Assholes All the Way Down
'St. Elmo's Fire' is terrible, iconic, and offers an excruciating example of accidentally dislikable characters.
NEW STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This newsletter aggressively spoils things.
If you didn’t experience the 1980s you might not believe they happened1. Case in point: St. Elmo’s Fire, which I recently watched after stumbling home, quite inebriated, one Saturday evening. You come home at one in the morning and turn on the TV and St. Elmo’s Fire is just beginning, you are obligated to watch it, slack-jawed in horror2.
Released in 1985, the film is considered the quintessential “brat pack” film because it stars, well, the majority of the Brat Pack, a group of young actors who often worked together in the 1980s and seemed, for one shining moment, to be the future of all entertainment3. The precise membership varied, but it generally included every actor in this film: Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Mare Winningham (the movie also stars Andie MacDowell and “hey, it’s that guy” guy Martin Balsam). The story is a mess of melodrama: Seven best friends and recent graduates of Georgetown embark on their adult lives, get drunk, make mistakes, and live beyond their means. There are affairs, unrequited loves, cocaine4, and debt collections.
It’s all pretty bad, but it’s actually given a jolt of energy from one simple fact: All seven of the main characters are what scientists call spectacular assholes. Normally mainstream entertainments try to avoid the Everybody Sucks gambit on the theory that the audience likes to have someone to root for, but the producers of this film (including the late Joel Schumacher) went in the bolder direction and offer us seven people you want to immediately punch in the face. I mean, there isn’t a single person in this film you can like or root for. They all deserve to be set on fire5.
Forever Got a Lot Shorter All of a Sudden
You get the impression that St. Elmo’s Fire was created using a primitive pre-AI algorithm6. They had these hot, young stars, so all they needed to do was plop them into a scenario, wind them up with some conflict, and let them run around in a coke-fueled flopsweat for two hours7. Nothing about it makes any sense: You have seven people who don’t share a major, a life goal, political ideology, fashion sense, or economic status. How in the world did these people even meet on campus8? At best, they should have a casual nodding acquaintance when they pass each other in the quad, yet they are somehow so close they know everything about each other. It’s a complete mystery with zero solution: They are best friends because that way they can pretend to be very, very upset with each other at different points in the story. Drama!
And in a way, it worked. When I was 15 years old, this movie more or less defined what I thought young adulthood would be like: Lots of drinking, wearing snazzy clothes, casual hookups that have zero negative impact on the friendships9, staying out late and being very, very sad about stuff all the time because life is just so damned hard. No, I was not a popular kid. Why does that come up all the time10?
Again, when writing a story it’s a good idea to make your characters appealing. They don’t have to be good or nice, but they have to be people that a reader or viewer actually wants to spend time with. Instead, we have a cast of assholes: One is cheating on his fiance, one is trying desperately to stay in his frat boy days and treating his best friend like shit, one is angrily stalking a woman he barely knows (and he is angry about it, kids, for reasons that will elude all but the craziest people), furious that she doesn’t give a shit about him. Demi Moore’s character is snorting her way through her credit lines, one of her supposed best friends more or less sexually assaults her, the “nice” girl happily lives off her father’s money, and the aspiring writer (Kevin, played by Andrew McCarthy) farts around like the world owes him inspiration11, and when his two best friends (Alec and Leslie, played by Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy) break up he waits exactly zero seconds before zooming in to try and bang Leslie12. Because it’s not like her whole life has just been ruined or anything.
Because nothing in this movie makes sense, she goes for it, and the two have some hot, soft-focus 1980s sex. Kevin is basically vibrating with delight afterward, because he pulled a total villain move and it totally worked! And then he’s picking out wedding rings and wondering how many kids they’re going to have, and that’s when Leslie drops the hammer: She just used him to make a clean break from Alec. Which really sets Leslie up as the Worst Elmo, frankly, because she’s angry at him, but not for leveraging her emotional devastation for his own sexual and emotional gratification, but for assuming she returned his feelings in some way due to the fact that she slept with him when he told her he loved her13.
To be clear: Kevin is also an asshole. No one here deserves your affection. It’s assholes all the way down14.
Wasted Love!
The problem is clear: Once you’re about thirty minutes in, you not only don’t care about the goals and dreams of these people, you actively root against them all. None of them deserve happiness. This is a problem for a narrative trying to convince an audience to stick with it until the end and possibly recommend it to their friends.
And it’s even worse, because the fictional universe that St. Elmo’s Fire is set in—the Elmoverse15—actually rewards these shitheads. Kirby, the guy stalking a nice young woman who barely remembers him from school? After a humiliating evening when his car breaks down after he drives angrily to stalk her and her boyfriend on a skiing trip, he gets a fist-pump moment when he grabs her and forces a kiss on her, beaming with pride as he drives away. Demi Moore blows all her money on blow and all of her friends rally around her to reassure her that she’s loved. Leslie moves on from both her asshole former fiance and her asshole Nice Guy fuck buddy, taking control over her life. No one is punished. At the end of the film they’re all heading out for a nice dinner, cracking jokes and dreaming of all the carnage they’re gonna cause once they have a little money16.
That complete lack of consequence is not only infuriating, because it demonstrates that the Worst People You Know will never suffer for their sins, it also belies the fact that this isn’t really a story. It’s a series of events cobbled together so we can admire the pretty people. And what’s truly sad is that giving just one character a conscience and the ability to comprehend how terrible they are would have made this at least moderately better17.
Instead: Assholes all the way down18.
NEXT WEEK: The Tourist has an Ethan problem.
If you enjoy this newsletter, consider subscribing to my paid fiction Substack, Writing Without Rules: From the Notebook!
A piece of real evidence that we’re living in a simulation: Frosted jeans.
The slack-jawed in horror part is optional, but if you’re not slack-jawed in horror while watching this travesty I have a legal obligation to call in a wellness check on you.
My firm belief that time travel is real is based on my firm belief that some intrepid hero traveled back from an alternate 2024 when Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy are in fact the biggest stars in the world and fixed things like Kyle Reese.
Being produced in the 1980s it’s possible that Demi Moore was just casually doing coke throughout filming and they decided just to leave it in for convenience.
St. Elmo’s Fire, get it? I’ll show myself out.
I’d like to imagine a room full of Commodore 64s crunching through a BASIC program pulling data from a sequential database on a cassette drive to write this script, but then, I’m a weirdo.
That’s as good a plot summary as you’re gonna get.
My freshman year of college I lived on the engineering campus. As a direct result all of my friends from college are enormous nerds.
I’ve always been fascinated with the trope of two friends having sex and then casually going back to being friends, because in my personal experience failing to send someone a Happy Birthday on Facebook pretty much sends shockwaves of violence through any friend group, so sex would result in someone’s house being burned down.
Is NO, I WAS NOT A POPULAR KID, PLEASE STOP ASKING the title of my memoir? Yes!
Okay, okay: This part is kind of accurate.
And succeeds! Because these people are all terrible. Also probably all that cocaine.
Again, the characters in this movie feel like they were cooked up by AI. Maybe time travel is real after all, and Chat-GPT is beaming film scripts back to 1985.
This is also how I imagined young adulthood to be, and as it turns out this part was 100% accurate.
There’s a non-zero chance that the simulation we’re living in is, in fact, the Elmoverse, and now you may never sleep again.
I’m still plotting the carnage I’m gonna inflict once I have a little money. ETA on me having a “little money” is currently about fifty-three years from now, when I will be dead.
I keep picturing a scene where Kevin McCarthy breaks down sobbing and just starts screaming WE’RE TERRIBLE PEOPLE for 23 minutes, then a smash cut to credits. The films I would make if I had the ability would be truly awful.
Actually, I think ASSHOLES ALL THE WAY DOWN is the title of my memoir.
Yes, BUT I still play "Man in Motion" at the gym when I'm trying for those last, terrible few reps, so there's that.
Thank you!