Professional Sweetheart: 6/24/24

That's the End of the Joke

Hello everyone! Here’s an open post of Professional Sweetheart for your eyeballs. If you want to get this kind of thing every week, why not subscribe?

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I don’t know about you, but does it feel like the word “brat” is being tossed around a lot right now?! Between the new Charli XCX album and the new documentary about the Brat Pack, that is…

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As much as I could probably talk about the former, I’m obviously here to talk about the latter. One of the benefits of aging is now getting long lens, tell-all documentaries about the stuff you used to like as a teenager, though in all honesty I was too young to see most of the John Hughes movies in the theaters when they came out. It really wasn’t until they made their way to cable starting in the late 80’s and early 90’s that I finally became obsessed with them. Nonetheless, I think most people around my age sprinted to watch Brats (2024) when it showed up on Hulu recently, all with different opinions, which is always fascinating. Without giving away too much for those who haven’t seen it yet: the documentary is essentially centered around the actor Andrew McCarthy and his reaction to an article written by David Blum for New York Magazine that originally coined the term “the Brat Pack”. On the whole, it’s definitely nostalgic and really tugs at the heartstrings of Gen X (is there any other reason to play “Love Will Tear Us Apart”?) but then slowly becomes a study in how Hollywood loves to put people into neat little boxes that are hard to climb out of if you’re trying to be a real artist.

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So, it probably goes without saying that Andrew McCarthy was a huge crush of mine as a girl. The first movie I ever remember seeing him in is Mannequin (1987). It used to play on basic cable ad nauseum although I distinctly remember renting the VHS tape from Blackwell Video, the video store my family frequented back in the day. I ended up watching it so many times that I used to have dreams about being a mannequin that gets kissed to life by him, just like Kim Cattrall does in the movie. I know by this point many people have pointed out how weird of a concept Mannequin was, even in an era where we’re all generally okay with people just trying to find someone to match their freak. As a kid though, I thought it was completely believable that a mannequin could come to life, much in the way that I thought Christian Slater totally did have a baboon heart. Delulu is the solulu, as they say.

Then, I think I saw Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) next, which I must admit I barely remember at this point. I mean, what are the fine details after “two guys dress up and carry around a dead dude”, really? It wasn’t until a year or so after that that I finally saw the movie that cemented AMC’s legend status, Pretty in Pink (1986). The problem was, I had already seen and loved Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) by this point, which I’d always heard was an attempt to right the wrong of that highly controversial PIP ending (frankly, I do like SKOW slightly better). To be honest, watching them in reverse just completely messed up my timeline. To this day, Andrew McCarthy as Blaine is still a weird feeling for me. As much as I get a lot of mileage out of the “preppy guy who abandons the trapping of his privileged life to date a girl outside of his world” trope, the issue really is Duckie, who is just too damn likeable. Despite all of his empathy and reeducation about how the other side lives, Blaine is always going to be the anti-Duckie, and therefore can never truly win. Plus, I always had a problem with Blaine taking Andie to the James Spader party on their first date. I’m sorry, I know this is a dumb high school kid who’s horny and new to dating outside his class, but I still feel like he instinctively should have known not to take the girl he’s trying to impress to a place where he knows all of his friends who make fun of her will be. And yes, I KNOW SHE EVENTUALLY RETURNS THE BAD JUDGEMENT IN KIND by taking him to the club where her people hate him, but I don’t care. I still think the onus is on Blaine to know better because he’s rich or some shit, and I’m sticking by it.

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I’ve gone on record saying this many times but the John Hughes 80’s teen movies really informed my ideas of what I thought high school would be like for me, probably to a fault. I came into 9th grade thinking it would be full on class warfare between “preps vs. punks” and that neither would cross into the others’ stream. As in, I could expect an entire wing of the school where only the punk/artsy kids would hang out and I would never have to see a Blaine if I didn’t want to. But by the time my actual high school years came around, Nirvana had just gone mainstream which subsequently screwed up the entire social ecosystem served to me in these Brat Pack films. Suddenly, popular, rich kids were into alternative music, and I would see guys in basketball shorts moshing alongside crust punks at shows downtown and feel like I’d been lied to all my life. Dare I say, I’ve never gotten over it and to be honest, if you catch me on a good day especially after a couple of drinks, I will tell you that the mainstreaming of alternative music completely ruined the world and that a small part of me still believes in an era where the Steffs and Hardy Jenns stay on their side of the school and the Andies, Duckies, and Watts-es stay on ours. But I digress.

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In closing, if you’ll allow me to dance around the central conflict of Brats: it’s hard to know how culture affects people on an individual level until many years after the fact. Had I known Andrew McCarthy had been feeling some type of way about his affiliation with his Brat past, could we have stopped stanning him in that specific heartthrob kind of way? Would I tell my heart to stop fluttering even seeing him pop up in stuff like The Joy Luck Club (1993) or Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994)? Had he really wanted to change his narrative, should he have just run towards the most transgressive art he could have possibly made, never to look back? His Taxi Driver (1976), his Claire Denis period, or his Showgirls (1995)? Can an artist even control a legacy at any point? And quite honestly: why was Rob Lowe of all people seemingly the most well-adjusted of the Brat Pack kids at the end of the day?!

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Talk soon!

Millie

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Movies Mentioned:

• Brats (2024, Andrew McCarthy)

• Mannequin (1987, Michael Gottlieb)

• Untamed Heart (1993, Tony Bill)

• Weekend at Bernie’s (1989, Ted Kotcheff)

• Pretty in Pink (1986, Howard Deutch)

• Some Kind of Wonderful (1987, Howard Deutch)

• The Joy Luck Club (1993, Wayne Wang)

• Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994, Alan Rudolph)

• Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese)

• Showgirls (1995, Paul Verhoeven)

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