We start out being a bit annoyed with him. He's fixated on the idea that being labeled as part of the Brat Pack in the 1980s stunted his professional and maybe even his personal growth. I think he thought he might go on to become some Oscar-winning actor (like his hero whom he interviews, Timothy Hutton) and the only thing that prevented this was the way his opportunities were limited by that assignation. In reality, this was never in the cards for Andrew McCarthy, a passable actor to be sure but no one with real enduring power. He might be no better than the seventh or eighth best remembered of the core Brat Pack, to say nothing of the Brat Pack adjacent (of whom Lea Thompson considers herself part).
In the first half of Brats, McCarthy goes on and on about this -- not specifically about what he could have become, but the stigma of being part of a group identified by a cutesy and belittling phrase -- to the point that you feel a palpable urge for him to at least vary up the wording he's using. This is especially evident in his interview with Emilio Estevez -- conducted from a standing position in Estevez' kitchen, it's interesting to note, rather than seated comfortably in a lounge -- where we feel Estevez wanting to say "Okay buddy, wrap it up." And this is not Estevez being rude. In fact, he's quite polite. It's Estevez sensing what we're sensing: This guy is fixated on something that Estevez himself got past long ago. Even if Estevez hasn't had a great career this century either, and even if he does struggle with some of these same things, he knows enough not to make a public display of agonizing about it.
A skeptic would say that McCarthy might be playing a bit of a character here. No doubt, he is genuinely troubled by all these things -- assigning outsized blame to writer David Blum for coining the phrase, when Blum had no idea he was doing anything more than devising a clever headline that would have a single usage. I mean, McCarthy also wrote a book about it. But he may also be aware of his need to have an arc during the course of the movie. And maybe that means he's playing up the frustration in the opening interviews.
The interview that seems to unlock things for him is, probably unsurprisingly, the one with Rob Lowe, whom everyone says is a really nice guy, and is especially gracious here. Gracious, and wise. Lowe has obviously had one of the best careers of anyone originally associated with the Brat Pack -- if you remove the very very adjacent, like Tom Cruise -- and that's in part due to his continued charm and his ability to set others at ease. Lowe embraces the term Brat Pack and reminds McCarthy that it is brilliant to be remembered for something important to people -- the unspoken implication being that if McCarthy had not been part of the Brat Pack, maybe even fewer people would remember him today than they do. Even more deeply unspoken, and a message that is nowhere in Lowe's words at all: Hey man, don't bite the hand that feeds you. McCarthy does seem a bit more at ease after this, though of course we only know the sequence the interviews are presented in the movie, not their actual sequence in time. (There's one bit earlier where he was supposed to interview Lowe but Lowe was suddenly in Orlando rather than L.A., leading us to believe Lowe might be blowing him off. So we feel a little relief on McCarthy's behalf when the two do sit down together, and the interview is great.)
After the Lowe interview in particular, what we realize is that the thing McCarthy is lamenting is being on top of the world.
He's not lamenting it because it happened, but because after it happened, there was no way that anything else would ever feel as good.
I feel this a little bit in my own life, and I'm sure we can all romanticize certain periods in our lives that we now look on negatively because they set unrealistic standards for our own happiness.
From the years 1992 to 1996, I worked on an island off the cost of New Hampshire called Star Island. It was me and another hundred college-aged kids, all catering to the needs of guests who would stay for a week at a time. Although it was often tumultuous because of the age we were and because of the intensity of the experiences we were having -- someone was always breaking up with someone, or starting a new relationship that hurt someone else, etc. -- many of us look back on those summers as the best summers of our lives, or the best times of our lives, period. In fact, some people who worked there in their late teens and early 20s never really figured out what their place was in the world because they kept on trying to achieve that evanescent high, some still even working on the island in their 40s and 50s, in some capacity, hoping to recapture those days of their youth. Others of us, who live halfway across the world, look back on those times fondly, but have had to move on.
Andrew McCarthy is like those people still working on Star Island as adults, and perhaps on some level cursing that they ever worked there in the first place. If they hadn't had this formative experience and had spent summers working in the ice cream shop in their hometown instead, would they be better actualized adults now? In McCarthy's case, if he had never been in Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo's Fire, would he still be regularly working in the industry he loves?
We can't ever know these things. But I suspect Andrew McCarthy's life would be a lot more empty if he had never been part of the Brat Pack, only he wouldn't have a name for it. The ennui you can name feels more potent than the ennui you can't name, but the former ennui is only ennui by comparison, rather than your personal norm.
The McCarthy we see at the beginning of Brats seems to think that being labeled in a way that undermined his professional abilities was something to bemoan. Look at this life now, still struggling with the aftermath. (We don't actually know what he's doing now, interestingly, though we never hear anything about a family. The internet shows a wife of 13 years and three kids, and his decision to exclude them may be a further attempt to build that specific character he's playing.)
Really, he's bemoaning attaining a level of fame and popularity that was never sustainable. It's something child actors, members of boy bands, and viral internet sensations understand all too well. These are your 15 minutes, and it's never going to get better than this. Instead, you will judge the rest of your life against it.
The analogy to my summer workplace came up for me because watching Brats on Sunday night caught me at a time when my own nostalgia could have become that potent if I'd let it. The week on Star Island my family and I attended every year in early July, before I worked there, just came to a close, and there were all sorts of Facebook posts by people I haven't seen in 30 years but still dearly love. (Thirty years, in fact, is the amount of time it's been since McCarthy has seen some of the other Brat Packers he interviews.) Not only that, but there seemed to be some sort of informal gathering of former staff during the same time, so there was a picture of a bunch of people I knew from working there, also posted on Facebook this week.
Living in Australia, I could easily go down a rabbit hole of regret about the choices that led me to rarely even be able to visit Star Island for a single day, let alone spend a week or a summer there. In ways that felt very real to my young development, those people were friends to me at an equivalent intimacy and intensity that characterized the relationship between the Brat Packers, Or at least that was how we imagined the relationship was between Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, and yes, Andrew McCarthy.
But out of necessity I have to be like Molly Ringwald, who declined to be interviewed for McCarthy's film because she wanted to concentrate on looking forward. I'm a sentimental old fool and everyone knows it. I could have been that guy who never had a proper career because he needed to keep his summers open to work on Star Island. "The glory days" are sort of my religion.
But it's not possible for me to linger in my own Brat Pack times, because I am so far removed from that being a practical reality in my life. Some of those people are fully immersed in it, still working there in the summers, in what I can only imagine is an agony of wistfulness for the former coworkers who are not still there with them. Some of those people at least get to renew that nostalgia for one week a summer. Me, I just need to be the person who only takes a glancing look at the photos on Facebook, and then looks away.
I'll be the Molly Ringwald, and someday, maybe Andrew McCarthy will be too.
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