I watched the Brats documentary on the plane, hoping to learn a bit more about the actors in one of my favorite classic teenage angst movies, The Breakfast Club. Being 13 years younger than the movie, I didn’t know much about the Brat Pack other than the name, and the 2010 YouTube dance thing that maybe was the first internet dance trend??

I always thought the Brat Pack was a cool group of actors who worked together and were friends or something. The documentary, directed and focused on Andrew McCarthy, actually starts more negatively. It’s clear from the beginning that he and the others immediately found the term extremely harsh, and the attached New York article “scathing”. McCarthy asks several people where they were when they first heard the term. The subtext is that the piece derailed their potentially bright careers.

But one thing really stood out to me as McCarthy reaches out to the various Brat Pack members. I’d group them into 3 categories:

• Elusive (and still hurting?): Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald are not in the documentary
• Processing, Impacted, Vulnerable: Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy seem to feel similarly to Andrew, that this hurt their caree
• Open, Fully Processed, Flourishing: Demi Moore & Rob Lowe

The last group was the most surprising and interesting to me because they defy McCarthy’s narrative a bit and steer the documentary to a more stable, resolved end. Both Demi and Rob seem to understand the label, acknowledging the accuracy of the term, that it was also created by just another human being (Demi points out “he was another young guy trying to do something flashy to move his career”, which is also conveyed in Andrew’s somewhat non-cathartic interview with the article's writer). They seem to be genuinely at peace with everything that resolved with the Brat Pack, and I don’t know which caused the other, but they are arguably the two members with the most successful post-1985 careers.

McCarthy seems to understand through his talk with Demi and another producer, that there was actually nothing wrong with the label, and perhaps their reaction was the problem. The article and the term seemed to trigger the biggest fears of the members of the group, who were the hot new thing in Hollywood, that maybe they weren’t all that, that people didn’t like them, that they were brats (I also wonder if the heaviness of the term ‘brat’ has diluted over time - it feels silly now but maybe carried more weight in 1985).

This tweet also connects to this idea - comparing the Patriots’ embrace of their “bad guys” label to the Chiefs today, who maybe want to be liked a bit more? Some if it might be revisionist, but there is truth to leaning into labels rather than avoiding them.

It makes me wonder whether that’s what makes people like Bob Dylan and Kanye West and David Bowie successful - they fit people’s mold of them for a period, and then reinvent themselves.

From A Complete Unknown -

• “Two hundred people in that room and each one wants me to be somebody else. They should all fuck off, let me be.”
• “…fuck off and let you be what?”
• “I don’t know. But they sure do.”