St. Elmo's Fire (1985)

St. Elmo's Fire arrives as a pristine specimen of 1985 Brat Pack cinema, a film that follows seven Georgetown graduates as they negotiate the treacherous waters of post-collegiate life. The enterprise is thoroughly yuppie-aspirational, its moral universe bounded by career ambition, romantic entanglements, and the search for a more sedate brunch spot. Any expectation of modern social consciousness should be set aside at the door. The principal cast is uniformly white, with a wealthy Korean businessman and an ungainly Jewish suitor appearing only as minor plot devices. A single line in which Jules accuses Kevin of being gay functions as a throwaway insult, not a genuine exploration of LGBTQ+ themes. Leslie's reluctance to marry and Wendy's assertion of independence from her parents register as mild 1985-era gestures, hardly a feminist agenda. The film's treatment of Wendy's girdle during a drunken encounter is the opposite of body-positive sensibility. There is no climate content, no anti-capitalist critique (Jules's overspending is framed as personal failure), no neurodivergent characters, and no historical subject matter to revise. The film's lecture energy is similarly muted. It wallows in its protagonists' problems without delivering any preachy social message to the audience. The characters are spoiled, affluent, and unbearably smug, as contemporary critics noted, and the film accepts their worldview without real criticism. This is not a sermon; it is gossip, as David Denby put it, designed to be picked apart on the telephone. The result is a time capsule of self-absorption, a document of young Republicans learning to brunch. For those of us who classify cultural artifacts with somber precision, St. Elmo's Fire offers a low-yield specimen: a film that gestures toward independence and romantic autonomy but never threatens to challenge the status quo. It is a relic of an era when social consciousness meant remembering to call your friends after a crisis. The score, appropriately, sits near the bottom of the scale.