Let’s Talk about What We Learned from The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire

C onsider two views of youth:

One: Man, I did a lot of stupid stuff. I got away with more of it than I should have. I was such a fool. Thank heaven my parents and other grownups indulged my craziest period and helped me get through it.

Two: I couldn’t really be myself because of the environment my parents and society created around me. Being young was nonstop misery and frustration, and this is all the fault of the grownups and social structures that warped me.

The two views I have described are the thematic basis of, respectively, St. Elmo’s Fire and The Breakfast Club. The movies came out within four months of each other in 1985 and came to define the short-lived trend called Brat Pack cinema. (After that instantly notorious coinage appeared on the cover of a June 1985 New York Magazine piece about Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, and Judd Nelson, the actors involved became allergic to working with each other for fear the dreaded label might be invoked, and the Brat Pack era essentially ended as soon as the movies that were under way at that moment were released.)

Though both movies were hugely profitable, The Breakfast Club (released for Valentine’s Day 1985) is generally respected, and St. Elmo’s Fire (which followed in June) is reviled. Both movies are about awful young people, but St. Elmo’s Fire is not only more mature about youth, framing it as a time of self-deluding folly and horribly self-indulgent behavior, it also has a more accurate feel. Be honest: Did you really spend your teen/young-adult years feeling as though your parents and teachers were puppeteers yanking your strings? I didn’t. I don’t think anyone in my very typical suburban high school felt that way. For Gen X, parents were at most a mild inconvenience who didn’t much care what we did and were unable to stop us from doing what we wanted anyway.

So why is The Breakfast Club so much more popular? Because writer-director John Hughes flatters his audience. He tells them, “Your problems are not your fault.” Andy the wrestler (Emilio Estevez) beats up another kid in a locker room for absolutely no reason, then blames this on his dad, who he imagined would approve. Huh? Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) contemplates suicide because he’s failing Shop class and is disappointing his parents, who have put major academic pressure on him. But he acknowledges he might be able to get his grade up to a B. Suicide over a B? Don’t blame your parents if you’re that much of a control freak.

Claire (Molly Ringwald) can’t be nice to people outside her clique for fear of social retribution: She’s a little princess, but it’s the system’s fault. This mindset may be common, but the Claires of the world are rotten people for perpetuating these status games. As for Bender (Judd Nelson), the abused child turned brave-yet-sensitive truth-teller who sacrifices himself to save the others (when the quintet leaves the library, he creates a distraction so that only he will be captured and punished), the character is a fantasy. We all knew burnouts in high school, and none of these guys ever came close to being brave or honest. Their failures were the result of their poor character and worse decisions. Some of these guys came from troubled homes, and some didn’t, but they all had agency to choose their own way. Bender’s parents fight, he gets nothing for Christmas except cigarettes, and he takes a punch from his old man once in a while. So what? A lot of boys did, and made something of themselves anyway. Bender is heading for a miserable life, and we’re supposed to think he’s a virtuous young man who is a helpless plaything of forces beyond his control. Sentimental nonsense.

The overarching lie is: All of the kids’ character flaws are the fault of grownups, or the system. Brian even claims, “We were brainwashed.” Note the passive voice here: Kids are put upon. They suffer the effects of mind control. Really? Is there a single person above the age of 30 who thinks he was “brainwashed” in high school? Starting with the epigraph of the film, a quotation from David Bowie’s “Changes” which asserts that kids know everything and adults know nothing, The Breakfast Club is an exercise in pandering to teens.

St. Elmo’s Fire is also about horrible young people, but the movie doesn’t let them off the hook for their flaws. Adults are in no way to blame for their missteps. If anything, grownups do their best to help steer these crazy kids away from their terrible choices, and help them when they mess up.

Consider Estevez’s Kirby, the law student caught up in a sexual obsession so demented that he stalks a young physician (Andie MacDowell) everywhere from a fancy party to a ski chalet where she is staying with her boyfriend. She gives him no reason to think she is romantically interested in him, and yet he keeps relentlessly dogging her. Her reaction to all of his insane behavior is . . . patience and kindness. She and her boyfriend, who doesn’t know Kirby at all, even invite him to stay the night in the ski cabin. Meanwhile, a Korean plutocrat hires as his assistant the irresponsible Billy (Lowe) and is forced to fire him for exploiting his generosity, then hires Kirby, who after swearing to be an ideal employee immediately holds a blowout party in the house he’s supposed to be looking after. Which group seems more true-to-life: the adults in St. Elmo’s Fire or the ones in The Breakfast Club? The adults of St. Elmo’s bend over backwards to help these foolish youths — Billy notes late in the movie that he has already been fired 20 times, which means adults took a chance on hiring him 20 times. In The Breakfast Club, Mr. Vernon is a walking cliché of corny and clueless authoritarianism, and the largely unseen parents inflict nothing but damage on their kids. The movie lets youth evade responsibility for our freely chosen mistakes.

St. Elmo’s Fire, deftly written by its director Joel Schumacher and Carl Kurlander, instead smartly identifies self-deceit as the principal problem facing young people. Kevin (Andrew McCarthy, author of a thoughtful new memoir on this mini-era called Brat) pines for Leslie (Ally Sheedy), his best friend Alec’s girlfriend, but when the two have a drunken one-night stand after she learns that she’s been betrayed by Alec (Nelson), Kevin treats Leslie like his property. Casually, and out of nowhere, he reveals that he assumes she wants to move in with him. This is a preposterous idea, and it’s exactly the kind of self-deluding mistake a romantic like Kevin would indulge in. “Kevin, sex isn’t love,” she tells him. Alec cheats on Leslie with everyone in sight and tells himself he’ll be faithful when they’re married, but we all know he won’t: Lying Judd Nelson is a lot more plausible than the rigorously honest Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club.

There is a lot of lying, to yourself and others, going on in youth, which is why dishonesty is the defining flaw of the young folk in St. Elmo’s. All seven of them are lying or cheating. Even Wendy (Mare Winningham), a good-hearted social worker who carries a lot of guilt about coming from a wealthy family, proves willing to help Billy commit adultery. Billy, by the way, is a drunken lout who cheats on his wife, who is trying to raise their baby, but he largely gets away with everything because he’s rakishly handsome. Again: totally plausible. Guys who look like Rob Lowe can get away with a lot, can’t they?

As for Demi Moore’s Jules, the turn in her character leads to a scene that pulls both movies into sharp focus. In the climactic moment of St. Elmo’s Fire, we learn that her stepmother, or “step-monster” — a Breakfast Club-style unseen adult who supposedly abused her — is nothing like what she has described. After joking about her stepmother’s impending death throughout the movie, Jules reveals that she actually loved the old lady and was misrepresenting her as a means of coping with her terminal illness. Jules then calls attention to herself with an absurdly histrionic, ultra-slow-motion suicide attempt (sitting alone in a cold room with the windows open until all of her friends come around and make a fuss), at which point Billy lays out the meaning of the movie’s title metaphor, which explains how young people create their own dramas. So they do. Even as Jules is in extremis, Alec takes time out to almost kill Kevin by knocking him off her fire escape, as though Alec didn’t get exactly what he deserved when his girlfriend repaid his infidelity by hooking up with his best friend.

Jules, Billy, Kevin, Kirby, Alec: Each of them is the author of his own misfortunes. Two of the men cheated on their women, the other two allowed themselves to be carried away by unrequited infatuations. What Billy tells Jules to put her problems in focus applies to at least five of the seven characters. Unlike The Breakfast Club’s pandering insistence that young people are “brainwashed,” it’s wise advice to young people in general: “You know, this smells to me like a little bit of self-created drama.” This unlocks Jules’s confession that she is actually close to her “step-monster,” at which point she instantly pivots to blaming her father for her unhappiness.

But this isn’t a psychoanalytic breakthrough that she should pursue. The movie doesn’t indulge her, and Billy advises her to consider that she has agency. She is fabricating her own dramas. His little speech is the best summation of what each one of the dozen messed-up young people in both movies needs to hear:

This isn’t real. You know what it is? It’s St. Elmo’s Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors would guide entire journeys by it, but the joke was on them . . . there was no fire. There wasn’t even a St. Elmo. They made it up. They made it up because they thought they needed it to keep them going when times got tough, just like you’re making up all of this. We’re all going through this. Hey, it’s our time on the edge.

Wendy follows up this point in the next scene with a complementary one, by telling Billy about how she made a midnight snack and it was “my kitchen, it was my refrigerator, it was my apartment, and it was the best peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich that I have had in my entire life.” Together, these two scenes are offering this satisfying truth: Young adulthood is exhilarating because you get to steer your own life. But being a grownup means it’s time to stop lying to yourself about who is to blame for the chaos you create.