What Constitutes a Brat Pack?

I watched the Hulu original documentary Brats—and I’m not even sure if I’ve ever watched a John Hughes film. I’m maybe ten years older than that genre of youth films from the 80s. I’d graduated from Ohio University and had moved to Chicago to work at an inner-city mission. While TV had been invented (hahaha)—we didn’t have one. Maybe one—a console that was carried around from floor to floor, though it wasn’t meant to be portable—mainly used for parties and special occasions.

Not sure why I watched the doc, but it sounded interesting to hear how people at a certain age handled fame (this was before social media could destroy you with one post) and the effect of a New Yorker article titled Hollywood's Brat Pack,” by David Blum (first appeared in the June 10, 1985, issue of New York Magazine). The Brats actually reminded me of the New York School—a loosely organized group of poets, painters, and writers/thinkers that congregated together in the lower East Side of New York in the 50s and early 60s.

Though no one was writing about them then, many books and articles have been written since about the special sauce that glued the mix together and eventually saw them unwind. Some believe it was Frank O’Hara with his charismatic personality that drew folks in and that the era ended with his untimely death in July 25, 1966. Of course, the group didn’t just stop, but the contours changed and life shifted. It was a bit like a balloon that might lose air and contract and at other times get a new breath and expand. The group spawned second- and third-generations.

There were even West Coast New York School participants. Oddly, Andy Warhol was not part of the New York School, though, geographically he was right there. Voyeuristically I’d like to think I was part of the center that did not hold. Perhaps, I am/was. My former collective worked with the same vibe: people coming and going and relationships sinking deep, to the point that  many of us stay in touch today, if possible, from far away.

The group of actors in the doc by Andrew McCarthy was dubbed the Brat Pack; they had no say over the name. Just like the New York School, membership was fluid; no one really knew if they were in the club or not. What were the benefits of inclusion? Mostly collaboration, an exclusive group of friends, perhaps notoriety. James Schuyler was in the original New York School, though his bouts with mental illness would force him to the edges. Some say the painter Fairfield Porter was in, some out; he wasn’t abstract enough. The painter Jane Freilicher was definitely in, her work later in life taking a page out of Porter’s handbook in that it was representational, reflecting her surroundings, minimal objects, domestic. Sometimes they were friends, sometimes they were feuding. A bit like a brat pack.

What I took away from the doc was that no matter who you were—in or out, if you identified as a brat or New York School—they were of a time, a certain place, they had something in common, and time cannot erase it.

Even today with my collective, even if you changed your mind about the thing you once believed passionately in and so closely identified with: we have a shared recollection, we were in this thing together. There was that one time we all went out in the middle of the night to observe a comet and on the way back into town ran out of gas and everyone had to throw in their pocket change for Mike and Jim to walk to a gas station and buy a quarter gallon of gas to try and get home.

The Brat Pack can’t deny that they were part of a zeitgeist, a moment in time that many young people lived vicariously through watching their films. They represent a time, the 80s, young, in love, misunderstood, yearning and aching, never knowing where it will end and who they’d wind up being. They are still trying to figure out who they are. The Brat Pack.