Brats are Back: And Bringing Intentional Style

The Summer of 2024 has been unofficially and proudly dubbed “Brat Summer”, thanks in large part to Charlie XCX’s album, brat, (release date: June 7, 2024). The playful vibe encourages us to lean into our messier selves and enjoy the hell out of whatever is in front of us with unapologetic gusto. Yes,  please! This seems like a fun approach to summer in a world that has increasingly become a literal and figurative war zone –  in many different directions. I am grateful for the levity, and I am enjoying the chance to re-work some of my own personal judgments about how words are used, intentionally, and then those exact same words become unintentionally misconstrued as people react to their own thoughts and feelings about them. And I breathe deeply around that because communication breakdowns serve no one. Never have, and maybe never will.

I am definitely interested in how specific words and phrases affect me, personally, as I work through my own triggers, but these days I place a lot more emphasis on what was actually meant by the person who said them. This is a relatively new practice for me, and I continue to learn how to expand my perspective in new ways. Also, how to lower my expectations for others without compromising my own standards for myself (or somehow feeling superior in them). My idea of common sense is always going to be different than someone else’s, and I try to keep that in mind. 

That’s a fact that we don’t acknowledge often enough, even though we all need opportunities to lighten up and not take things - especially ourselves - quite so seriously sometimes. Chatting up our inner brat can move us through some of our own conflicts, judgements and triggers simply because we are spending time allowing them space to breathe. From that point of clarity, we organically become more creative within ourselves. It just happens, and it’s so freaking cool when we get to watch it manifest!

Summer has always offered us a yearly respite, as the pace of things slow down, naturally. As modern humans, we often make ourselves too busy to take advantage of it (or even see it as the gift it’s intended to be!). Right now, there are a few weeks left of official summer in 2024, so I recommend spending some time with your bratty self… Make some noise and find a sense of balance within your center! When we figure out how good it feels to live in vulnerability, we are able to see and use the power that comes with laying down our judgements and being among what is vibrant and real. 

I want to point out that as soon as I wrote that last sentence, my best friend from 1985 called and asked me to go to the pool. It’s supposed to be 100 degrees in Kansas City today, so I dropped everything to go hang out with her (an easy value-based choice!). We spent a few hours reminiscing about our own evolutions - ego and soul - and how much importance we placed back then on things that hold little value now. I told her what I was writing about, and we recalled our individual love stories with The Brat Pack - the actors themselves, as well as the characters they brought to life in the movies we loved. And the changing meaning of words.

As a child of the eighties, and a fan of Andrew McCarthy’s recent documentary “Brats”, (release date: June 13, 2024), I delight in the current reinvention of the word “Brat”. Thirty-nine years ago (June 10, 1985, to be exact), a single headline, “Hollywood’s Brat Pack”, caused a massive stir that spread like wildfire into our collective vernacular. Overnight, this entire group of actors were branded as Brats - and none of them were happy about it. For the actors involved, this new moniker felt like an insult, and to some extent, the effects of this cavalier headline have continued to incite and trigger several of the people involved – which is why the documentary is so timely right now! Brats are having a vulnerable moment with respect… and it is good…. 

*Spoiler Alert: despite claims in the 1985 article, the members of the Brat Pack didn’t get together to discuss this phenomenon with each other until many years later (wild, right?!). By most accounts, they weren’t really brats, and they were never a pack of any kind. True or not, the idea continued to grow...

Despite the actors’ displeasure, “Brat Summer” was in full effect in 1985. Public opinion was clearly misguided - we LOVED the Brat Pack so much that we hardly noticed that they didn’t. At all. Within a short span of time, we all started asking to be/have/feel something that didn’t even exist in reality. Somehow, our culture was ripe for believing that it did, and those desires prevailed. We wanted all of the things that we assumed The Brat Pack had at their fingertips. Problems presented quickly when we were willing to compromise parts of ourselves in order to get them. 

Conceptually, these kinds of ideas shaped many of our views and set off waves of division between reality and perception – just like many other things in the eighties. As a country, we had ramped up production and become rabid consumers without realizing how quickly it had happened. But that was kinda the name of the game in the eighties, am I right?!

Some of the values that seemed sacred then, now appear empty, fake, or hollow in today’s light. I mean, are there many people under 32 still eager to help bury a body and cover up a murder because of their attachment to loyalty? The answer is No! They are more likely to call you out for having the body in the first place. They don’t want to see your physical and mental health suffer as a result of keeping the secret. On the surface, this idea was practically non-existent in the eighties. Kudos to the kids for championing our needs for emotional support.

In 2024 we are asking to be real and whole within our bratty selves in a solid bid for authenticity. Our youth is crying out for the types of changes that reflect the world they will be living in, not the one that we grew up in. Those of us who lived through the eighties carry a sense of ego attachment to security and privacy, along with a lingering bootstrap mentality that these younger generations don’t care to abide by. They see themselves as part of a collective in ways that we have never been able to, and this is where we start to see how different the world really is for them, generationally. Great example: a single headline is unable to affect the collective thinking the way it could back then - and THAT is something to be excited about. 

In Andrew McCarthy’s documentary, he sets out to see how the road has been for his fellow Brat Packers, and ultimately, finds himself more at peace than he ever thought he would be at the end of the journey. I’ll attribute part of this to his interspersed conversations with Malcolm Gladwell, who is on hand with a gorgeous take on the wholeness of the situation. He also interviews the guy who wrote the “offending” article for New York Magazine, David Blum; who will still argue that at 29 he had earned the right to call them brats as a tantalizing headline for what had started out as a feature article about a 23 year old Emilio Estevez. The idea came from a joke made after a particularly indulgent group dinner (Fat Pack) – an obvious play on the beloved Rat Pack (whose words have also become more problematic as time has moved away from what was once “okay”). He hopes that McCarthy understands his intentions, but still…

David Blum’s headline helped clinch a pattern of beliefs that have prevailed, despite many attempts to thwart them. Dreams of a John Hughes-inspired life danced across our movie screens and into our aspirational ideals. We found ourselves identifying with the personality traits of the characters that this talented group of actors were lighting up on movie screens across America, as well as the actors themselves. The false suggestion that they work and play together, as a unit, was an easy sell to people who thought that was really cool. Or were jealous of it. Or, who hated on it. We didn’t think about the effects of misinformation, or how it might look in the future. At least not enough to raise awareness about it.

These characters that were being written for the youth of America became our friends before NBC introduced us to the Friends that we adopted in the nineties. By the same principles, we got to know these people because of how they interact through the writing and their chemistry on the screen. The personalities of the characters and the actors can become entwined in our minds. We meet the characters and then we are able to hear the actors talk about their connections to the characters. Over a short amount of time, those words blend together, even though these are all people we don’t actually know (at least in most cases). Somehow, though, we can feel like we know what it would be like to hang out with Jennifer Aniston, Molly Ringwald, or any of the characters that they have played, don’t we?

As Andrew McCarthy set out to make Brats, the effect of his own perspective about what happened is on display. He truly believed that this was a terrible thing done to him and his fellow actors/Brat Packers. He maintained that it cost him (and the other BPs) acting roles. It derailed his confidence and kept him from fully enjoying his success. Because it was so unexpected, it exploded with a lot of force. That initial hit felt supersonic, and instead of working through those first feelings, they were all scrambling around some kind of damage control. Again, I had no idea they were so bothered while I, and the rest of the younger population thought it was so tubular, rad, and awesome to the max. We bought into the hype for sure, and kept it going. 

Perspective is an amazing resource, and 39 years creates a lot of it. Trying on the ones that aren’t ours will always give us a broader framework to see anything. If you have been lucky enough in your life to look at the world from the top of a mountain, or at least a vantage point that gives a broader look at the landscape around you, then you can use that feeling to broaden any view for yourself, at any time. There are so many ways to see a thing, that we can’t even begin to imagine some of them. And that is exactly how we have gotten so sideways from those we don’t agree with - by refusing to see how off base we can be from other intelligent people. Smart people don’t all see things the same way!

On June 28, 1985, the movie St. Elmo’s Fire was released, sending these actors into a stratosphere of fame that might not ever exist in the same way again. Not because they were so great (and they were), but because it has become practically impossible to grab the attention of the masses without something massive happening. In nature, Saint Elmo’s Fire is a continuous electric spark that occurs as a corona around tall objects, backlighting them beautifully. It comes on quickly, with tremendous force, lighting up the edges of things in the night.

It’s obvious from the documentary that some of these interviews occurred during Covid (another big corona moment!), and that each of the actors have developed their own unique relationship with the idea of the Brat Pack. My takeaway, except for the desire to have a spiritual conversation with Demi Moore, is that they should all take the rest of this summer to embrace their inner Brats, let any of the remaining negative triggers fall away naturally, and feel their own Brat Powered Energies. Summer is almost over - Enjoy!