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This week will be a film biography of a loosely-knit group of actors who rose to fame during the 1980s, and whose fame and interlocked association certainly codified the division between acting generations. This week, we’ll be talking briefly about The Brat Pack.
Any people my age are intimately familiar with The Brat Pack, as they starred in some of Generation X’s most famed and celebrated (and yes, criticized) feature films. They were a group of young white actors, all in their 20s, who presented the new angst of a new generation of young people. Director John Hughes is strongly associated with The Brat Pack, as he wrote some of the best films of the 1980s about growing up and the modern ‘80s milieu, a milieu that was so cinematically influential that it is still being references and revered to this day. Case in point: the recent cult musical Pitch Perfect cited John Hughes’ 1985 film The Breakfast Club as the height of cinema. This wasn’t a joke. The Breakfast Club touched and moved millions of teenagers.
To rattle off a quick roster, judging by this definition, The Brat Pack contains Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, Rob Lowe, and Demi Moore. Other members are always being proposed (Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey, Jr., Mare Winningham, Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, John Cryer, Matthew Broderick, James Spader, John Cusack, Kiefer Sutherland. and Jami Gertz are always dipping in and out of the “official” distinction), but those eight are the “core” members.
Like any generation of actors, this core group worked closely with one another, often working together, and sometimes even directing (Estevez made the 1987 film Wisdom with Demi Moore). They were distinctive from previous generations, as they seemed to operate as a unit – at least in the minds of the filmgoing public. In previous generations of actors – even if they did closely work together – actors and actresses tended to stand out as bold individuals, solitary in their talent. Occasionally, you’d have a pair of actors who worked well together (Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon spring to mind), but it wasn’t until The Brat Pack that an entire “generation” of actors was lumped together in such a cleanly codified manner.
The ethos of The Brat Pack was, as I have said, one of angst. This was the generation that lamented that they did not have a Great War, or some other unifying factor in their lives that made them as “Great” as the so-called Greatest Generation. They worked retail, and turned inward, musing on their social status. They were self-aware, and found that they had nothing to contribute. They could only connect to one another, and share their problems openly to find any sort of common ground. This is Gen-X in a nutshell. Cynicism, monetary greed, a lack of a central ideology, and constantly aching for a single life meaning, even if it was just the popular culture of the 1970s.
The actors in The Brat Pack did not choose the label, nor did they conspire to be The Voice of a Generation. “The Brat Pack” was a label applied to them. That they shared a strong common voice, and projected as young actors such a powerful ethos, was more the constructed workings of filmmakers like John Hughes. With the coinage of the phrase, Hollywood suddenly openly admitted that newer younger performers had taken over filmmaking as a centralized force, and Hollywood began to acknowledge the passage of time in terms of acting eras, rather than just by individual performers.
Many of the members of The Brat Pack have openly declared their distaste for the label, feeling that it pigeonholed them as performers. That they were called “brats” also most certainly cast a pall on their maturity as performers. That many of the actors in The Brat Pack experienced their highest degree of fame during the 1980s may only be a coincidence, but one could argue that the very label of “brat” cut into their longevity, however talented they may have been.
The label did also, however, associate them with the celebrity lifestyle, and many of the actors were often tabloid fodder. If the internet age has taught us anything, however, it’s that the fame cycle is insidious, and can encourage bad behavior. Many of the members of The Brat Pack lived powerful party lifestyles, and associations with drink, drugs, and sex tapes floated around the actors, further hurting their credibility. Demi Moore and Rob Lowe have gone on to bigger fame, but some, while still working, have not been as famous as they were since the 1980s. All of the members of The Brat Pack are, mercifully, still alive and still working.
Indeed, even though “The Brat Pack” is still applied to these actors, you’ll find that they have all gone on to work in textured and varied careers, working some light roles and some heavy ones (stretching from bad kid flicks like Cybermutt to classy biopics like Bobby). They may have once been touted as the voice of their new generation, but the real truth is that they are actors first. That they have all kind of split up and gone on to work in such a variety of films and stage projects means that all actors all share one trait: They are all working professionals.
Their tabloid fame and newspaper buzzwords, then, eventually gave way to the most important thing to an actor: The actual acting craft. These are people who all exploded into fame at an early age, perhaps were pushed out of the spotlight by their own imposed label, and have gone on to act and direct in their own idiom. They were the voice of a generation. Now they have their own voices.
Homework for the Week:
Watch either The Breakfast Club or St. Elmo’s Fire. Do you feel they represent their own generation, or are the films more universal than that? Do you think certain “generations” of actors are all reliant on one another? Do you think of acting legacies in terms of generations, or do you look at individuals? If The Brat Pack did make a single “type” of movie, what would characterize them?
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and co-star of The Trailer Hitch. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind. If you want to buy him a gift (and I know you do), you can visit his Amazon Wish List.
