Friday December 15, 2000
The Guardian
In the 1960s, a bunch of Hollywooders smoked and drank and
canoodled their off-screen lives into public attention. They
were the Rat Pack. Two decades later, things had changed.
After the Summer of Love and the punk upheaval, the movie
audience's social demographic had jolted downwards by a similar
20 years or so. As the 1980s dawned there were teens running
around all over the planet with hard currency in their pocket
and not a whole lot - cinematically speaking - to spend it
on. Enter the Brat Pack.
From the outside, they looked like a group as internally coherent
as the Rats - incestuous, vain, hedonist and spoilt beyond
belief. A goodly proportion of them enjoyed a head start in
the movie business, being the sons and daughters of powerful
Hollywood figures. Others infiltrated the scene via television
shows and working the audition circuit. The Brat Pack weren't
the best actors of their generation, nor did they make the
best movies, but in some indefinable way they distilled the
spirit of their age, and earned an ambiguous, collective place
in the hearts of the hormone-racked adolescents who voraciously
sucked down one movie after another.
From our 21st century vantage point a decade and a half later,
even the most enduring Brat Pack products seem clumsily scripted
and ineptly put together - much like the music videos of similar
vintage - but it's impossible to overestimate the emotional
charge that much of their work carried for the serried ranks
of teenagers who saw themselves, heightened and idealised
maybe, flashing across the screen.
The Brat Pack movies told all kinds of stories, some of them
simple, some of them ridiculous, some moving, some nausea-inducing.
Not all of them were teen movies, for as the Pack got older,
so did their movies, and had them tickling around the issues
that beset young adults. Not every teen movie was a Brat Pack
movie; there were stars and talents working outside the gilded
sphere of privilege who made their own contribution to a fondly
remembered genre. Still, teen tales of resentment, self- loathing
and wide-eyed gratification form the staple of the Brat Pack
oeuvre, and, although the combination always changed, they
were all linked by the unrelenting gang-mentality arrogance
that the Brats brought with them.
The intervening years have only added to the Brat Pack's
lustre. The kids who slavishly watched the movies - say you
were 15 in 1983 - grew up into the world-weary, ultra-knowing
Generation X, a do-nothing generation that cherished and treasured
its own formative experiences with a fervour and self-regard
that's become almost embarrassing. And where did this self-regard
come from? The Brats themselves set the example, feeding and
inspiring as many teen demons as they appeared to exorcise.
Appropriately enough, the Brat Pack have all gone their separate
ways: some have become huge stars, others workaday actors;
yet others are nursing career revivals and negotiating parole
conditions. But once upon a time, they were all revelling
in the limitless possibilities and awesome potential that
lay ahead.
The high point of the Brat Pack was the summer of 1985. The
Breakfast Club was out, and St Elmo's Fire in the can. New
York magazine, that June, ran a story identifying for the
first time the existence of a new generation of Hollywood
players. Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson and Emilio Estevez graced the
cover, radiating whatever energy it took to par-tay all night.
Writer David Blum characterised the threesome living life
to the limit at LA's Hard Rock Café. With benefit of
hindsight, some of Blum's assertions make interesting reading.
He describes Emilio Estevez as the Brat Pack's unofficial
president. He assures readers that Estevez's career as a major
writer-director is only a matter of time. Molly Ringwald doesn't
get a single mention. Harry Dean Stanton is name-checked as
the Brat Pack's spiritual father. And, according to Blum,
the movie that changed Hollywood, that brought the Brat Pack
together... is Taps.
Now that the heyday of the Brat Pack is past, some readjustment
is in order. First off: who, precisely, are the Brat Pack?
Most would agree that Estevez, Ringwald, Lowe and Nelson exemplify
the Brat Pack, but what defines their membership? And what
about awesomely Bratty talents like Sean Penn, who by and
large swerved by the teen movie cycle that is somehow central
to the Brat Pack oeuvre?
As is the way of history, it takes time for coincidence to
become a phenomenon. The heart and soul of the Brat Pack,
in retrospect, were a gang of nine: the principal casts of
two movies, The Breakfast Club and St Elmo's Fire, both released
in 1985. Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Robert Hepler Lowe,
Demetria Gene Guynes (we know her better as Demi Moore, the
surname taken from her first husband Freddie), Judd Nelson,
Mary Megan Winningham, Molly Ringwald, Michael Anthony Hall
(he swapped his first two names) and Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy.
What's become apparent, years later, is that appreciation
of the 80s teen movies reflects that of the teens themselves
- grown-ups just didn't understand them. But why did this
outpouring of emotion wait until the 1980s to well up and
explode, like a pustule on an adolescent nose? Teens had been
around, as a socially and economically identifiable force,
since the 1950s. They had their own icons in James Dean and
Marlon Brando, Tuesday Weld and Natalie Wood. And they had
their own movies: from The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause
in the mid-1950s to Beach Blanket Bingo and Muscle Beach Party
in the mid-1960s, teens could thrill to the alternate impulses
of sassing the old-timers and oiling their glistening pecs
in the surf.
Ironically, when all this came to an end in the late 1960s
as the Hollywood new wave rushed the gates of the palace,
it signalled an end to what few reasons there might have been
for the curious teen to haunt the movie theatre. Although
undeniably Hollywood's 70s generation initiated a golden age,
they did it by making adult films. And not pornography either,
although to audiences of the time there was occasional confusion.
The era that brought us MASH, The Godfather and Bonnie and
Clyde also spawned Deep Throat, The Story of O and Emmanuelle.
But the golden age of the movie brats couldn't last. How could
it? They didn't make movies for teens.
Those who did - George Lucas and Steven Spielberg - changed
the face of the industry yet again in the mid-1970s. Jaws
and Star Wars hauled in the kind of young audiences who were
largely alienated by the Movie Brats' later efforts, and Hollywood
faced the tough truth that artistic fertility had coincided
with economic downturn. It emerged from the 1970s knowing
that teens were at least part of the answer to its problems.
Years before Star Wars, however, George Lucas had pointed
the way. If ever a film-maker had his finger on the pulse,
it was Lucas. His second feature, American Graffiti, released
in 1973 was a bittersweet memoir of his own high-school days
in Modesto 10 years earlier. The big thing, though, about
American Graffiti was it took $115m, on an investment of $750,000.
One sweet deal. Then followed low-spend, high-yield teen movies
ranging from National Lampoon's Animal House to Porky's and
Halloween.
The first unarguable Brat Pack movie arrived in 1983, when
Francis Ford Coppola corralled a bunch of the brightest young
actors for his answer to American Graffiti. The Outsiders
was another 60s-set tale of youth rebellion, and through its
offices Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez and C Thomas
Howell all forced their way onto the Hollywood map. The Outsiders
acted as the high point of a family tree, with its participants
going on to make a flood of often-successful movies in each
others' company over the next five years. The 1985 high point
came when two ensemble movies, The Breakfast Club and St Elmo's
Fire, were released within months of each other, sharing cast
members and a similar confidence in their distillation of
the teen experience. The penny dropped; the label stuck. By
1988, the Brat Pack cycle was pretty much over: the key Brats
had gone their separate ways. In the eternally 1980s way,
no one actually wanted to be identified with the label that
made them famous.
All these movies share a central factor: an unashamed and
unaffected deployment of archetypes. The poster for The Breakfast
Club shoved it right up front, enumerating its principals
as "a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse".
In their unswerving recycling of these basic units, teen movies
often resemble the classic structure of fairy tales, or primitive
mythology. Ugly ducklings are everywhere, menacing ogres are
there to be repulsed (as often by a shower of vomit as anything
else). But teen movies are also instinctively sociological:
located in strictly defined and controlled communities, at
their best they offer a compelling and subtle analysis of
a bewildering social network with a pecking order of its own.
Teens make the perfect models for this: old enough to recognise
and filter social hierarchies, yet too young to rise above
it.
It was in this framework that the Brat Pack were to make
their movies: an unlikely conjunction of the rankest exploitation
and most tremulous of emotions. Uniquely among cinematic genres,
the teen movie could veer from the most leering bra-tearing
eyeful to the most sickening of humiliations - often in the
very next shot. The best of the teen movies possess a kind
of freewheeling insanity that is as turbulent as its central
characters' hormones. The 70s auteurs, who were blown out
of the water by Hollywood's commercial revival in the latter
half of the decade, may not have approved of what came after
them, but in engineering the collapse of the old studio system
they broke open Hollywood's floodgates for a kind of continuous
revolution, a never-ending panic that ensured that the teen
movie could expend all its anarchic energy. And for that we
should be grateful.