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I did not see a lot of movies when I was growing up.  There was a time when my father would take me on our weekends together, but once he got remarried, I spent more time watching VHS tapes – usually of things I had already seen.

However, I listened to the radio constantly.  It woke me up in the morning.  When I got home from school, it kept me company.  When I played wargames, it was the soundtrack.  At the end of the day, I listened to it as I fell asleep.

All of which is to say that while I missed the theatrical run of White Nights or St. Elmo's Fire, I vividly recall the music.

Thus, seeing St. Elmo's Fire for the first time was oddly familiar.  I knew the cast of course, having grown up on The Breakfast Club and other Brat Pack films.

I have also recently viewed The Big Chill, and though different in mood, the films have many similarities.

For one thing, both have ensemble casts composed of core group of seven friends (split between four males and three females) with an additional secondary female to round out the story.

Both are "small stories" centered around relationships and maturation and both feature a meandering plot that derives its intensity and meaning from the chemistry and acting skill of the cast.

However, there are some significant differences.

Structurally, The Bill Chill takes place over a single weekend reunion in the aftermath of a funeral.  The action is compressed as long-separated friends catch up with one another and explore where they are in their lives.  The cast is also older, more settled and more disquieted.  They are filled with disillusionment as the idealism of their youth has collapsed before harsh reality.

St. Elmo's Fire is less compressed temporally, with weeks passing as its story unfolds.  The cast is much younger – recent college grads who still know people at their old school.

The attitude that pervades St. Elmo's Fire is much less bleak, thanks in large part to the experience of the elder generation.  The movies were filmed only two years apart, yet they seem to be from different eras.  This effect is heightened by the settings – a fine Southern mansion during the fall vs bustling Georgetown during the zenith of the Reagan era.

The older film looks to the past with its musical selections while eponymous main title of St. Elmo's Fire (subtitled "Man in Motion") is clearly about seizing opportunity.

This  makes it more upbeat and while there are bleak elements to the story (the troubled life of Demi Moore's Jules in particular), the overall tone is one of hope and promise.

This is largely because of the failures outlined in The Big Chill.  The idealism of the 1960s was always completely unrealistic (particularly the type coming out of the University of Michigan), so there was never any possibility of it working.  The despair of that revelation in turn led to a focus on reaping material rewards, and instead of deriving comfort from faith and family, career advancement became the measure of personal success.

Kevin Cline and Glenn Close have arguably the most successful characters in their film.  They have a superlative house, good local reputation and are raising their children in an idyllic community.  Kline even tends meticulously to his physical fitness, in the process reminding others to do likewise.

Yet there is an emptiness to all of it.  The marriage is a hollow shell and none of their accomplishments bring them fulfillment.  It is true that this seems to find resolution during the course of the film, but as I noted in my earlier piece, that development seemed both nihilistic and unrealistic.  It was the product not of organic character growth but the writer's sentimental hope for a happy ending.

By contrast, the characters in St. Elmo's Fire have a much clearer understanding of how the world works.  They are younger than their counterparts, but their youth is also less sheltered.  As already noted, Demi Moore's character epitomizes the pervasive divorce culture that blossomed during the 1970s and the corrosive impact it had on children.

Rob Lowe's character is one of the more intriguing, representing as he does the same sort of immaturity that drives the older generation's actions.  Alone of the group he is a husband and a father, but he is a failure at both.

However, he matures throughout the film.  When we learn that his wife is planning to remarry, he decides that being a "weekend dad" would be unfair to his infant child.  Better to give the gift of a stable family.  Coming in 1985, this is a profoundly thoughtful decision.

In fact, one can argue that that theme of both films is the need to grow up and accept life as it is and that the younger cast is simply a decade ahead of their elders in this realization.