“Everyone Talks About the Party Based Upon How Good a Time They Had”
A Q&A collaboration on Andrew McCarthy’s “Brats”, streaming on Hulu.
https://substack.com/@travelswitharchibald
AND
JUL 17, 2024
Andrew McCarthy directs and acts in “Brats,” a documentary that seeks catharsis or closure for the wounds inflicted by an article (*) that wasn’t about him. He takes the viewer on a self-deputized hunt for the writer who allegedly wounded his career. He also finds solace in a community of “friends” who are sometimes vaguely sympathetic, indifferent, and possibly confused by his questions. It’s the documentary as therapy.
We now explore some questions inspired by McCarthy’s journey and indulge in our 1980s nostalgia.
(*) The alleged traumatic event at the film's heart is a notorious 1985 article in New York Magazine by David Bloom titled “Hollywood’s Brat Pack.” The article coined and popularized the phrase to describe a period of hot, young actors who dominated Hollywood’s youth-driven movie scene. The article's gist, which focused on Emilio Estevez, suggested that these actors, while not lacking in talent, are spoiled, superficial, on-the-make, and, implicitly, lack the gravitas of an older echelon of young actors. No Marlon Brandos, Paul Newmans, or Robert De Niro’s to see here.
What is McCarthy’s goal in making “Brats”?
DAVID: Cynically viewed, “Brats” mines the nostalgia market for attention and profit; however, I’ll take at face value the premise that Andrew McCarthy is seeking an authentic journey to heal himself and bond with others since it would be consistent with his recent literary efforts (McCarthy is an accomplished travel writer.) He nurses a near-obsession with hiking the Camino de Santiago, and his latest book describes his attempt to bond with his teenage son on that famous medieval trail. In “Brats,” McCarthy refers early on to his not-quite-satisfying effort to get closure with his dying father. So, this effort at reconciliation through the medium of film is at least consistent with other McCarthy projects.
FERNANDO: The way I see it, we have two choices: We believe that Andrew McCarthy genuinely wants to work on his traumas. For this to be believable, we must accept that a 61-year-old man still hasn’t gotten over a forty-year-old article that mentions him once, in passing (*). We must also find it reasonable for him to have a camera crew follow him around as he directs, stars, and produces in his own healing efforts.
But if he’s being truthful, “Brats” makes him look petty, delusional, and self-absorbed. In ‘80s terminology, one could say he’s a total loser.
(*) Sure, there was some fallout. During interviews, he was asked if he was a “brat.” However, as several people in the documentary stated, it was good PR to be branded in a business that forgets you easily.
The other option is the one I believe: he’s acting. “Brats” is a vanity project as real as a reality show. McCarthy plays the victim, which gives him the perfect excuse to feature all these actors we rarely see anymore. It’s a win-win: he shows us how much they’ve aged, and, in turn, we get the delightful shock of seeing we’re not the only ones in decline. He hits nostalgia, celebrity, and myth-making themes while trying to find a re-entry point into his second act.
While my cynical take makes him look opportunistic and selfish, at least he comes across as sane. And I don’t know about you, but I prefer a Machiavellian narcissist over a whiny, pathetic loser.
Is this documentary relevant today?
DAVID: I suspect themes of class disparity and finding one’s identity still resonate, but I wonder how well these movies translate for kids our age when we first saw them. There is the agony and ecstasy of friendships, romance, and social status without the all-consuming attention-deficit disorder of today’s tech-fueled youth culture. Do Gen Zers find this quaint and sad, or perhaps brimming with an authenticity they might miss?
As for Gen X-ers, there's relevance as long as they have time to spend streaming. Some gateway documentaries in 2023 and 2024 already paved the way for Brats, e.g., “Wham!” and “There’s Something You Should Know” (Duran Duran). Maybe this documentary arrives at just the right historical moment for Gen X-ers to look in the rearview mirror and cuddle up with their innocence.
FERNANDO: I recently watched most of the Brat Pack ‘80s movies and discovered that the nostalgia factor is minimally present. Unfortunately for McCarthy, Netflix and YouTube have made it easy for me to pine for the past, and there are better documentaries, music videos, and edited clips that can transport me faster to my childhood.
When I rewatched “The Breakfast Club” a few weeks ago, I was surprised by how poorly the movie has aged. First, students don’t get detention anymore. Then I heard Emilio Estevez’s character claiming he was being punished for taping another student’s butt cheeks and went, hmm? Would I be okay if my child’s bully only gets detention? Anthony Michael Hall’s character is in trouble for bringing a flare gun, which raises another red flag. Then Ally Sheedy’s character, the “basket case,” attends Saturday detention even though she’s done nothing wrong, and I thought, Shouldn’t someone talk to her about depression and such?
Perhaps I’m the one who has aged and has outgrown these movies, but I was confused. I didn’t know if the problems teens of the ‘80s had were too easy compared to the ones today or if parents and educational institutions were neglecting their children back then. I mean, who has a flare gun lying around the house?
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What did you think of McCarthy as a director?
DAVID: From a purely technical standpoint, the word “shambolic” comes to mind. Several frames contain odd film choices meant to convey a retro atmosphere, which fail and merely distract. He occasionally includes film crew members and their equipment in interview scenes for no apparent reason.
“Brats” begins well enough on a story-telling level, but the narrative arc quickly degenerates into a pity party. One problem is that three central Brats –Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, and Anthony Michael Hall– declined interviews, and those who accepted aren’t as angst-ridden as McCarthy.
FERNANDO: Good directors elicit wonder —how did they do that? Or, at the very least, they facilitate the desired emotional responses without audiences noticing the artistry. Lousy directing, on the other hand, is intrusive and distracts from the story. McCarthy’s “Brats” falls in the third category. He reminds me of an NYU film student who wants to impress his professors by using every trick he’s learned. The editing is frenetic and made me feel like I was in a Bourne Identity movie. The angles he chose were sometimes unflattering —he sets his iPhone at ground level, offering a “chin shot,” which invariably makes his subjects look bloated or warped. He plays with filters, lights, and framing, and at some point, I was, calm down, McCarthy, these are just two people talking. It was like adding car chases to Waiting for Godot.
How should we feel about the Nostalgia Factory that keeps profiting from past glories?
DAVID: I am willing to cut McCarthy some slack here. If we take the etymological origin of the word literally, nostalgia means “the pain from an old wound.” Dogs lick their wounds, and most people do it metaphorically because of a pain-pleasure reward dynamic. If McCarthy truly believes that a single article wounded his career, friendships, and self-esteem, this may be a legitimate project, even if poorly executed. But make no mistake, this is pure nostalgia fishing.
Ultimately, the documentary’s underlying difficulty is that its director’s relationship with an assumed shared event fails to confirm that something “huge” happened –or, if it did, it seemed the rest of the pack didn’t experience that big thing the same way.
One scene features Emilio Estevez, with whom McCarthy hasn’t talked since the 1980s. While some genuine affection kindles between the two, Estevez has moved on with his life —a theme that runs through the rest of the interviews. Most of the participants have been through and triumphed over the standard Hollywood demons of broken marriages, depression, substance abuse, and scandal. Almost all of them display a resilience that McCarthy struggles to find.
FERNANDO: This documentary is so narrowly focused on McCarthy’s bruised ego that I wouldn’t classify it as nostalgic. However, his grousing crusade made me think of how hard it must be to be remembered for something you did over thirty years ago. Is it still fun for 58-year-old Rick Astley to tour from Newcastle to Southampton with his two songs from 1988?
Very few people attend a Rolling Stones concert to check out their new stuff. They purchase a ticket because they want to relive their youth —and to do so, they must forgive plenty since the Rolling Stones look like towels that were left too long in the washer. The public enters a collective agreement where they ignore the swollen eye bags, the sagging cheeks, the hair dye, the reading glasses, the zombie dancing, and the times Jagger forgets the lyrics. They forgive the incongruous themes —getting laid, doing drugs, rebelling— because, let’s face it, watching an eighty-year-old man trying to stay up past midnight is rock ‘n roll enough.
However, if the Rolling Stones decided against playing the hits in favor of a new set, they’d soon be opening for a banjo-playing barista at Starbucks. So, they’ve been stuck with the Sisyphean task of jamming to “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” for most of their lives. Is that better than being an accountant? Perhaps, unless you have a passion for green eyeshades and pencils.
Let’s also consider that only four guys get to be The Rolling Stones, just like only four get to be U2. Most of the nostalgia membership shows up at high school gyms, sits behind foldable tables, and signs posters and baseballs. They make a good living, I’m sure. But is that a good life?
What, if anything, worked for you in this film or salvaged it for you?
DAVID: The soundtrack. There’s always that to fall back on. Of course, that’s low-hanging fruit for the director. But even the songs that didn’t go Top 40 are indelibly imprinted on my brain and are generously deployed in Brats.
As for the cool insider stories, one of my favorite revelations was learning Tim Hutton is an apiarian with 60,000 bees. The other one was Rob Lowe’s recollection of when he and Andrew McCarthy are partying with Liza Minelli and casually decide to pay a call on Sammy Davis Jr, who answers the door and then bartends while chain-smoking. “The Brat Pack Meets the Rat Pack.” That’s what we paid to see.
FERNANDO: I delighted in Demi Moore and Rob Lowe's shrink-speak as they tell McCarthy that they didn’t take the article as a personal offense.
Moore says, “There was a belief that you were holding underneath that you made it mean something about you that created a limitation in your expression.” Translation: the article hurt you because you let it hurt you.” It is a lesson I teach my five-year-old daughter: “You cannot control what other people say of you, but you can control how you react to it.” I don’t mean to diminish it. It’s a good lesson —one which I hope my daughter will learn before she turns sixty-one.
I also loved the soundtrack because I mostly listen to music released between 1975 and 1995, so much so that I’ve never heard a Taylor Swift song—not even by accident. I still indulge in Joy Division, The Cure, Simple Minds, OMD, Modern English, The Bangles, General Public, and Steve Winwood, and I do so with much pleasure.
I have a different reaction to movies. I find ‘80s films, including Star Wars, quite dull— this is a good thing since it probably means I now opt for more complex ideas. I would hate to be the fifty-year-old guy in a Darth Vader suit at a convention center in Frisco, Texas, going “Wooshhhh! Wooshhhh!” every time I swing my plastic lightsaber.
Was there any place in the film where McCarthy hit rock bottom for you?
DAVID: For me, it was his final interview with David Bloom, author of the perfidious article that coined the phrase Brat Pack. Just before leaving, McCarthy turns around and half-pleads for an apology he still feels he’s owed (it reminded me uncomfortably of that cheap shot by Michael Moore in “Bowling for Columbine” aimed at Charlton Heston, who was clearly into his Alzheimer’s.) It was lame.
FERNANDO: The interview with David Bloom made me angry. The final battle arrived after McCarthy whined for an hour and a half. And what happened? Bloom defended his article, regretted nothing, and McCarthy gave him a big old hug in return. I was reminded of those people on social media who are scathing when expressing their opinions from a distance and completely tame when face-to-face.
Is McCarthy’s documentary more digestible if we discard the director’s crusade and instead welcome it as an enjoyable spotlight on the Brat Pack movies and the whole John Hughes experience?
DAVID: Sure, if we focus on the text divorced from the author’s mission. Why did the movies resonate with you when you first saw them? I don’t remember being able to identify closely with, or even really liking, the actual characters in most of those movies. But they did give a kind of fictional/dramatic structure to the birth of emergent adult friendships during my teen years.
Like the narrator says in Stephen King’s “Stand by Me”: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” Substitute “15” or “18” for “12.” As it turned out, maybe you did go on to have friends like or even better than those childhood friends. But the point is you didn’t have any guarantee there would be other friendships like that or even better at the time. Friendships made in high school were lifeboats helping us brave the tides and eddies of puberty. We hungrily, shamelessly scavenged the Brat Pack movies to articulate our inexpressible feelings better.
I remember my last night at a summer camp, where, at age 15, I realized my own real-life Breakfast Club. We sat around in a circle in the dark, dreading the arrival of our parents the following morning, listening to the “Love Theme” from St. Elmo’s Fire—tears running down all our cheeks as we swore to all keep in touch. It was sentimental and mockable as it sounds, but it was real.
Even adults paid attention to the phenomenon of The Breakfast Club. I haven’t forgotten a particular high school morning in the chapel. Father Swann delivered his movie review in place of the usual sermon. Apart from some regrettable foul language, Father Swann thought Breakfast Club held some great messages for students. He encouraged us to reach outside our cliques to the loners, the nerds, jocks, etc., as one painfully reflected one’s position in the brutal high school hierarchy. And you know, for a week or two, people in my school did seem palpably nicer to each other. Never say that movies can’t change the world.
In short, I feel no guilt about joining McCarthy’s nostalgia trip, even if he fails to convince me that he is the victim of some professional or personal tragedy.
FERNANDO: I grew up in Mexico, and like most Mexicans, I watched these movies in a movie theater and rewatched them many times on TV via a pirate satellite dish (it was legal in Mexico to steal American television. If you took an aerial photo of Monterrey back then, you’d see the sea of dishes on the roof of every home, all pointing at the equator.)
These movies portrayed a lifestyle I longed for. I wanted to live in Tom Cruise's house from Risky Business and ride his motorcycle from Top Gun by the San Diego coast. I wanted to skip class and crash a parade in downtown Chicago like Ferris Buller and have Elizabeth Shue cheer for me as I crane-kicked some arrogant bully on the face. I cannot understate the importance of these movies in fostering my desire to move to the United States. And I did. I moved to the United States, so for all of those anti-immigration folks out there, hey, if you want to sell these films worldwide, expect foreigners to desire the dreams from which you profit.
Meow! That got political fast.
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