VHS, cassettes, Walkmans, MTV when the M stood for Music, Jell-O Pudding Pops, and of course, the Brat Pack.
Born in 1977, I was of the youngest ones who lived through the Brat Pack days. And pop culture at the time of the Brat Pack was the best—which is a statement every generation declares, that theirs is the best time—but really, no one else can claim the era of MTV and The Breakfast Club like Generation X.
I found Andrew McCarthy’s Brat: An ‘80s Story at my used bookstore a couple of summers ago. He was my favorite character in St. Elmo’s Fire, the stewing lovelorn guy, a foil to the obnoxiousness of Emilio Estevez’s obsession with Andie MacDowell. I admit to watching Mannequin several times but not Weekend at Bernie’s. McCarthy never seemed to carry the ego of Rob Lowe or Tom Cruise or even Molly Ringwald, which made him likeable, seemingly more authentic than the generic Hollywood actor. His snarky book tone made me laugh while his vulnerability was profound. I eagerly watched Brats, his documentary about the Brat Pack, for pure nostalgia.
Yet I was not a die hard Brat Packer.
No member of the Brat Pack hung on my tween room wall. I graduated beyond the Brat Pack thanks to the invention of the Fox network and 21 Jump Street. Johnny Depp in all his grungy glory hung on my closet doors as well as select pictures of Corey Haim—The Lost Boys remained my favorite movie despite my enjoyment of John Hughes’ creations. Posters that came in my four-year-older sister’s albums covered my walls: Wham!, Madonna’s True Blue, Prince and the Revolution. The Brat Pack was noticeably absent.
The Brat Pack was the in-crowd and I always gravitated towards the misfits. While my sister religiously followed the gossip in her Tiger Beat and Sassy magazines, I simply enjoyed their movies.
Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink were my sister’s kind of movies. I adored Sixteen Candles, but I never cared much for the frumpy unpopular girl vying for the rich popular guy trope. I preferred lower class groups of boys who were either vampires or fought vampires. While the Brats documentary briefly discussed the lack of race in any of Hughes’ movies (or just about any teeny-bopper movie of the Eighties for that matter), Hughes did represent the class differences well—the rich above the poor, the poor longing to be rich. Some Kind of Wonderful repeated such the storyline.
I preferred Better Off Dead, a middle-class family with eccentric members, a heartbroken guy who realizes his ex-girlfriend isn’t all that he wanted and he ends up with the equally outcasted French exchange student. I was always Team Duckie, but what turned me against Pretty in Pink was the god-awful dress Molly Ringwald wore at the end. That sheet of a disaster was unflattering and not even cool in its uncool homemade way. The only thing I liked about it was that it was pink.
The Legend of Billie Jean was also a favorite, another outcast group of poor kids who eventually win against the rich ones. Since I fantasized about becoming a dancer, I watched all the Eighties’ dancing movies over and over just to learn the choreography: Dirty Dancing, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Footloose, and Flashdance. I preferred Lucas, Stand by Me, and Gremlins to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Risky Business. Yet we watched all the classics repeatedly: The Outsiders, All the Right Moves, Just One of the Guys. I even stumbled upon River’s Edge once I became obsessed with movies that were based on true stories (At Close Range became one of my favorites).
The Brat Pack itself was an exclusive club, one that had drawn specific boundaries, yet never spelled out its members. It’s as if we all knew Judd Nelson was a member, but not Anthony Michael Hall. That Ally Sheedy made the cut, but Mare Winningham did not. St. Elmo’s Fire and The Breakfast Club were the two dominant Brat Pack movies, yet their own actors were not included. We knew Jon Cryer wasn’t on the member list, neither was John Cusack or Ralph Macchio. Michael J. Fox would never be a Brat, nor would Matthew Broderick, no matter how bratty Ferris was. The group singled out by the media followed its own set of requirements, like how a high school has known members of the popular group, those that are on the periphery, and those that are certainly not, and will never be, part of the in-crowd. Perhaps that’s why I paid little attention to the Brat Pack actors themselves, instead submersing myself into their movie characters.
This is the underlying dread that haunts McCarthy—you finally make it into the popular group only to be outcasted because of it, a group you felt uncomfortable joining for any number of reasons in the first place. While Demi Moore and Rob Lowe capitalized on it (Demi Moore became a megastar while Rob Lowe never ran out of television movies), McCarthy hated the label. I don’t blame him, considering how The Geek and Duckie should have at least been honorary Brat Packers.
But no matter how one defines the parameters of the Brat Pack, the surge of movies that focused on teenagers and college students were all the rage, playing on endless loops thanks to the invention of the movie rental business and VCRs.
McCarthy’s interview with Lea Thompson was the most insightful as she described the ability to hold such pop culture in our hands whereas now everything is digital, in the cloud someplace. Others in the documentary discussed how in the Eighties we were invested in such movies, standing in line waiting for a ticket, things that don’t happen nowadays.
The album covers, the VHS tapes, and—my favorite—pins, enough to fill a TGIFriday’s server’s vest. Reciting your favorite lines over and over again…do people still do that?
Nowadays, people watch YouTube and Netflix on a faster speed, uninterested in suspense or thought-provoking dialogue. Consume as much as possible with nothing invested in it, only that you can then engage on social media regarding the latest trend since FOMO dictates our existence. We cared about trends in the Eighties too, only we knew every nuance of them. We knew exactly when Claire bit her lip, whispered words like cancer, and ate peanut butter and Cap ‘n Crunch sandwiches. We said “Christmas” like Ricky’s mother, we danced like Allison during the fast parts of The Goo Goo Dolls’ “Name,” and we knew that 608 dollars was a lot of money. We wanted to wear hats to school like Samantha and dug through drugstore makeup in the hopes of finding beige iridescent lipstick. We shook Pixi Stix onto the backs of our hands, licked it off, then said, “Seriously,” just like Lisa in Weird Science. We embraced red like a true Heather and some even cut their hair like Billie Jean.
For that’s the lasting impact of the Brat Pack’s appeal—we remember because of all that time we spent with them and their movies, regardless of their Brat Pack status. We didn’t swipe right or left or up or down after watching a clip for five seconds. We submersed ourselves in the pop culture, and after—OMG forty years—we still remember.
As Ferris Bueller tells us, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.”