Analysis Paper: St. Elmo’s Fire

The film, St. Elmo’s Fire, tells the story of seven people fresh out of college and exposed to new responsibilities in the outside world as they frequent their favorite social gathering place, St. Elmo’s. The characters also face conflicting challenges ahead of them, like friendship with one another, with parents, and with careers. Conflict is an everyday occurrence we deal with and the first word we seem to dodge. While it can be a storm bringing calamity to our relationships with family members, friends, and co-workers, it can also yield positive or negative consequences. Drawing from the various concepts presented in the readings of this course, the main focus of this paper reflects the struggles experienced by the film’s protagonists, in terms of the various elements of conflict, such as interpersonal versus intrapersonal, functional versus dysfunctional, and how goals play a role and conflict is managed.
Focusing on seven tightly-knit characters, right from the film’s opening image of them walking arm-in-arm emphasizes the role of interpersonal conflict. The movie stresses the struggle that originates between two or more interdependent people and occurs whenever one individual thought’s or actions are perceived to limit or interfere with those of another. Each of the characters is given equal time to illustrate this kind of strife, and some characters have multiple interpersonal conflicts. For instance, Alec Newberry, a man in a political career, frequently clashes with his girlfriend, Leslie, as he persuades her to marry him. In addition, Alec responds angrily when he discovers that Kevin and Leslie have slept together, leading Alec to feel bitterness and betrayal toward Kevin. Leslie feels part of a love triangle between Alec and Kevin, and wants to be free of both of them. Wendy Beamish, a young and caring woman employed with a welfare career, wants an independent life. However, her father has other plans in store for her rather than see her kill time in her welfare job until marriage. Jules, the glamor girl, has a brief interpersonal conflict with Kevin, when she assumes his absence of a love life must mean he is a homosexual. Later in the film, we see that she has a deeper interpersonal conflict with her father, who was not seen but mentioned in the film. Jules, forced to confront her feelings as she spends time with her dying ‘step-monster’, feels her father never loved her. Kirby tries to force himself into the life of an older woman he adores- Dale. Billy is a very public failure at keeping his commitments to marriage and work. Therefore, these interpersonal conflicts define the characters and drive the plot.
But these interpersonal conflicts, in most cases, are shown to have an origin: intrapersonal conflict, a struggle originating within the person. As depicted in the movie, a lot of intrapersonal conflict stems from balancing personal relationships with professional careers. Billy is the ideal example of a person undergoing said conflict. He realizes he has been a disappointment to himself and to his friends since graduation. The opening scene, in which he is arrested for drunk driving, implies that this is not a surprise to his friends. He quips about the understanding the emotion of “not accomplishing anything at all”, but he realizes it is an accurate description of his lack of direction. Kevin declares that “love sucks” as he struggles with his hidden feelings for Leslie. He is obsessed with her- keeping a box of photos of her and saying that she is the only person he can think about but afraid to risk confrontation with her. In a similar way, he is frustrated and resentful of his meaningless job at the newspapers when he really does want to become a writer, but he feels hopeless about it. While Leslie was in a healthy relationship with Alec during and after college, she is undecided on marriage because she is not sure what she actually wants. Alec seems to be at conflict with himself because he does not want to settle into monogamy, yet he will not admit it. Jules appears to be self-destructive, making drama to test people, but by the end of the movie, we see that this may be all learned behavior to try to attract attention since she feels unloved. Wendy’s intrapersonal conflict derives from her lack of confidence in the face of her hopeless infatuation with Billy. Each of these examples demonstrates the interior struggle of young people as they begin to understand themselves.
Not all conflicts are harmful or even useless, however. Functional conflict gives the person a clearer understanding of needs, attitudes, or beliefs for himself and others. Several characters discovered it in the film. Kirby was infatuated with Dale since college, and he describes her as “the only evidence of God on this entire planet”. He pursues her wherever she goes, such as showing up rain-soaked at a party and meeting her in a ski lodge, where Dale and her boyfriend are kind and generous enough to let him stay for the night. Dale speaks to him gently and with understanding rather than hostility or suspicion, in a way that explains her position without diminishing Kirby. Though he had been eager to force himself into her life, Kirby discovers a renewed sense of self after he kisses Dale and leaves her. In a similar way, Billy redeems himself after long battles with his irresponsibility by seeing that his wife and daughter would be better off with a new family, eventually leaves for New York to finally pursue a career as a saxophonist, knowing that the challenge of living up to his potential is a mark of adulthood. These characters show how conflicts have led to growth.
In contrast, dysfunctional conflict serves to destroy relationships and create emotional strains and several types of dysfunctional behavior, such as crazymaking, beltlining, and guiltmaking. Alec, for instance, is shown to perform crazymaking behavior, a conflict-producing technique that can “drive a partner” crazy, when he humiliates Leslie with his public announcement of a marriage she hasn’t agreed to. After finding out that Leslie had sex with their best friend, Alec engaged in beltlining when Leslie shows up to collect her belongings and, in angst, he attempts to shame Leslie over behavior which he also engaged in, and belittles her concerns for her careers, showing that it means nothing to him. Jules’ intrapersonal conflict, the lack of self-worth that comes from feeling unloved, also serves as a dysfunctional conflict, as it drives her into drug abuse, infidelity, and the squandering of her job and income. These characters illustrate how conflicts can build on themselves to make relationships worse.
Goals prove to be a factor in the conflicts among the film’s characters as they pursue life after college. Alec and Leslie have non-shareable goals: Alec is focused on his career but Leslie is not sure what she wants. Wendy, like Alec, is also very clear of her career over marriage. Kirby’s goals change several times during the movie, as he bends them to whatever he thinks Dale wants. Billy is mostly notable for having no goals at all. The goals of these characters can be placed into two categories: those that give rise to interpersonal conflicts, and those that lead to intrapersonal conflicts. Alec, Wendy, and Kirby have set goals for themselves that cause increasing friction with important persons in their lives and ultimately result in confrontations with those persons. Leslie and Billy, on the other hand, suffer from an internal inability to set firms goals; their conflicts are intrapersonal and grow as the film progresses. These characters clearly depict how conflict arises within a person (Billy’s lack of goals and Leslie’s uncertainty), as well as between persons (Wendy’s rejection of her father’s offers).
Most of the time conflict is solved face-to-face by five different conflict styles: avoiding, forcing, compromising, yielding, and problem solving; a few characters applied various approaches. For instance, Leslie keeps at arm’s length Alec’s persistent marriage proposals as she feels reluctant and needs more time to ponder the issue. Alec exhibits a forceful and competitive style, by maximizing the importance of his need and minimizing Leslie’s needs, as he badgers her to marry him. In a similar way, while Jules is immersed in a party-like lifestyle, she eludes Leslie and Wendy’s concerns for her wellbeing during a lunch meeting as well as denying the affair with her boss. Although Wendy’s father wants the best things for her, Wendy tries to find middle ground with him, but does not display an accommodating lifestyle, when she ultimately refuses to yield to his wishes. Billy executes a collaborative style to a depressed Jules when he and his friends show up to spring her out of her apartment. As he consoles her, Billy tells her that he was afraid she would find out he was irresponsible and she laughs, as they both know that he has been. Yet Billy’s ability to face his shortcomings give Jules hope for herself. At the end of the film, Leslie compromises with both Alec and Kevin by declaring she does not want to date anyone for the time being.
In short, the seven film characters dealt with conflict, which can either be a positive or a negative experience, as they adjusted to post-college life and responsibilities as an adult. Their affections for one another and pursuit of careers were put to the test. In the end, their conflicts were resolved, through hard work, communicating, and understanding.