"We all made it mean something": Brats, the 80s, and the power of narrative

A few years ago, my husband and I attended an anniversary screening of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Afterward, I posted on Facebook:

Fast Times at Ridgemont High marked the true beginning of the 1980s.

I should have added this:

 And then it handed the baton to The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire.

On June 10, 1985, David Blum’s article in New York Magazine, “Hollywood’s Brat Pack,” changed the lives of a group of young actors yet gave their fans a pop culture touchstone and a whole identity far greater than the sum of its parts.
 
Andrew McCarthy, one of the Brat Pack’s resistant members, expressed it even better:

If you were coming of age in the 1980s, the Brat Pack was at or near the center of your cultural awareness.

I wouldn’t read Blum’s article until my teens were well in the rearview mirror. And yet, it wasn’t until I read McCarthy’s memoir Brat—and, this past weekend, watched his follow-up documentary, Brats—that I would understand how vastly different the Brat Pack phenomenon’s effect was on me (a fan) from them (the branded actors).
 
If there’s anything we Gen-Xers have in common with the Brat Packers, it’s that we’ve all grown up. We are gray and wrinkled. We have reinvented ourselves several times over—if not by circumstance, then by choice—and we’re confronting the quintessential midlife questions:
 
What did it mean then? What does it mean now? What do I want it to mean in the time I have left?
 
What do I want to mean?
 
I don’t remember how or when the term “Brat Pack” came into my consciousness, but I loved it. Fifteen-year-old me connoted the moniker not as spoiled brats or arrogant actors, but as a representation or extension of what Duran Duran’s Rio video encapsulated: color, glamor, and excess—not of booze or drugs or sex (I was a naïve fifteen-year-old), but of freedom, wealth, fashion, and fun. I imagined the Brat Pack to be a group of successful, tight-knit friends who worked and played together, loved their lives, and would let you hang out with them if you asked.
 
And I think that’s what we adolescents wanted. We wanted in on their world—at least, the world we perceived them to be living in.
 
McCarthy said, “We filled a niche that needed to be filled in pop culture at that moment.” Our parents had the Rat Pack. Gen-X needed one of our own. And we got it.
 
Like Rio, the Brat Pack and their films represented a kind of escapism. I never wrote fan fiction about the Brat Pack, but I could have. I would have initiated myself as one of them. I would have been dating any of the guys—Rob, Emilio, Andrew—and been best friends with the women—Demi, Ally, Molly.
 
Others might have drifted in and out—Jon Cryer, Eric Stolz, Robert Downey Jr., Leah Thompson—but for me, the aforementioned six formed the core pack. They’ve since all wended their way into my novels in one form or another.
 
McCarthy made the documentary because he realized he’d never talked about the experience with his fellow Brat Packers—they’d all been inextricably linked; yet for the last thirty years, they had avoided discussing it. And, as I know firsthand, writing a memoir brings such things to the surface and you find yourself needing to dig deeper.
 
Because the narrative is never about what you think it’s about.
 
Which was a running theme in Brats.
 
Because I’d never read the article until some twenty-plus years later, I had no idea how scathing it had been, and how negatively it had affected those who’d been branded. I had no idea that these actors not only weren’t best friends, but also had gone out of their way not to work together following the article’s release. I had no idea that the term Brat Pack was far from a badge of honor. Rather, it was more of a scarlet letter.
 
Looking back, I had subconsciously wondered why they never worked together again. Missed seeing them on the screen. What we lacked in additional content, we made up for by repeatedly re-watching those films. We owned them, and not just in the literal sense.
 
Duran Duran outgrew the label “New Romantics” after only one album. The Brat Pack never shook their label. The business never let them forget it. The fans didn’t see a reason to forget it. There couldn’t have been a bigger schism between how the movie and media industries ridiculed them and how their fans revered them. “It wasn’t taken as a compliment by the industry,” said McCarthy. “We were members of a club we never asked to join.”
 
As McCarthy reunited and reflected with his former co-stars/club inductees, one of their shared experiences of “collateral damage” (to use David Blum’s assessment) was that they were no longer perceived by the industry as professional actors who took their craft seriously. Again, I draw a parallel to Duran Duran, who faced similar criticism from those who labeled them “a teeny bop video band.” No one in the music industry cared that they wrote and recorded their own music and played their own instruments with precision night after night (at the same age as the Beatles, and… well, the Brat Pack).
 
But here’s the thing:
 
We knew.
 
We cared.
 
We took them seriously.
 
We knew every member of the Brat Pack was a talented actor. McCarthy lamented “All you want is to be seen.” We saw them.
 
But, in our teenage shortsightedness, what was even more important to us at the time was that we felt seen.
 
In a high school library on a Saturday.
In a jeep following college graduation.
At a prom.
On a day off.
 
In response to Blum’s article and the Brat Pack brand, McCarthy said, “This isn’t the right perception of who we are. This isn’t the reality of our experience.” Likewise, Ally Sheedy said, “The Brat Pack is an image someone thought up, and by someone who doesn’t know anything about us.”
 
But Gen-X’s perception, even if fantasy, helped us craft and shape a narrative about ourselves and who we wanted to be. Jon Cryer said, “ ‘Brat Pack’ allowed a new narrative to take place.”
 
Yet, unfortunately, for the Brat Pack themselves, to paraphrase McCarthy, they lost the narrative of their careers. And perhaps even their lives.
 
Years later, McCarthy reflected on what the article perhaps really triggered in each of them at the time:

---

That article tapped into doubts and fears we may have had about ourselves. Was it touching truth? It was touching fear, and fear is a powerful thing.

And yet, it made us feel more brave, more confident, more certain.
 
Which is what McCarthy has reconciled and made peace with, I think. When fans talk to him about the Brat Pack films, “they’re talking about themselves and their own youth, and we are avatars of that moment.”
 
Demi Moore seems to have reconciled with it in a way that most resonates with me:

The event is the event. What we make it mean is the value that it has in our lives.
. . . We all made it mean something. And it [the article] wasn’t even about any of us. It was about the person who wrote it.

Which, perhaps, brings me full circle to the power of narrative, and the claim made by the late Donald Murray:
 
All writing is autobiographical.
 
When we watch a movie, read a book, and/or listen to music, we are ultimately immersed in our own story.
 
Watching Brats made me write this blog post and recall:
 
The first time I saw The Breakfast Club, or watched the Rio video, or laughed with my friends as we cast Twilight with Brat Packers.
The first time I felt seen. Felt heard. Felt understood. Felt powerful. Felt like I mattered.
The first time I wrote a story and imagined myself with John Taylor as the love interest. And later, in a novel, with Andrew McCarthy. Or Rob Lowe. Or Emilio Estevez. My novels were movies, and they were cast as the characters.
 
My teenage years were full of pain. Yet at age 54, the stories I tell regarding the 80s and my adolescence are about the music and the movies and the clothes and the colors. I write about all the things I escaped to rather than the things I escaped from.
 
It happened for us, not to us. We all made it mean something.
 
And when others read my stories, they read—and write—their own.
 
That’s a pretty good club to be in.

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