Member-only story
Not Part of The Brat Pack
This coming-of-age teen didn’t relate to the characters of the Brat Pack originally published in The Baltimore Sun
As I sit in my apartment streaming the documentary, “Brats,” by Andrew McCarthy, I think this setup is all wrong. I should be watching this on a VHS tape, with my own Brat Pack in tow, not streaming it from a remote-controlled environment alone. That’s because if you grew up in the ’80s, this group, their coming of age in cinema, is likely an inextricable part of your zeitgeist. It is only now that I, like the narrator himself, question whether it should have been.
As a memoirist, I often write about nostalgia, the careful dance of looking back on your life and trying to document it without an inherent bias. It’s hard not to look back at your transgressions without a self-imposed Fred Savage narration of wisdom, like in “The Wonder Years,” because you have naturally gained insight decades later. It looks like Andrew McCarthy might have less distance. I hope this film helps him get his closure.
I still remember seeing “Pretty in Pink” at The Kingsway Theater in Brooklyn — the infectious music. It was mesmerizing to watch others who reflected my fears. But as an urban girl, I never truly related to John Hughes’ depictions of teenagers, and I never wanted to be any of them. They simply did not reflect my culture, my beat.
