Demi Moore Celebrates St. Elmo’s Fire Anniversary With Charli XCX Song
Demi Moore is celebrating her 1985 breakout, St. Elmo’s Fire, on the 39th anniversary of its release.
The actress posted an Instagram Reel on Friday, June 28, showing her character, Jules Van Patten, throughout the movie, set to Charli XCX’s “365.”
“Jules would have loved Brat Girl Summer,” she captioned the post. “Happy 39th birthday to #StElmosFire!”
St. Elmo’s Fire follows a group of recent college graduates as they transition to life in the real world. Jules is a banker and party girl who falls on hard times when she loses her job and her excessive spending catches up to her.
Despite receiving negative reviews at the time, St. Elmo’s Fire was a box office success, becoming a cult classic and one of the forerunners to the famed Brat Pack. The group of 1980s actors featured St. Elmo’s Fire stars Moore, Andrew McCarthy, Emilio Esteves, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy, as well as Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall.
The group reunited for a McCarthy-directed Hulu documentary, Brats, which released on June 13. Moore reflected on the chance to revisit the Brat Pack’s height.
“I had such a great time sitting down and talking with [McCarthy.] I’m sad there wasn’t an opportunity where we were all sitting in a room together, talking,” she said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “That’s my only wish. It’s something very unique to all of us that we experienced.”
She added that the group didn’t always like being referred to as the Brat Pack.
None of us really liked the idea of being called ‘brats,’ or that we weren’t professionals or didn’t take our work seriously,” she said. “It was such an interesting, curious thing. We all had different experiences. [The Brat Pack] was very impactful for Andrew, and shifted the direction of his career.”
Moore’s decision to use “365” in her commemorative post is fitting. It’s the final track on Charli XCX’s album, Brat, which she released on June 7. That led her fanbase to dub summer 2024 “Brat Girl Summer.”
Charli described what Brat Girl Summer means to her in an appearance on the “BBC Sounds Sidetracked” podcast.
“It can be, like, so trashy — like a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra,” she said. “That’s like, kind of all you need.”
Slate’s review of Brat took it a little further, describing the overall aesthetic of what would become Brat Girl Summer.
“The themes colliding this summer — our f—it indulgences, the feeling of being over, a crushing sense of nihilism that has no cure other than, perhaps, dancing in a smoke-filled basement — are perfectly encapsulated by Charli XCX’s new album Brat,” Slate’s Scaachi Koul wrote.
Exactly the type of summer that would make Jules Van Patten proud.