Notebook: Projections
When I was twelve years old I saw an author on some morning show who was my own age and had just written a book that had been published by a publisher (it was illustrated in a child-familiar style by her best friend). The book was called She Was Nice to Mice, and it was about a mouse observing the daily life of Queen Elizabeth (the first one). I was so jealous.
The author of this book was Ally Sheedy, who would go on to become famous for something else. A few nights ago, casting about to avoid my weighty book review editing responsibilities, I watched the documentary Brats by Andrew McCarthy, whom I remembered as “the thoughtful one” from the signature “Brat Pack” movie St. Elmo’s Fire. The Breakfast Club came out when I had just graduated from college: the actors were my age, but they were playing ourselves as high school students, so the movie seemed to me charming in a prematurely nostalgic way. St Elmo’s Fire, arriving soon after and addressing our contemporary selves, struck me as just ridiculous. (Glancing back at it, the characters seem startlingly heedlessly “privileged” in the contemporary parlance: oblivious to the world beyond their demographic niche, as Reagan arrived at his second term—they were in Washington!—Oliver North diverted funds to the contras, and Gorbachev entered public consciousness. The critic Ira Madison III in the film magnanimously suggests that Black audiences at the time were used to seeing themselves in white characters. The Brat Pack actors are identified in Brats without wincing as defining the youthful spirit of the age rather than, say, hip hop or AIDS.)
The startling premise of Brats is that the young actors of the Brat Pack have completely lost touch with each other, never really hung out at all, and never talked about the shared experience of being so defined. We see Andrew McCarthy phoning up the various erstwhile brats and each of them expressing irritation with the designation and how it followed and circumscribed them after a casually titled 1985 cover story in New York magazine branded them for life, however much it greased their way to fame and riches and opportunity. When Andrew McCarthy toward the end speaks with the New York piece’s author, a working journalist, who was then only twenty-nine himself and just doing his job, the journalist is barely able to resist saying they shouldn’t all have taken it so seriously. (The piece’s subject, Emilio Estevez, still appears grief-stricken by his betrayal. Someone, give these people a copy of The Journalist and the Murderer.)
What interested me about the set of ideas and emotions unfolding here was the porous relationship it unveiled between audiences and fictional characters and the real people who embody them. I have often thought about how actors carry in a kind of magical way their past characters into new roles, and carry the glamour (in the original sense) of their being actors into the fictional characters they portray; that’s why a “cast of unknowns” feels so different. In some way their reappearance in different situations knits together a kind of metaphysical alternative reality that teases our subliminal allurement within the fiction and stokes our attraction to “celebrity culture” outside it. The actors in Brats dimly intuit that their whole métier is dependent on the superfluity of our identification with them; they cannot escape our pinning to their carnal selves our lived experience of their fabrications.
The documentary didn’t pay much attention to the Brat Pack’s progenitors, the Rat Pack of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr., but the precedent is meaningful: film critics in the documentary allude to the fact that the projection of friendship and carousing out of the films and onto the real people entailed a wish for the fiction to continue. As the original Rat Pack appeared to have a lived social reality mirroring a sleek, monochromal, gin-sheened cinematic world that defined real-life sophistication (the grunginess of the “rat” association was part of the joke, or maybe a soigné rascality was tacitly approved, Brat Packers might note), eighties teenagers on the cusp of the MTV and VHS age, clustering outside the cineplex at the mall, yearned, as the film’s historians note, to connect in technicolor above their mutually isolated living rooms, for the newly recognizable cinematic creatures to be befriendable, for their scene to be enterable; to be released from solitude. (A colleague once startled me by saying that she reads books “for company.”) When I see these faces they still stir in me that awareness of the awkward visibility of my skin, how ill at ease I was with myself, how much better I imagined it would be if I were, like them, becoming beautiful, sustained by the attention of other beautiful people. These beings, who could inhabit a character and then float free of it, seemed to have the charm that those of us bound at home by one destiny to our emerging identities lacked.
The sense of a “scene,” in which the magically superpowered actors are in magically superpowered relation with each other, carrying this cumulative anthology of identification within them, draws us into spying on Oscar afterparties and makes the spectacle of celebrity clusters of friends more powerful than the sum of its parts. That fictional characters whose relationship to each other gets imagined into real life onto real people, and then those people come back and tell us that they have no relationship, except a retroactive one that (on the pretext of a film) grows out of the rubble of the invented one, reveals the warm-blooded engine of yearning that binds fiction to its audience.
Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson declined to participate in Brats. Judd Nelson’s absence is embodied in the image of his ambiguously raised fist (defiance? solidarity?) that closes The Breakfast Club and, allusively, Brats. Molly Ringwald, those of us who grew up with her will remember, asserted the finality of her rejection of it all by decamping for Paris, capital of the Old World. She (and Andrew McCarthy) wrote books. The director John Hughes is appreciated in Brats as a person who treated them well, but the fact that he made films whose craft made a more significant claim for theirs than a New York cover story does not get much notice. Nor that some of them really did gather some centrifugal career energy from the Brat Pack phenomenon. The absent Robert Downey, Jr., for instance, had bigger problems than paparazzi and soared past most of them. Ally Sheedy made a serious film about art called High Art. There’s more to it in the end than the adhesiveness of one’s publicity.
The Brat Packers were involuntary early recruits in what we now in the age of social media understand as “self-branding,” the “connecting with one’s audience” that we “independent creators” are encouraged to do in order to lift our relationship above the commercial and into the personal, the better to sell our products in a world of infinite other products. The emotiveness of authors on TikTok rises to meet the emotiveness of their waiting (there) readers. Tavi Gevinson, who enjoyed a dizzying ascent as an Oak Park preteen who started her own spookily sophisticated fashion blog, wrote a heartbreaking story way back in 2019 for The Cut about how broken she had been by the lucrative deal that invited her to record for Instagram her entire existence in a paid-for fancy apartment building (after an ascending ladder of similar deals). “I think I am a writer and an actor and an artist. But I haven’t believed the purity of my own intentions ever since I became my own salesperson, too,” she wrote. Brat Pack descendent Sydney Sweeney took grief for complaining that she has to hawk herself on Instagram to pay the bills.
There’s a little montage, at the end of Brats, over an eery cover of the song “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” lining up outtakes of the Brat Packers looking startlingly young and vulnerable for a few seconds at various afterparties and talk show sets. The denuding experience of moving backward through film’s increasing ability to falsify makes their tremulous surfaces seem abruptly actual and sentient. This movie, whose speakers discern only faintly the alchemical strangeness of longing and artifice, self and invention that make fictional forms irresistible to us, is in its way a revealingly hapless illustration of all that we do not understand about such enchantments.
For actual film criticism, that also looks a bit inside the ambiguities of spectatorship, see Book Post’s April Bernard on Ripley and Christian Caryl on Werner Herzog.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. For those hankering for more of her thoughts on movies, she has a spoiler-filled and overwritten account on Letterboxd: BookPostAnn. Visitors will see that she doesn’t get out much.
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