Don't You Forget About Me

I can see a new horizon, underneath the blazin' sky

I was extremely excited when I spied the trailer for BRATS, a new film by Andrew McCarthy, lynchpin of the Brat Pack and this blogger’s fave teenage dreamboat, which follows his search for fellow Brat Packers, and for personal closure.

The Brat Pack (for any youthful readers here) was a group of actors in 1980s Hollywood who became synonymous with the explosion of films about the teen experience during that time. The list is large and no doubt debatable, but I reckon includes The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, St Elmo’s Fire, Young Guns, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, Lucas, Catholic Boys, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Class… and more and more. It was a genre of films that loomed extremely large in my tween and teenage psyche. I was 8 in 1985 when The Breakfast Club came out, and I saw it not long after. The others followed hot on its heels, with Pretty in Pink probably my favourite for romance, Young Guns for swoony men and The Outsiders (only borderline Brat Pack?) for outsized feelings.

Perhaps if you too were a certain age in the 80s and early 90s you might have been affected by these films, for good and bad. I often feel the unrealistic standards I set for teenage and 20-something romance were entirely a product of mainlining Pretty in Pink on VHS. In my mid-20s, during a bit of a low phase, I watched that film every Friday night for a few months, whilst binging the things that are bad for your lungs and liver. An approximation of living, rather than the actual experience.

The impression those films made on a young me was huge - I sewed in my 20s to try and make copies of Molly Ringwald’s wardrobe in PiP. I attempted to cut my hair like hers. I listened passionately to the soundtracks. I LOVED the music in Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful and St Elmo’s Fire… I still do, mostly.

But BRATS itself was disappointing. Andrew McCarthy (kind of precious and annoying IRL it seems) sets out with one, specific grievance against the journalist David Blum who wrote an article for New York Magazine in 1985 coining the term “Brat Pack” - a moniker and article which AM, and some of the other Brats he spoke to, feel exerted a profound negative influence on their careers and lives. Because of this narrow gripe, AM ended up having more or less the same conversation over and over with the Brats who would talk with him (sadly no Molly Ringwald or Anthony Michael Hall). So a broader look at how their lives were altered by the experience of being part of that massive, culture-shifting zeitgeist was missed. The final showdown with David Blum himself is also a bit lame, both men pretty intractable in their memories and stances on the issue, both fairly unappealing.

However the soundtrack is, of course, banging, and I got a bit of a high on that and the old clips, so that was good. Horrifying to think The Breakfast Club is almost 40 years old.

I drew all these “posters” for the films about six years ago, and perhaps if Andrew had seen them before he made his documentary, he could have included a new specific grievance in which he tracks down an illustrator fan in London and takes her to task for her incredibly unflattering portraits of him and his gang. But alas, he did not.

---

I made this drawing recently, and it caused disagreement in the household.

My sister, Jessie, on being asked to praise the drawing for the third time, said she liked it but thought it was niche as not that many people know what mallards are. We argued a bit and then she said well what IS a mallard exactly and I realised I wasn’t quite sure and had to look it up. I mean, I knew it was a duck, but beyond that… anyway, turns out a mallard is the KIND of duck we mostly see here in the UK - it’s a dabbling duck, which means it mostly potters about on the surface to feed rather than doing any deep dives. It’s a Rebecca Adlington not a Tom Daley. Sorry for that shit sports metaphor!!!¡¡¡

Is Jessie right or am I? How’s everyone’s mallard knowledge out there? And who else’s romantic psyche was warped by John Hughes??