Oddly (or fortuitously) enough, Brats comes out at a time when the commentary surrounding both brats and rats has become very favorable. The former because of Charli XCX and the latter because of the “hot rodent boyfriend” trend. Each example giving a strong indication of how far pop culture has moved away from anything resembling the monoculture of the 1980s. And nothing was more monoculture-oriented in the teen world than the Brat Pack. Depending on who you ask, some will say the group was born out of The Breakfast Club. Others, St. Elmo’s Fire. Others still might argue it could have originated with Taps, starring Timothy Hutton, Tom Cruise and Sean Penn. In fact, Brat Packer/Brats filmmaker Andrew McCarthy calls Hutton (who also appears in the doc) the “godfather” of all the Brat Packers as he was the first young person to star in a movie that actually took young people seriously at the beginning of the 80s, specifically for his role as Conrad Jarrett in 1980’s Ordinary People. But the specific who and when of the group’s precise genesis isn’t as relevant as the June 1985 article that decided to corral all of them together into one blob and brand them with the name that would define them and their movies forever.
The consequences and aftermath of that branding is the subject McCarthy wishes to explore in his documentary, a companion piece to his 2021 autobiography, Brat: An 80s Story. And if titling his book as such didn’t give the indication he’s doing his best to reappropriate the name, then surely titling his movie Brats will drive the point home: he’s ready to take back the narrative. One created by a little-known (and still little-known) journalist/writer named David Blum. In a sense, it’s arguable that Blum was among the first writers to take offense over nepo babies having everything handed to them. Of their galling sense of privilege under the guise of having “earned their place” despite having an automatic leg up. After all, the piece was originally just supposed to be about Martin Sheen’s boy, Emilio Estevez. And yes, Nicolas Cage, Coppola progeny extraordinaire, is also called out in the article, which features the subtitle: “They’re Rob, Emilio, Sean, Tom, Judd and the rest—the young movie stars you can’t quite keep straight. But they’re already rich and famous. They’re what kids want to see and what kids want to be.”
That condescending summation being a precursor to the idea that fame for fame’s sake (or at least the sake of partying like a VIP) was the thing to aspire to (in which case, the message has been received beyond anyone’s wildest imagination). Because it was true, with a single two-word phrase, Blum had effectively diminished these “young people’s” work to something totally unserious. And solely because they were young. It’s the oldest trick in the book: discredit or minimize someone’s talent or opinions because of their youth. (Granted, in the present, the youth is paying back “olds” with a vengeance by discrediting or minimizing anyone over twenty-five.)
Accordingly, Blum does come across as a curmudgeonly boomer begrudging youthful Gen Xers (and, in McCarthy’s case, Gen X-cusping—while actors like Nelson, Penn and Hutton are all actually classifiable as being in the baby boomer category) their moment in the spotlight. Though, incidentally, Blum was twenty-nine when he wrote the article and McCarthy was twenty-two. So not that vast of an age difference. And yet, even more than speaking to a matter of age discrepancy in terms of “reasons why” Blum came at them, it was a matter of class discrepancy. For it’s so obvious in the article—and now—that Blum is filled with contempt for ilk of this nature. You know, rich, hot people who seem to have no problems apart from which free, swag-filled event to slip into. And in this sense, one can’t help but side with him, for who among us ordinary mortals hasn’t been prone to such flare-ups of rage and jealousy when it comes to witnessing privilege in motion and wondering why we shouldn’t have it instead (or, in a more ideal world, in addition to)?
Yet on the other, it’s not hard to sympathize with a Brat Pack “charter member” like Andrew McCarthy, clearly so shaken up by the unwanted “rebranding” of who he was all these years later. While some might deem this as a product of “snowflakeism” being chic, even among those who aren’t millennials and Gen Zers, it’s true what McCarthy says in the documentary: “Things that happen to us when we’re young, they’re really intense and they go deep. You know, had the same thing, Brat Pack, if the Brat Pack happened when we were forty, we would have gone like, ‘Whatever dude.’ You know, because you’re young, you just take it so personally because you’re not sure of yourself yet and so I think that article tapped into doubts and fears that we had about ourselves. ‘My God, are we maybe really undeserving of this?’”
This fear, to a more legitimate extent, seems to be the exact reason so many nepo babies, finally forced to reconcile with their privilege (though not really), had a strong reaction to the New York Magazine (the same place where “Hollywood’s Brat Pack” was published in 1985) cover story published for the December 19, 2022–January 1, 2023 issue. Titled “Aww, look! She has her mother’s eyes. And agent. Extremely overanalyzing Hollywood’s nepo-baby boom,” the article by Nate Jones solidified the derogatory term (originally tweeted by Meriem Derradji as “nepotism baby” in reference to Maude Apatow in February of 2022) as an ultimate takedown. Because only does everyone want to believe there’s a secret “easy way” that success is achieved (true, being born into the right family helps), they want to believe that not achieving it is through no fault of their own. They just didn’t get popped out of the right vagina. And now, the “poor” nepo babies have to go around living with the Scarlet “NB” forever, put in a place to constantly question whether they’re talented or just, to use a Buellerism, born under a “good” sign.
At the time of the fever pitch over the term, certain nepo babies who wouldn’t otherwise have acknowledged their privilege came out of the woodwork to weigh in. This included Lily Allen, daughter of the increasingly lesser known Keith Allen. Her take? “The nepo babies y’all should be worrying about are the ones working for legal firms, the ones working for banks and the ones working in politics. If we’re talking about real world consequences and robbing people of opportunity. BUT that’s none of my business. And before you come at me for being a nepo baby myself, I will be the first to tell you that I literally deserve nothing.” The deflection and “self-effacing” approach being one way to minimize a backlash. Or there’s the Hailey Baldwin Bieber (a “double nepo baby”) approach: taking ownership of the “slur” by wearing it like a positive term on a t-shirt she sported around town during the first week of 2023 (when the NY Mag article was still fresh).
In fact, members of the Brat Pack probably look back and wish they had done something similar in order to “take back the narrative” when it was still fresh. But, as McCarthy points out, they were so young (Bieber was twenty-six when the nepo baby article came out and she chose to don that shirt in response) when it happened, that it was impossible not to be affected, not to take the unwanted branding seriously. McCarthy added, “If it didn’t touch something, you know, it’s that old saying, ‘If it gets you, you got it.’ If it didn’t touch some fear that we had harbored about ourselves, it wouldn’t have mattered, you know? Was it touching truth? It was touching fear, and fear is a powerful thing.”
In a sense, by giving the term so much power, the group allowed the name to flourish. In short, they chose not to take the Madonna route after photos from her nude modeling days were published in Playboy and Penthouse (also in 1985, a big year for life-altering cover stories) by saying, “So what?” And with those two words, she steamrolled any attempts on the media’s part to end her career. Words, thus, only have the power or meaning that people give to them. Or, as Blum says to McCarthy during their first-ever meeting, “I just figured ‘sticks and stones.’” As in: “Stick and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
But it’s clear that words can hurt in instances such as these, that they have the power to alter the trajectory of careers, therefore lives. Look at someone like Lindsay Lohan, who was ridiculed ad nauseam in the media for her drunken, drug-addled hijinks to the point where she became an irrevocable laughingstock in Hollywood (and, if we’re being honest, still is). However, there were certain sects in the media that sided with the Brat Pack at the time. In point of fact, the movie opens on an interviewer asking McCarthy, “Are we doing a disservice to you and the rest of the young group that, by calling you the Brat Pack and sort of putting in one group and stereotyping all of you as young actors who’ve made it now sort of control a lot of Hollywood…?” It’s here that McCarthy bursts out laughing, “Oh I wouldn’t say control… I think it’s easy to just group people together in any level. So it’s just an easier way to get a handle on people, but I think all of us are very different.” Sort of like The Breakfast Club itself. Which McCarthy wasn’t a part of.
To be sure, one of the running jokes of Brats is asking different people who they think was in the Brat Pack and what movies are actually considered “Brat Pack movies.” Either everyone has a different answer, or no one knows for sure. Lea Thompson, now a mother to nepo babies Madelyn and Zoey Deutch, declares that she’s merely “Brat Pack-adjacent.” After all, she was in Back to the Future (some people considered Michael J. Fox classifiable in the Brat Pack category) and Some Kind of Wonderful (written by John Hughes, maker of Brat Packers, and directed by Howard Deutch, the Pretty in Pink director who would end up marrying Thompson in 1989).
It is also Thompson who points out that there’s a reason why this group of young actors was so impactful. For, in addition to bringing the collective youth sentiment to life onscreen at a time before social media existed to fill that void, Thompson posits, “I think we were at a very unique moment in history, and I boil it down to this: it was the first time you could hold a movie. And you could buy it. And you could put it in your thing and play it over and over again. And it was a very small part of time… It meant something more, it was physical.” And it was mostly the youth market buying these tangible items for their VCRs or record players (and yes, the soundtracks to these movies were just as important). Therefore, the young generation of that time connected with a specific set of people in a way that, say, Gen Z never will. Their lives are devoid of physical media in a way that further detaches them from the content they’re more mindlessly consuming.
So yes, to be a member of this as-of-yet-unnamed group in as late as May of 1985 held quite a lot of weight and influence. The kind that might start to go to even the most humble person’s head. And oh how they were humbled. For example, the fallout after the article resulted in many of the actors distancing themselves from one another (though McCarthy and Molly Ringwald, noticeably absent from the documentary, would go on to reteam for the inevitably panned Fresh Horses in 1988)—even if some of the best roles they were offered were in films co-starring their fellow Brat Packers. Estevez confirms this to McCarthy in the documentary when he admits that he backed out of an adaptation of Young Men With Unlimited Capital upon learning that McCarthy was potentially going to be cast as well.
Rob Lowe was probably the least concerned out of everyone, or that’s how he comes across in Brats, informing McCarthy that there’s nothing but “goodwill” infused into the term. Now. The two also muse on one of their more ribald nights out, starting at Spago with Liza Minnelli and then ending up at Sammy Davis Jr.’s house—the only time, the pair notes, that the worlds of the Rat Pack and the Brat Pack meta-ly collided. Lowe adds to his reflection on that strange night, “When I think of the Brat Pack, I think of that night. Because stuff like that routinely happened. As it does, when you were in that moment. And you see that recycles every generation. With different people, different names and different places, but it’s the same story. Someone is having that moment. It can fuck you up, or it can be fun or it can be all of the above, but there are very few people that are ever in a place to go through that moment. And yet there are always people who will go through that moment every generation.” It seems the last time it really happened at full force though was with the consumption of “tabloid queens” like Paris, Nicole and Britney in the 2000s.
With regard to the absence of certain Brat Packers in the documentary, namely Ringwald, Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall (who isn’t mentioned at any point), McCarthy fills in that space with hot takes on the unwanted epithet by such scholars/experts of social science meets pop culture as Malcolm Gladwell and Susannah Gora, who wrote 2010’s You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried. It was Gora who said, upon the book’s release, “When [the Brat Pack article] first came out… these actors were stuck with that label. It was kind of a difficult and painful thing to deal with both personally and professionally.”
As for Gladwell’s opinion on why the name endured, he insists it relates to encapsulating the generational transition in Hollywood that was going at that specific moment. And, what’s more, that paying attention to such a pop culture moment is “possible then in a way it’s not possible now… You can’t have a cultural touchstone that everyone in their twenties can refer to… Things have been fractured; we’ve gone from a relatively unified youth culture to a youth culture that looks like every other aspect of American society, which is everything’s all over the place. There’s no common denominator.”
And yet, among the many detailed explorations in Brats is the idea that America in the 80s was extremely fractured. But, to loosely quote Andrew Clark in The Breakfast Club, the country was just better at hiding it during that time (in part because there was no internet). Hence, bringing up the now all-too-common callout that John Hughes’ movies, ergo Brat Pack movies, were extremely white. But rather than chalking that up to Hughes being racist, Gladwell tells McCarthy, “He’s reflecting the way the world was in the 80s. You know, the Brown decision is ‘54, which is the legal end of educational segregation in this country, but the country just resegregates after that, just along kind of residential lines. So it, like, the reality of being a suburban, upper-middle-class suburban kid from outside Chicago in the 1980s is that there were, there was like one Black kid in your class. That’s the reality of it in that era… So we can watch those movies and be reminded that’s, that’s what America was.” From the perspective of the people with the privilege to tell stories in Hollywood.
In any case, McCarthy saves his pièce de résistance for the final minutes of the film: meeting David Blum for the first time. The writer who set all this trauma in motion. In truth, Blum himself reveals a certain kind of privilege that no writer today knows the security of: being on a contract with New York Magazine (instead of that other dreaded word: freelance) that required him to only write eight stories a year, complete with the perks of any paid airfare, paid hotels and paid meals required to write those stories. And, as he rehashes how the article came about, one can argue that it’s really Estevez’s fault for invoking the whole thing. For what was to be a simple feature article about him evolved when Estevez invited Blum out for a night on the town with him, Rob and Judd.
Observing them as though a fly on the wall, for no one was paying much attention to the “nobody writer,” Blum tells McCarthy that they were getting a lot of “special attention.” And he wasn’t. That clearly must have struck a nerve. He also makes mention of where the idea for the name first came from. Begging the question: is it actually Alan Richmond’s (of People) fault for “incepting” the idea of doing a play on the Rat Pack by calling him and a group of other journalists eating at a restaurant the Fat Pack?
Through it all, Blum remains decidedly glib and defiant about the whole thing, reminding McCarthy, “There’s tradeoffs to being a celebrity. And some of it is you get whisked around the gate to get into the nightclub. These people wanted to be written about. These people agreed to talk to me. These people behaved the way they did. I’m doing my job as a journalist… It wasn’t meant to destroy or hurt anyone, but really just to define a group of people in a clever and interesting way.” But there’s the rub—why did Blum take it upon himself to “define” anyone? Because, as people need to be reminded all the time, that’s what writers do. They observe and, that’s right, define the world around them. That night, the world to be defined was the one orbited by Estevez, Lowe and Nelson.
While many wanted to push back on the impression that was given, in the original article, Blum has no trouble painting an all-too-accurate picture of the kind of male privilege that would have gone totally unchecked in 1985, regardless of being famous or not. But add fame and money into the mix, and there was an even more palpable air of “swagger.” So it is that the account of Estevez’s, Lowe’s and Nelson’s interactions with women were expectedly cringeworthy. And placed right in the first page of the article: “…by the time the blonde girl arrived, Rob Lowe had long since forgotten she was coming. He had turned back to the table, where his friends had once again lifted their bottles in a toast: for no reason, with no prompting, for what must have been the twentieth time of the night, the boys were about to clink bottles and unite in a private pact, a bond that could not be broken by all the pretty young girls in the room, or in the world, or even, perhaps, by the other, less famous young actors who shared the table with them as friends. As the bottles clinked, the boys cried together at the top of their lungs, “Na zdorovye!”—Russian for ‘good health,’ but really something else, a private signal among the three famous boys that only they understood.” A “secret handshake,” if you will, that only those on the inside of such a bubble of privilege could understand and appreciate. This extended even to “youth writers” of the time, like Jay McInerney, who was also invited out for evenings with Estevez and co.
It didn’t take long for Less Than Zero writer Bret Easton Ellis (also appearing to give his two cents in Brats) to enter the Brat Pack realm the same year the Blum article came out (two years later, he and McInerney would also suffer the blowback from the coining of that phrase by being dubbed as part of the “Literary Brat Pack”). In fact, as though to simply embrace both of their reputations for being “brats” by sheer non-virtue of being young and rich, Easton Ellis and his own article subject, Judd Nelson, decided to have a bit of fun trolling Tina Brown and Vanity Fair. After befriending Nelson, of whom Brown supposedly said, “I don’t like him”/“I want to bring him down a bit,” they decided to repitch the article, released in November of ‘85, as being about how the two visit the “hippest” places in L.A., eventually giving it the title, “Looking for Cool in L.A.” The troll? Easton Ellis and Nelson either deliberately went to the most “over” places they could name-check or made up locations altogether, namely “The Bud Club,” which could crop up anywhere in town depending on the night. Indeed, the entire article becomes centered on their quest to find out where it might be on that particular evening. The level of commitment to making readers believe it was real, along with all their other “advice” about where to go in L.A., is truly something to behold. By the time Brown caught on to the ruse, the article had already been published. Ellis never wrote for the magazine after that.
As for Blum, he continued his career in writing magazine articles (and even books), while Brat Packers started to fall off the radar as the 90s got underway. Ironically, the writer himself will never be known for anything else but coming up with that moniker. He, too, committed a form of seppuku on his career, taking a gamble on what he thought would elevate it instead of leaving it perhaps in a state of stagnation. Just as it was the case for many Brat Packers. Those on the periphery of it were, in fact, more likely to endure beyond the 80s. Sean Penn, for example, whose association with the “pack” even trickled over into his then wife’s life when she started hanging out with Sandra Bernhard and Jennifer Grey. That’s right, Madonna, Bernhard and Grey decided to call themselves the “Snatch Batch” after enough jaunts out on the town together.
With regard to Blum’s professional plateau, he admits to McCarthy that the article didn’t affect his career success as much as he thought it was going to. As he tells it, “I really thought I was going to be suddenly ushered into Tina Brown’s office [no, instead that was Bret Easton Ellis]. I’ve spent my whole, honestly, really, whole life—it comes up sooner or later with people I know. ‘You created the Brat Pack?’ I mean people just literally don’t know how to process that information.” He eventually concludes, “I hope it’s not the greatest thing I ever did. I really do.” The same way any Brat Packer might.
Though McCarthy pretends to make peace with Blum, as he’s walking out of the apartment, he asks, “But do you think you could’ve been nicer?” Blum laughs. McCarthy insists, “Seriously.” Blum replies, “It’s collateral damage, in my view, to making the point that here was a bunch of people that had become very famous and popular and I’m calling them the Brat Pack and here’s how I’m saying it.”
This, clearly, isn’t what McCarthy wants to hear (i.e., closure not received), though he perks up at Blum’s casual admission to invoking collateral damage with the article. Either way, part of McCarthy’s subtle revenge seems to be filming Blum during this interview with his bare belly protruding out from the bottom of his shirt. Now forever immortalized just like the Brat Pack name.
Demi Moore, whose presence in the movie is possibly more surprising than Ringwald’s absence, is the one to distill the whole thing down to this: “And it actually wasn’t even about really any of us. It was about the person who wrote it. Trying to be clever and get their next job.” Apart from unwittingly speaking to how capitalism hurts us all, it’s also a very “celebrity way” to negate a writer’s work and worth. But perhaps it’s a fair trade considering how much he managed to denigrate theirs.
Even so, rather than Brats being a “revenge of the Brat Packers” story, it is one of acceptance, of making peace with something. And, more than anything, projecting a new, more positive meaning onto it. Besides, no matter what they do, you’ll still see them as you want to see them—in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions.
Genna Rivieccio
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