Advertisement
Commentary
I saw 'St. Elmo's Fire' with my best friend when I was 22. ‘Brats’ took me right back
“I never thought I’d be so tired at 22,” Demi Moore’s character says to Rob Lowe in a key scene from the 1985 film “St. Elmo’s Fire.” When I saw that movie, during its opening week at a mall cineplex in New Jersey, I was also 22, watching with the closest friend I’d made at what was the first job out of college for us both.
“I can relate to that,” Barbara whispered to me, and I nodded. We were reporters for a small-town newspaper, working crazy hours to get the clips that would catapult us out of there, living on coffee and adrenaline and five hours’ sleep. “St. Elmo’s Fire” wasn’t a great film, we agreed later, but we’d enjoyed it. The movie captured something about what it was like to be young then, at a time when Hollywood had only recently started to reflect our generation.
The actors from “St. Elmo’s Fire” are featured prominently in “Brats,” the new documentary by actor Andrew McCarthy, a member of the legendary Brat Pack. In some reviews of the film, McCarthy has been criticized for ruminating excessively on how the Brat Pack label negatively affected his career, as well as his relationships with the other actors. But I sympathize with McCarthy. I understand what it’s like to want to return to a moment when life felt unspoiled, its wildest possibilities still seeming attainable.
In clips from the mid-1980s, the Brat Pack actors — many of whom are my exact age — look like kids. Seeing their younger selves juxtaposed with recent interviews swept me up in a wave of nostalgia. And since nostalgia and grief are cousins, that led me right back to my friend, Barbara.
We met in that South Jersey newsroom at the end of 1984. I was a punk and New Wave fanatic with a perm that never could achieve the height the ‘80s demanded, wearing thrift store mini dresses to cover local zoning board meetings. Barbara, just one year older than me, had gone to school in New York City and possessed the kind of cool that she didn’t have to advertise, as well as a much better sense of appropriate workplace attire. I was pretty lost that first year after college, as were many of the characters in “St. Elmo’s Fire.” But Barbara knew exactly where she was headed, and once we became friends, she helped me get my life on track as well.
We were film buffs who would rent what we couldn’t find in local theaters, or we’d drive: to Philadelphia, 45 minutes away; to Manhattan, a nearly three-hour trip, where Barbara often spent the weekend with her college boyfriend. We saw all kinds of films, from art house fare to mainstream. Although we were a few years older than the characters in the John Hughes films, we loved those movies, still close enough to our own high school experiences to see glimpses of ourselves on the screen.
Barbara and I only worked together for a year and a half, but we’d become such good friends by the time we moved on to other jobs that we remained close — through interstate moves, grad school and twelve years of writing a novel for me, marriage and kids and a steady climb to larger, more prestigious newsrooms for her. We talked on the phone weekly, later instant messaged nightly, visited often. When she died in 2002, it was sudden, unexpected: a pulmonary embolism. Something preventable only with a crystal ball, or a time machine.
I took it hard. The most acute stage of grief typically lasts for about a year, according to most psychologists, but Barbara’s death left me deeply unmoored for the first half of my forties. She had been my sounding board, my rock, the person I most relied on. Life rushed onward while I remained stuck, at the whim of memories and the sweeping emotions attached. I didn’t know how to think of Barbara without crying, and so eventually I tried to stop thinking of her at all.
I dove into my work, made some new friends. On my birthday in 2008, I threw myself a party, and my apartment in Somerville was packed. I remember standing on my porch as the last guests left, and realizing that I felt, for the first time in years, alive.
Advertisement
But happy? That would take more time.
There’s a moment in “Brats” where Andrew McCarthy and Ally Sheedy, his “St. Elmo’s Fire” co-star, talk about when they first met. McCarthy remembers a time when Sheedy gave him a ride home from a movie rehearsal in her Jeep as being “one of the happiest memories” of his life.
“There was something about being young and life was just happening, and it was thrilling,” McCarthy says. “I was aware in the moment of how happy I was.”
I imagine the two of them, riding in a Jeep along a sun-drenched California highway. But then the image shifts. It’s winter, 1985, and I’m riding in Barbara’s ancient Volkswagen Beetle. After a late night in the newsroom we’re heading into Manhattan for the weekend. There’s a light snow coming down, transforming the New Jersey Turnpike into something magical. We’re at the beginning of our adult lives, and our futures stretch before us as endlessly as the snow-dusted highway.
I can sit, now, in these kinds of memories. Part of me even wants to freeze time there, riding endless loops with Barbara in some imagined space where it’s 1985 forever. Nostalgia is greedy like that. But even though her life was cut short, Barbara lived so far beyond what our young selves imagined. To enshrine her as an early version of herself dishonors the ways she grew and the life she built. Just as I, too, am more than the grief that once derailed me.
