St. Elmo's Fire (1985)

I was watching St.Elmo's Fire again after about 30 years that I last saw the film, I didn't see it when it came out, I was only 11 then, but I bought myself the soundtrack on vinyl in 1986 and the music still felt fresh, and so felt the entire experience. I think this may be the only film of its kind that I saw when I was young, well, I also saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but I didn't see Pretty in Pink or Some Kind of Wonderful, for instance, and maybe I didn't even see The Breakfast Club, and having seen all these films now, also Sixteen Candles, it is striking how different St. Elmo's Fire is from them, as it doesn't focus on persons or types, nor does it convey a clear message like Stick to your kind! or Don't be afraid to hook up with another kind! (Some Kind of Wonderful and Pretty in Pink, respectively). Actually, it makes no effort to give any advice at all and neither does it claim anything about people getting to know each other better.

Seeing it now felt like being a coroner performing an autopsy, but fresh and glorious, like having found the cause of a terminal disease. The protagonists are involved in incredibly stupid pursuits, owing to the fact that they never sat down and asked themselves what life should look like according to them, but instead try to incorporate any half baked ideal that caught their fancy into their lives. The Kirby story is quite harmless, but many of the others trouble in terms of what the world is coming to, because they show - or rather hint at - the consequences of such immature decision making.

It is not clear what the authors thought: This is why you fail., Those are the difficulties of youth., Oh, the drama. - it could be any of that. But since the film itself suggests by its title the latter, I wonder whether Peter Frampton would miss in retrospect the generation that thought that it just ain't right, if that generation had not existed in the 1960s.

It is typical of American culture that no generation has any relevance other than for itself and hence there's never anybody that could possibly think that it just ain't right, and that is of course at the core of this, because if there was any intergenerational transfer of experience, then the pipe dreams and costs would be exposed, and in light of the drama of youth I much prefer Agatha Christie's stance on it, which is: It is always a little difficult., which allows both for help and accepting the role of luck, over the stance that Billy puts forth here, which is: There will come a time in your life, when you will have forgotten about all this., which means to accept that you'll be buried alive soon enough.