Cine-Trash
St. Elmo’s Fire (Joel Schumacher, 1985)
by William Ham
illustration by Michael Corcoran
If, under threat of dismemberment, I were asked to choose the one film that best summed up the 1980s, I’d choose, not Wall Street nor Blue Velvet, but St. Elmo’s Fire. And then I’d brace myself for the pain. But it’s true, I tells ya – St. E’s F is the eighties in only 108 minutes, quite the bargain for those of us who hadda live through the whole thing. It bisected the decade, literally and figuratively – on one side, you have economic prosperity and the belief that the Brat Pack would amount to something in the scheme of cinema history, on the other you have the cracks in the Reaganoid greasepaint turning to fissures and Emilio Estevez’ one-film refutation of the auteur theory, Wisdom. This story of the post-grad angst of a septet of pretty college kids serves several useful functions: as a quick textbook of the BP’s collected “acting” tics (Judd Nelson’s bowlegged swagger and – well, I’ve spoken of his cavernous nostrils enough in the past; Andrew McCarthy’s frightened-puppy bug eyes; Estevez’ ear-rupturing laugh; Demi Moore’s fiberglass-coated throat [the breasts came later – they were still on order]; Rob Lowe’s… I dunno… hair?); the use of twentysomethings as characters, predating by at least five years the moment they got interesting (although it will allow scholars of the future to avoid having to read Less Than Zero); a crash course in easy narrative shorthand (script has no characters? Actors indistinct? Let the wardrobe do the acting!); characters with all the charm of a chancre sore (the men are either drunken cads or drunken stalkers, the women either prissy, wild, or wild-in-a-prissy-kind-of-way); a great look at common sense according to Hollywood (no one does anything that resembles human logic or motivation); a lot of gloss with nothing beneath it (hey, look, I encapsulated the whole decade in eight words – does that mean I’m Joan Didion?); and a sneak peek at the regular panelists on Hollywood Squares 2020 (Who will get the center square? Anthony Michael Hall? Steve Guttenberg?). The only actor that doesn’t completely immolate his/herself in this pale Fire is Mare Winningham, by far the best performer of the lot, but even she is saddled with a role (the uptight virgin) that is too goody-two-shoes to be trudy-two-shoes. There is so much more to say about this film, but with space constraints and all, it’ll just have to wait for my book, “I Love Her, Man”: The Genius of Andrew McCarthy.
