friend in Westwood Village, feeling like I understood life. I wish I could say this had everything to do with my rebellious feeling, but I think as much of it had to do with the movie that made me feel adult. It was about 'post-graduate's,' just college graduates, one step up from me, a high school graduate, but I was going away to Santa Cruz in a couple of months, already accepted, and in the same predicament.

Sure, the characters in "St. Elmo's Fire" were older than me but they echoed the original 'brat pack' (Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson), that spoke directly to me just a year or two before. They were playing older characters, more mature, and having sex with each other, more defined, but not yet defined, or defining each other, making for a fascinating movie. It was like the great precursor to Gen X cinema, while at the same time stuck in the past, a schlocky masterwork, that was both ahead and behind of "The Breakfast Club" that preceded it. "St. Elmo's Fire," had two big actors from the original 'Brat Pack,' our rat pack, but they added a newcomer, Andrew McCarthy, as the romantic lead, and a couple of newbies, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, and boy is it weird to use the word 'newbie' when referring to them, but I guess that tells you how old I am. For Demi Moore and Rob Lowe, the newbies, it was the beginning of an illustrious career, but for Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson, it may have all but ended their career, not because their performances were particularly bad, and I'd probably argue they were good (they were a couple with confused ideals), that for whatever reason "St. Elmo's" was the straw that broke their back. I'm not even sure that John Hughes, the Fellini of the 'brat pack,' directed the movie, but "The Fire" broke the 'brat pack' forever, and I don't think it ever united again. It was like a genre had stretched as far as it could and snapped.

The movie felt like a cross between a sort of second-wave new-wave story of the boomers, with a hint of my generation, but they were distinctly older, and the biggest conflict seemed to be whether they should sell out or not, and what exactly selling out meant. In some ways, it may have been the first movie to put this question into perspective, because up until this point, it was assumed that a 'sell-out' was bad, and that someone that stayed true to the truth seeker's path was, well, true, but the lines were blurry in "St. Elmo's Fire." It didn't hurt that Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, he as the saxophonist staying true to his dreams, and she as the lost art school girl, gone to cocaine, were an interesting couple, because they didn't sell out, or fuck (I don't think), and yet they were the losers of the bunch. The couple that really took on the question of selling out were Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson. They were living in D.C. and she was working for a good democratic party cause in 1986, a pre-Dukakis but post-Mondale era, when there was more than one liberal in the Senate, and Gary Hart could still be President, carrying J.F.K.'s torch. Judd Nelson was a young Republican but a kind of lit one like Alex P. Keaton on "Family Ties," or a character out of an Ayn Rand book, but I don't remember either character necessarily winning the war over the debate of their love, except that she has an unforgettable affair with Andrew McCarthy, the poet, in the shower, a contradistinction to Judd Nelson, and yet a similar type, true to his ideals. In fact, they are the thee idealists of the movie - Judd Nelson, the political operative, Ally Sheedy, the political idealist, and Andrew McCarthy, the artistic tortured wounded idealist, all coming to a head, as they do in real life, and a great triangle, almost like "Reds," with Warren Beatty as John Reed, the socialist idealist, Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill, the tortured artist, and Diane Keaton, the muse caught between two worlds, but "St. Elmo's Fire" was better, if less instructive. It not only had this story but another one of a tortured love affair between two in between generation'rs, Demi Moore and Rob Lowe, as coke heads party freaks afraid to grow old, like the boomers, and a much less serious sub-story.

I loved "St. Elmo's Fire," like I love all bad cheesy art that stands the test of time. I wish Mark Wyatt a happy birthday for drawing a great sketch of it, that takes real courage, and since he was a little older than me, maybe he was seeing the characters from the rear-view mirror while I was flash forwarding to the future, but I don't think I ever felt so delinquent watching a movie and that either makes me the most pathetic person in the Universe, or a hopeless romantic, or a little bit of both. I know "St. Elmo's Fire" is a bad movie, but bad movie's like that don't come along very often, and I've come to respect that more as I get older, because that's a sacred pact a movie has between the zeitgeist of the times, that is unspeakable, so much so Rupert Murdoch doesn't even know about it. The movie killed two stars and created two more, and even a bad movie that noteworthy is a success, in a film lover's mind, but accidents don't happen by accident, and the movie let that happen, the ushering in of the new, the second wave boomer story, and the killing of the former, the fucked up Gen-X story, so that the boomers won in "St. Elmo's Fire," by accident. Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, the tortured party souls, became huge stars while Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, and Andrew McCarthy, taking on the real Gen X struggle of how to conform to a corrupt society when you've been taught by Ex-Sixties revolutionaries that society was fucked-up, were on their way out. Hollywood dropped them soon after 1986 when "Fire" was released, because I think that the struggle they represented from the original 'brat pack' was worn out, or so Hollywood thought. The transition between the first wave of the baby boomer generation, and the second wave, was hazy for a few years of my teenage years, but then quickly was taken over by the second wave boomers, best symbolized by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the popular imagination, but by Demi Moore and Rob Lowe in "St. Elmo's Fire," tabling the real concerns of Gen X that were to be addressed in 'grunge,' the music not the movie.

The original 'brat packers' were excluded from grunge, ushering it in but nowhere to be seen when it hit in the early Nineties. Anthony Michael Hall had the most tragic demise of the original stars, really losing his magic, but they all disappeared (Molly Ringwald to France) in almost historic fashion, barely resurrected even in trivia, and yet they existed for a horribly painful moment when our parents born in in 1945 were getting old, especially by their standards, and the generation beneath them had yet to come up, and everyone was looking for the youth (us) for an answer. Hollywood, as if she was a person, took away all of our adolescent heroes that should have represented us as we got older, and maybe they would have, but the John Hughes movie ended with "St. Elmo's Fire," and nothing like it has ever returned, though I guess "Napoleon Dynamite" was this for another generation, a worthy movie, but I'm not sure a 'star making machine' was made of it like the brat pack with all their angsty swagger, my friends. "Napoleon Dynamite" was more of a one off that set off some minor explosions, but the 'brat pack' were huge in a pre-internet, post ET era, and it's interesting to see how they died, killed off by the budding roots of an older generation, coming into maturation, and threatened by the young buds. My heroes were killed and I barely noticed it, because they were replaced by new heroes in "Pulp Fiction," although there was nothing new about John Travolta, he'd been fucking me up since '76 in "Saturday Night Fever," another unforgettable movie-going experience that is being lost, but I don't think many people care, and if I told them my "Saturday Night Fever" story, they'd never want their kids going out again.

I felt older walking out of "St. Elmo's Fire," like I'd literally aged watching the movie. It was the same movie theater in the village next to the Taco Bell where my friend Sean Barth's sister worked as an usher, and talked about how people left the "Deer Hunter" crying; the same movie theater where I saw "Baby It's You," and probably had one of the sweetest most unforgettable movie going crushes of my life on Rosanne Arquette, that I still cherish, since it was rare; I also saw "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" there and there may have never been a Woody Allen movie I appreciated more, still one of my favorites, even if my intellect searches for deeper movies of his, because I never enjoyed watching one in a movie theater more than that one. Woody made me feel like a real movie fan that day, a guy who lived for the movies, and could watch "Anyway Which Way But Loose," "Eddie and the Cruisers," or "Cannonball Run II," and still appreciate the comic subtlety of a neurotic New York City Jew, making me feel like the biggest movie fan in the world, like Woody made of Mia Farrow in "The Purple Rose of Cairo."