Dear Mr. Vernon...
Here at The Last Days of Generation X, I would be remiss in not briefly touching upon venerable Gen X’er icon Andrew McCarthy’s newly released documentary Brats. Spoilers do follow, fair warning.
Gen X’ers well know McCarthy from his signature roles in Class, Weekend at Bernie’s, Less Than Zero, Pretty in Pink, and most infamously St. Elmo’s Fire. In 2021, he also penned a book about his exclusive club (see what I did there?) called Brat: An 80’s Story.
In doing this pair of projects, McCarthy seems to have framed himself as a cinematic equivalent of Gen X writer Bret Easton Ellis (who appears in the doc), in terms of chronicling and analyzing the saga of the Brat Pack. As it turns out, he’s mostly dismissive, or downright vexed, about getting that tag permanently attached to his acting career, as are several of his Brat Pack associates. The first time the term was used was in a now notorious article for New York Magazine penned by David Blum, who also appears in the doc, agreeing to a sit down with a clearly irritable McCarthy, still blaming Blum for all the fallout from the coined term.
To be fair, the original article was mostly about Emilio Estevez, and it was a bit harsh at times, occasionally implying the actors in question weren’t worth their salt, riding the 80’s glitz heyday on looks and charm and luck, rather than old school Hollywood talent. Many critics of the doc are saying it’s self-indulgent, that McCarthy comes across as overly bitter and whining, softly lamenting about the path of his career arc after he was labeled part of the Brat Pack crew.
Estevez has the same sentiment about the Brat Pack label and his post-career fallout from it, though perhaps not as fervently as McCarthy (and holy cow, in his elder years he’s looking a dead ringer like his father Martin Sheen). He, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, and Ally Sheedy were the only OG members of the pack who agreed to participate in the doc, alongside pack-adjacent members like Lea Thompson, Jon Cryer, and Tim Hutton.
It’s telling to note expected tent poles like Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald refused to appear, purported to have firmly put any Brat Pack nonsense behind them once and for all. Also strange was the complete omission, nary a single mention, of John Hughes staple Anthony Michael Hall, who clearly joined the Nelson-Ringwald circuit of plausible deniability.
What’s become evident over the last thirty years…geez, has it been that long since the Hughes heyday?…is that most of the ‘Brat Pack’ resented the term, and most believe their future forward progress in their respective careers suffered accordingly due to Hollywood directors and casting executives filtering that uninvited stereotype through that Brat Pack lens.
So, there’s who the Brat Pack thinks is among their members, and there’s who the public thinks is among their members. Me, I have my own tesseract space buried in the eighties sectors of my memory that sort of compartmentalizes all those coming-of-age 80’s staples, whether they were limited to Brat Pack signature movies or if they went on to different horizons. Let’s do a quick classroom roll call, shall we?
Most of American pop culture pretty much identifies the core of the Brat Pack as cast members from two signature movies of 1985, The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. That would be Estevez, Ringwald, Nelson, Hall, Sheedy, Lowe, Moore, and McCarthy (with apologies to Mare Winningham).
But then, a thorough 80’s historian of antiquity might wonder why the other young adults of the same age with the same level of fame and celebrity aren’t included in that scope. In truth, I believe they are, in terms of Gen X cultural memory, but to different degrees. Those degrees seemed dependent on what projects they took on that appeared to break that potential consignment into permanent Brat Pack moldings. Of those ‘fringe’ Brat Pack folk, there are many, if we’re considering the rise (and in some cases, the fall) of that rush of young actors who were finally being given lead roles because, as was often discussed in McCarthy’s doc, Hollywood figured out there was money to be made with actors representative of that coveted 18 to 20-year-old movie-goer demographic.
Let’s start with the cast of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders. It’s highly doubtful the seeds of the Brat Pack would’ve sprouted without that classic 1983 flick in play, whose cast members included Lowe, Estevez, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio, and C. Thomas Howell.
Another flick that contributed to the rise of 80’s famed youth was 1984’s Red Dawn, also starring Swayze and Howell, in addition to Thompson and a young Charlie Sheen.
Then there was 1984’s Karate Kid, with Macchio’s rendering of Daniel-San etching forever into Gen X legend.
Cruise starred in Taps with Hutton and Sean Penn. Both Cruise and Penn launched much larger careers outside the pack by landing lead roles in seminal 80’s flicks like Risky Business and Top Gun for Cruise, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Bad Boys, and Colors for Penn.
That same phenomenon of kicking the Brat Pack tag happened for Swayze when he dropped his signature films; Dirty Dancing, Roadhouse, and Ghost.
Also adjacent? Matthew Broderick. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and War Games.
Robert Downey Junior was in both Less Than Zero and Weird Science, and he did a season of SNL with Hall, though they barely appeared in that odd era.
Regarding Weird Science (one of my faves…oh, you too? Yeah, you gotta love Bill Paxton as Chet, it’s kind of a Gen X mandate). I have sometimes mused on the brief zeitgeist of Ilan-Mitchell Smith, who originally starred in The Wild Life, most famously was the Wyatt to Hall’s Gary in Weird Science, yet he ended up leaving Hollywood not long after the Brat Pack heyday.
As an aside, unfortunately, like much structure within John Hughes’ scriptwriter lexicon, crafted through his whiteboy-of-the-time-filters, there’s plenty in Weird Science that doesn’t age well, not the least of which is Hall’s character Gary adopting an inebriated ‘Black persona,’, something he also did briefly in The Breakfast Club after his character Brian gets stoned with Bender. Then there was all the misogyny displayed toward Kelli Le Brock’s Lisa throughout the film by an assortment of lusty whiteboys. And Joel Schumaker ran the edge of that razor blade as well in St. Elmo’s, what with Kirby’s stalking behavior toward Dale and Wendy’s general fat-shaming.
In truth, Hughes has a lot of questionable script choices, particularly in his early career before the commercial success of Home Alone, stereotypes and cultural tropes likely stemming from his humble, middle-class, Rust Belt beginnings. Long Duck Dong in Sixteen Candles. The parking garage attendants in Ferris Bueller. Personally, I think his greatest film of all time is Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. That also happens to be my favorite movie comedy, so maybe I’m biased.
But I digress.
Streams of consciousness, streams of writin’. ; )
John Cusack was a fringe member of the pack, notably appearing in Class, Sixteen Candles, Better Off Dead, and his most prominent contribution to Gen X coming-of-age cinema, Say Anything.
It’d be foolish not to include 1988’s Young Guns as a Gen X trademark, with its cast of Estevez, Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Casey Siemaszko, and Dermot Mulroney. Sheen was another who broke away from the pack, almost entirely due to his casting in Oliver Stone flashpoint movies Platoon and Wall Street. Sutherland was already at least a card-carrying member of fringe Brat Pack, with his appearances in Stand By Me and more notoriously The Lost Boys. (hey, by the by, Gen X’ers, if you didn’t catch Reservation Dogs’ homage to that classic 80’s film with its credit stinger tag of Tim Cappello revising his shirtless, saxophone riffing ambience, you’re missing out).
Regarding the latter, why the two Coreys, Haim and Feldman, weren’t steadfastly remaindered to the pack is kinda lost on me, I must admit. They seemed to have their own niche which grew more concrete with their soap operatic, Hollywood C-List antics later on in life, most tragically ending in Haim’s overdose passing.
Concerning Michael J. Fox, well…he definitely hung out with those guys outside of work. We all knew him from Family Ties, and he landed the lead role in Ellis’ adaptation of his signature Gen X novel Bright Lights Big City, but the much beloved Back to the Future trilogy skyrocketed Fox to a Gen X staple well beyond any Brat Pack considerations.
Keanu seemed to escape all that Brat Pack tagging. So did River Phoenix, though his early demise was a Gen X tragedy of utmost proportions.
Anyhoo…that’s pretty much what my Gen X recall sorts out, in terms of the admittedly subjective assortment of the larger network of Brat Packers. Note the preponderance of attractive, charismatic, young white men who largely made up the bulk of that Gen X rise to fame, with very few BIPOC members outside of Phillips, and only a trio of primary female members (Moore, Ringwald, Sheedy) and a handful of fringe-adjacent female members (Thompson, Jennifer Grey, Mary Stuart Masterson, Jamie Gertz, Elisabeth Shue, Phoebe Cates). There’s surely a few more I’ve missed.
In any case, what I really wanted to assert regarding all this jazz, was the juxtaposition of what many of them lament about their Brat Pack status arresting their career arcs in some fashion, versus what those iconic roles mean to an entire generation. Legacy, in short.
While I can fully appreciate the actors’ frustrations in getting vetted out of auditions or role considerations from casting directors because of the Brat Pack ‘stigma,’ there is something they might consider when licking those wounds, especially now all these decades later. I am reminded of Alan Alda’s occasional frustrations in always being identified as Hawkeye in MASH, and again, while that’s understandable, there’s that other component that he’s overlooking…Icon status. For an entire generation of human beings.
First of all, most actors never, ever reach the heights of either Alan Alda nor most members of the Brat Pack. Ever. So there’s the working actor scales to consider there. Secondly, there’s the notion that even if one’s career is arrested by the cultural consolidation of a signature role…is that really so awful? It really isn’t.
They ought to consider how much happiness, how much joy, how much emotional impact they levied upon millions of human beings, most of whom were suffering a lot more than bankable Hollywood stars of their times. If those roles brought even the tiniest bit of peace, or laughter, or the idea of representation in being seen as a like-minded soul through an actor’s portrayal of a character, maybe, just maybe, that’s enough for a single person’s lifetime, seeing as how most actors never get that time in the spotlight, much less have an appreciably positive affect on an entire generation of humanity.
In watching the documentary, witnessing how uncomfortable McCarthy remains to this day, quite obviously still put out about his stalled career post-Brat Pack era (he did fine, he became a travel filmmaker and a published author and now a documentarian, and it’s not like he’s hurting for dough), I think he, and perhaps several other members who mourn the Brat Pack stigma, have overlooked the significance of their respective contributions not only to Generation X legacy, but to worldwide popular culture and human history itself. The only ones who appeared content with their Brat Pack origins seemed to be Lowe and Moore, though they too experienced career lows afterward. Nonetheless, if you’re known for only one role, or one era, or one set of movies, and those expressions of art stand the test of time, you did alright. You did better than most humans get to do, in terms of world history.
So suck it up, and be grateful, Brat Packers. Your career wasn’t nearly as important as your contributions, however brief they might have been, to making the world a better place.
Gotta be relative, Ahab! Got my doobage?
That’s a riff on a John Bender quote, you diehard breakfasters.