This has been our longest respite from publishing anything, we believe, and our excuse is being involved in the “Write-In Mark Greene for King County Director of Elections” campaign and a little writer’s block, to be honest. It looks like that “one post a week” goal did an about face over the several weeks, but we’re here now and we hope we can keep the momentum on the first day of the week of the last week of spring, 2026. For the moment, at least, for this first post back after a long downturn of writing, we’re not going to talk about war or crime or the crazy politics going on in the United States of America, pretty much.
Believe it or not, we’re going to talk about an old movie called “St. Elmo’s Fire”, released in 1985. What sparked it was listening to the wonderful theme music of the movie, that pretty much goes by the same name. From there, we found a Reddit article where 90%-or-so of the commenters were bashing “St. Elmo’s Fire”. I found that surprising, because I really loved the movie. The commenters, for the most part, didn’t suggest what movies or kind of movies they actually like, but they had plenty of derogatory adjectives for one of my all-time favorite movies. Going by what’s popular in the “popular culture”, you can probably guess what they like. So, no, St. Elmo’s Fire had no gore or horror, no super heroes, no sensationalist, sadistic plot, and didn’t devolve into implausible fantasy land with Hollywood’s Pandora’s Box of out-of-this-world, extremist or implausible characters.
St. Elmo’s Fire was none of that, the writers and the producer decided to make a movie about ordinary, newly post-college young adults, with common, ordinary foibles that we would all recognize, trying to get their footing into the next big stage of their lives — and Hollywood succeeded. For people like ‘yours truly’, that much prefers plausibility in movies than implausibility, it was refreshing, but really not all that uncommon in the 1980s. Hollywood was putting out some good stuff back then, at least, along with the bad and the mediocre. So, at least you had your choice. Now, today, it’s just one way bad, I don’t even bother to look and see what they’re putting out anymore, and if I go to the movies more than once in a two-year span, that’s a minor miracle. I think it says something about society that now tends to like the extreme and implausible more than the sensible, the logical and the plausible, or at least the understandable. I was going to get into this topic a little more deeply, but I am just going to let this “first post in ages” sink in first, and hit that “publish” button once again. There’ll be a Part II.
American Sun-Light News & Literature 