There are probably only a handful of films about Georgetown specifically, compared to the dozens that are set in DC, and none can capture the elusive pains of new adulthood like one particular Brat Pack feature. Watching a movie when you’re at the same age as the characters in the film can be an empowering experience. Of course, this is what Hollywood banks on, and they always seem to bank on viewers being between 18-24 years old.
This is a good bet, because there are always people in that age range, and the strange magic of films makes it so that we only get a six-year window where the stories told up there are really our stories, meant for us. It would be nice to know ahead of time, so we can make sure we pay more attention. There are times, too, when we feel like we’ve fallen completely into their trap, seeing something that reflects us, and we might be easily influenced at the time, enough to accept all the projections we’re being offered.
That kind of conscious assent to image is a key to the power of cinema, and it’s a strange and baffling thing that has complex potential that no one since Godard has cared to explore with any intelligence. It’s certainly not there in St. Elmo’s Fire , the 80s film I’m looking at here, and perhaps that lack of intelligence is what helped us to believe we weren’t being fooled, and instead we were being sung to.
The movie did make me want to go there, to book one of the Washington hotel suites that might get me close enough to their college. I wanted to have drinks with Rob Lowe, hang out with Andrew McCarthy and write angsty poetry, and eventually declare my undying love for Ally Sheedy. There might be time for the last one still, but the other two fell away into a celluloid ideal, whose power lies hidden in the obsessions of a generation.
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