What if Andrew McCarthy’s Brats documentary is actually a cautionary tale?
I have to admit, I gobbled up the documentary Brats created by Andrew McCarthy like it was a stromboli from my favorite pizza place.
As a child of the 80s, it was right up my alley. I have such a fascination for the “where are they now” stories and this one definitely delivered.
Sometimes my TV watching really is just pure voyeurism. I own that.
In this documentary, McCarthy, of St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink and Mannequin fame from the 80s — to name just a few, looks into how being labeled a member of the Brat Pack essentially destroyed careers.
He talked to some of his fellow Brat Pack club members — those who would get back to him to be included in the documentary — and the results were fascinating.
This film allowed me to see what a lot of the Brat Pack looks like today — yes, I could have simply done a Google search, but this told me so much more — and I realized that basically only one of them, McCarthy, has been stuck, apparently this whole time, in the decade that gave us leg warmers, Member’s Only jackets and enough Aqua Net to tear a hole in the ozone layer.
I’ve talked to a number of people about this documentary and read some reviews and I have to tell you, I was rather surprised at the amount of vitriol and aggression that came from the people who watched it.
I’ve heard everything from “there’s an hour and a half of my life I’ll never see again,” to “who gives a shit?” to “oh, the poor white man who is a bazillionaire because of these movies feels like he was done wrong by them. Boo hoo.”
Yikes.
And to a point, I absolutely get it. All of the Brat Pack, no matter where they ended up, certainly had a hell of a lot more opportunity because of those movies than the vast majority of this country did or does — and it does feel like a hell of a lot of sour grapes to now be shitting on that serious source of income.
It does.
Was some of that documentary cringey? Hell yes, it was. I swear Emilo Estevez looked as though he was a half a second away from spontaneous combustion at any given moment.
Was McCarthy awkward and bumbling and strangely desperate? At times, yes.
Could some of the reason McCarthy couldn’t get a number of the Brat Pack people to talk to him was, well, because of McCarthy?
Possibly.
But to me, the thing is, that’s him. His jokes may have been odd and his laughter may have been too much at times in the film, but, frankly, I wouldn’t really expect anything less from him. That’s who he was back in the day and apparently who he still is.
And that, right there, to me is the crux of the whole issue.
Because for some reason, as I watched that documentary, I found myself pulling back into the bigger picture. Here was a 61-year-old man who, for all intents and purposes, has a hell of a lot more than the rest of us, but he’s unable to see it because of one article written literally decades ago that he believes ruined his life and coined the phrase the “Brat Pack.”
As those authors who came before me have said, it sure didn’t seem to affect Demi Moore or Rob Lowe. Those were two people, including Ally Sheedy, he was able to get on camera. Moore and Lowe were about as put together as any 80s children who delved into drugs can be — probably more so.
And certainly the same could be said for those who weren’t interviewed, like Robert Downey Jr. and Sean Penn.
Was Andrew McCarthy able to see that? Did doing this documentary give him the ability to realize that not everyone felt the same about the label of the Brat Pack? Or was this just one last ditch effort to scream, look at me, I swear, I AM more than this! Can’t you see it?
I don’t know the answer to that. I am just a menopausal 51-year-old woman binging streaming services with my cats on the weekends. I certainly do not know Andrew McCarthy.
But I do sincerely hope that this documentary changed some things for him because it’s certainly about time.
Although that’s a hell of a lot of shit to dig through, you know?
Speaking as an 80s kid who works every day to not be triggered by the crap that went on during my formative years, I can honestly say, yeah, it takes a lot.
Some days I’m good. Other days, I’m that kid in the leg warmers being left behind at the junior high dance while Whitney Houston played on the speakers.
Lame, I know, but I try to own that, too.
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Let’s get down to the title of this article — what if all of this is a cautionary tale?
As I watched Brats, I felt bad for Andrew McCarthy, too, but maybe not for the same reasons others did. I felt bad that he allowed himself to be, quite literally, stuck for all of these years.
And I’d feel that way for anyone who can’t let go of something, regardless of their economic status or intersectionality.
One of my absolute favorite quotes comes from Master Oogway in Kung Fu Panda: “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called ‘the present.’”
Live in the now and let it go.
Let go of what you can’t change. I am incredibly fortunate to not be facing anything horrifically nightmarish from my past. I know that. It’s a lot easier for those of us not facing true trauma to blithely say, “oh, just let it go.”
That’s not meant to be glib. I absolutely recognize how difficult it can be, especially if the demon that has its claws in you is particularly hideous.
But do we really want to end up like Andrew McCarthy at 61?
Sorry, Andrew. I really do hope that some day you get it.
We all get stuck in something from the past. A breakup. An awful parent/child relationship. A marriage that didn’t live up to the dream.
But what if we just let it go?
What if we stopped giving that incident or person or moment in time, any power over us?
Growth sucks. It’s hard. It’s crappy. You’ve got to look at shit that you’d much rather leave deeply buried under that moldy rug in the back of the house.
But growth is actually incredibly important.
I found another amazing quote a few years ago that was attributed to Cynthia Occelli: “For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.”
Sometimes it’s okay to come completely undone — what could be waiting for you on the other side?
What could you have been doing in the time you’ve spent rehashing over that breakup? What could you have accomplished in the time you’ve spent letting that family argument rule your life?
Just let it go.
Although I’m also not naive enough to believe it’s ever really gone. A lot of the really awful shit that happens to us does stick. That’s understandable. But it’s important for us to at least attempt to live beyond it from time to time and not let it utterly rule our lives.
Like, apparently, McCarthy has.
So if you have moments of setback, that’s okay. I’m sure there have to be times when people say something to Demi Moore or Rob Lowe that deep inside makes them cringe because it triggers something from the Brat Pack days.
That will happen. But it’s about not getting stuck there and being able to take another step forward.
I really do believe at the end of the day, our existence is about forward momentum.
It really is up to you.
Life is a choice and you get to choose how you live it.
Will you focus on your regrets? Or will you leave them in your history and enjoy your ‘present?’
It’s interesting because I don’t think McCarthy realized how much those movies meant to people back in the day. Hell, a lot of us were formed by those movies. They were our foundation. The Brat Pack had immense power and influence over the zeitgeist of the time.
There’s something to be said for that.
And if people can look past the “poor me, I’m misunderstood” cringe that’s definitely part of the Brats documentary, it could be another moment in time to learn something really critical about the importance of letting go.
I hope one day everyone can see that because this 80s kid with her own issues really is rooting for all of us.
