The magic and music of Mr. Rob Lowe...and his super stupid earring.

This movie has Rob Lowe “playing” a saxophone…in a bar…with a band. There’s a part of me that wants to leave this Pop Culture Blind Spot at that. Seriously. It’s the first time in a while that I’ve shouted the word “Really?!?” at a movie. There’s that scene in “Transformers 2” where they crash out of the back of the Air & Space Museum in DC and seem to suddenly be in Iowa…this was more shockingly unbelievable than that was. There was the moment in “The Usual Suspects” when you realize that Spacey is really Soze…this was more outlandishly twisted than that. It even tops the magical moment when Rob Lowe appeared on the Oscars singing with Snow White. It was just that crazy. Don’t believe me? Relive the magic for yourself. But as much as I want it to be, “St. Elmo’s Fire” isn’t all about a few insane scenes of Rob Lowe playing the saxophone. No, it’s about many more insane scenes with many more stars, culminating in Andrew McCarthy using a blowtorch to try to get to a soon-to-freeze-to-death Demi Moore. But, as always, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

A Brief Synopsis of St. Elmo’s Fire: “St. Elmo’s Fire” is one of the quintessentially 80’s movies that I’ve come across. It epitomizes everything that was wrong with the 80’s. First and foremost, it was co-written and directed by Joel Schumacher (otherwise known as the man who ruined Batman). His name at the beginning of the credits should have been my first clue that something was foul in Denmark. The movie follows seven friends who’ve just graduated from Georgetown as they struggle with the challenges of that period in life when you’re just out of school and trying to “make it” in the real world. The seven friends are played by six of the biggest names in 1985 movies…and Mare Winningham (seriously, who invited Debbie Downer?). Quickly, it’s established that the 7 have spent most of their college lives hanging out at a bar called “St. Elmo’s Bar” (hey wait! That’s like the title!) where they’ve got their own table and quirky inside jokes. Basically, they spend the first third of the movie establishing the fact that they’re all kind of spoiled douches…just so they can spend the 2nd third of the movie falling off their high horses…and the final third of the movie climbing back up onto them as slightly improved human beings. Let’s break down the basics of the plot by brat packer and the lesson they learned over the course of the film:

• Kirby (Emilio Estevez): Martin Sheen’s other kid plays Kirby, the least well off of the group, who works as a waiter at “St. Elmo’s Bar.” Although he’s roommates with Andrew McCarthy’s Kevin, Kirby spends most of the movie in a series of escalating stalkerish attempts to date the woman of his dreams, Andie MacDowell’s Dale Biberman. It seems that Dale was a senior at Georgetown when Kirby & Co. were freshman and they went to one movie back in the day. When Kirby sees Dale at the hospital after Billy’s drunk driving car accident (more on that in a minute) he decides to drop out of law school to become a doctor…just like Dale. After following Dale to a party on his bike in the rain and confronting her, Kirby decides that what he needs to impress Dale is 80’s style cash (think Charlie Sheen in “Wall Street”) so he becomes the personal assistant to the mysteriously never explained “Mr. Ho”. He throws a party in Dale’s honor using Mr. Ho’s house only to find out that Dale’s gone skiing instead. He finds this out by driving to her house (only after attempting to have the operator break into her busy telephone line multiple times) and then drives up to the cabin where he finds her with her beau of choice. After spending the night in their living room, Kirby sets off home…but not before Dale’s boyfriend suggests that he get his camera and take a picture of Kirby and Dale…What the French? While loverboy’s inside the cabin grabbing his Polaroid, Kirby grabs Dale and lays one on her. And surprise! she ends up totally kissing him back you guys! Lesson learned: Stalking works.
• Billy (Rob Lowe): Billy’s stuck in a state of arrested development. Known as “Billy the Kid” he drinks too much, sleeps around and makes Nancy Botwin-sized bad decisions. The movie starts with Billy having just wrecked Wendy’s brand new car while driving drunk. She ends up with a nasty bump to the head and he ends up in jail…for what seems like 10 minutes. After his friends (who’ve rushed to the hospital thinking the worst) bail him out of the 10 minutes of jail he was forced to succumb to, they do the only responsible thing: TAKE HIM TO A BAR. The drunk driving offense is never mentioned again. Soon after arriving at St. Elmo’s we learn that Billy the Kid’s got a wife and kid at home and that his true passion is playing his sax…man. Billy spends most of the movie taking advantage of Wendy (who’s got the puppy dog eyes for him from the get go) and lamenting the fact that he’s no longer the irresponsible frat boy that SOMEHOW MANAGED TO GRADUATE FROM GEORGETOWN. Seriously. After confessing his Peter Pan fantasies to Wendy and finding out that she’s a virgin, he attempts to rectify that situation (if you know what I mean) only to lose his cool (and his friend) when he laughs at Wendy’s 80’s era Spanx. In one terrifying “Rob Lowe plays the Sax” scene, it’s Halloween and Billy’s playing at St. Elmo’s Bar with his band “The New Breed” when his wife shows up with another guy. Even though Billy’s been basically saxing every girl in that bar for the entire movie, seeing his wife there with another man throws him into a double-standard rage and he gets into a bit of a punch up. The fight spills out onto the street where Billy and his wife eventually end up making out as everyone looks on with that “Oh Billy, you scamp” look on their faces. It’s baffling. After promising his wife that he’ll give up the boozing and the ladying, he’s caught drunk in their driveway after attempting to get with Jules. His wife remarries and takes their little girl with her and in Billy’s mind, they’re better off without him. Billy only manages to redeem himself in the end by “saving” Jules with a story about an atmospheric phenomenon and then immediately moving to New York to pursue his love of sax. But not before taking Wendy’s virginity…high five! Lesson Learned: Trying is for suckers. Saxing is forever.
• Wendy (Mare Winningham): Wendy’s probably the most two dimensional of the seven friends and really serves in the “friend grenade” capacity for most of the movie. Wendy’s a pushover. She lets Billy use her for money (and eventually sax practice). She lets her father tell her who to date (and almost marry). All Wendy wants is to be independent! If only she’d gotten a solid education from a well known school…oh wait. Although her father seems to be the area’s greeting card baron, Wendy works in a welfare office and soup kitchen because that’s what people who really believe in things do. After having her heart broken by Billy’s Spanx-related humor, she dates a guy hand picked by her parents to become the next greeting card franchise owner. Her new beau Howie is bland, balding and marked for elimination the moment he appears on screen. Even though her father tries to bribe her with a new car (which she takes) she just can’t get engaged to Howie no matter how much he loves greeting cards. After breaking things off with Howie, she moves out of her parents house, paints the bricks blue in her apartment…and sleeps with Billy before he heads for New York. Oh and that new car? Yeah, that’s the car Kirby drives to the ski chalet to find Dale. Lesson Learned: Be your own person and you get to sleep with Rob Lowe.
• Jules (Demi Moore): Jules has a coke problem. Throughout the course of the movie, Jules faces a bunch of different challenges: her job is hard, she’s advanced 2 months on her salary, she’s sleeping with her boss, her furniture’s been repossessed. But in the end, it’s really all about the fact that Jules has a massive coke problem. Not like a “she’s only doing it at parties” problem or a “fun in moderation with a few dips into excess” problem. No. Jules is basically living as a snow bird. We can see her getting worse and worse as the movie goes on and her friends do try to intervene a few times but basically spend the bulk of the movie wringing their hands together and saying things like “She’s getting worse!” No joke geniuses. She’s basically riding the white horse from the opening credits on. It’s Jules eventual cratering that leads to the big reunion in the final reel. Her furniture’s been repo’d and she’s locked herself in her apartment with the windows open and only a t-shirt on. It’s a long, slow, stupid way to kill yourself but dammit, she’s going for the full on freeze. Luckily her friends run to her rescue attempting to break down the door and cut through the steel bars on her window using a blowtorch (Fun Fact: Blowtorch 201 is a requirement for all Georgetown undergrads regardless of major). But it’s Billy’s story of St. Elmo’s fire (“an electrical weather phenomenon in which luminous plasma is created by a coronal discharge originating from agrounded object in an atmospheric electric field”…thanks Wikipedia!). See, the problems that Jules has in her life aren’t anything more than flare ups, like St. Elmo’s fire, which Billy demonstrates using a conveniently placed can of spray paint and a lighter. Of course it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that Jules is doing lines off anything not nailed down. Lesson Learned: Coke isn’t a problem, it’s just a coronal discharge, so go ahead and do sandboxes full of it.
• Alec (Judd Nelson), Leslie (Ally Sheedy) and Kevin (Andrew McCarthy): Why are all three of these characters listed together? Because basically they’re all involved in one big cluster f***. Alec and Leslie met in the dorms at Georgetown and have been dating ever since. They’re in love and have just moved in together at the beginning of the movie. Alec’s a career driven political flunkie with a wandering eye. Leslie’s…well, she’s never really anything other than Alec’s girlfriend. I’m sure that at some point Schumacher mentions what it is that Leslie’s doing with her time when Alec’s not around, but hell if I caught it. Kevin, on the other hand, is a struggling newspaper writer (and Kirby’s roommate) who’s been in love with Leslie for as long as he can remember. So much so that he’s stopped dating (and sleeping) with other women. While all the other drama is going on with Wendy, Billy, Kirby and Jules, the movie still has time to give us a “Is Kevin gay or straight?” subplot that involves him discussing the finer points of love with Thelma from “Amen“. Everyone knows that Kevin’s in love with someone but somehow his 6 closest friends never figure out that it’s Leslie. At the party that Kirby throws for Dale, Alec (who’s been trying to get Leslie to commit to marry him so he’ll stop cheating on her) announces his engagement to Leslie only to spark a fight between the two in the kitchen during which she confronts him about his inability to keep it in his pants. They break up and she ends up spending one glorious night with Kevin. They do the thing that he’s not been doing with anyone else on a coffin with her pearls on…don’t ask me, I didn’t write the movie. Kevin immediately assumes that they’ll live happily ever after (but Leslie is quick to remind him that “Sex isn’t love”)while douchey Alec decides that the best course of action is to be petty about Springsteen albums. It’s a solid strategy for both of them that ends with a confrontation on the fire escape outside Jules’ soon to be frozen apartment. Alec almost drops Kevin off the fire escape in a fit of rage…but 5 minutes later, when Leslie decides that she doesn’t really want to be with either of them (she needs time to find herself, you guys!) they decide that it’s somehow possible for them all to remain friends. Lesson Learned: Pearls, coffins and Springsteen are the most important things in the world and longterm damage to a friendship takes more than infidelity.
  

Why is it a PCBS? Released the same year as another major movie starring a bunch of these actors (“The Breakfast Club”), “St. Elmo’s Fire” is considered one of the infamous “Brat Pack” movies of the era. Not only was the movie a hit, but the soundtrack (specifically “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “Love theme from St. Elmo’s Fire”) was a big hit. You can’t really have these actors all together in a movie at this period of time and not consider it to be pop culturally relevant. We can only hope that at some point in the near future, the cast of “St. Elmo’s Fire” will join with the missing players from that John Hughes era of cinema to make one giant super movie. It would be “The Expendables” of Rom Coms.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Is my contempt for this movie obvious yet? For me, in 2010, this movie was a bit of a train wreck. The problems that all of the main characters had were less about the adversities of growing up after college and more about learning not to make insanely terrible choices while acting like a dumbass. The movie is missing a moral center and it shows when we reach the end and still don’t really care about any of the characters. Yes, it’s sad that Billy’s moving to New York and breaking up the group but it’s good because he’d basically been nothing but a drunk and a deadbeat dad for the majority of the movie. Yes, it’s sad that Leslie doesn’t fall into Kevin’s arms and ride off into the sunset with him but if he’s willing to get over his adoration for her so quickly and go back to “just being friends” with her (and with Alec) then why should we care? And if you want me to care about Kirby the Wonder Stalker or Jules and her coke habit, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Basically the movie ends with no one really having learned anything of real value which is fine for the 80’s but extremely hollow today.

Final Thoughts: Am I glad I saw “St. Elmo’s Fire”? Sure. I mean it’s always nice to see actors that you’re familiar with in one character type stretch themselves to the character type slightly to the left. It makes me respect the writing/directing of John Hughes all that much more since the same basic group of actors that he led to some of the greatest movies of the 80’s were able to come up with this train wreck. Unfortunately though, I realized about three quarters of the way through that there wasn’t anything about this movie that’s bubbled up through the zeitgeist after all these years. There’s no one scene, shot or line that seems to get referenced either in film or daily life. The original tag line for the movie was “The passion burns deep.” Unfortunately, looking back, you realize just how shallow a burn it really was.

But hey, the song’s not that bad. That’s got to count for something, right?