Who among us is quick to turn the page when someone has done us wrong? The only name I could come up with was maybe the long dead Mother Theresa, but then I recalled hearing that even her legacy has been called up for review. No matter: this only serves my point. The blessing and curse of the big human brain is a long memory, and that makes it not very hard at all to catalog the people, places and things that have f*cked us up, over or out of things we really wanted (and maybe even deserved). It means that if and when we have a bad feeling, it doesn’t take us very long to identify the source: a callous parent, a failed relationship, a heartless joke, a rude comment, a cruel boss, a corrupt institution. The list goes on. In fact, mine could probably be its own separate newsletter.
This was what was on my mind as I watched Brats, the documentary conceived and directed by the former actor Andrew McCarthy, who is probably indelibly known to you not just as himself but also as the prom spoiler Blane McDonagh and the recent Georgetown grad Kevin Dolenz. Of course, these are characters from two iconic films of the era the title references, but to the legion of young culture consumers who breathlessly thought that being a member of the “Brat Pack” looked pretty great, he tells a different story: the moniker was insulting, constricting, reductive, unfair – and he’s not quite over it. McCarthy appears be living in the side of his life where nothing is ever put straight, and to leave, he’s going to need to figure out Is It Okay to Hold a Grudge?
I feel I should share that before watching Brats myself, I read dozens of amateur critiques (NB: this is how I’m workshopping classifying the narratives I absorb from Threads, which despite being both a source of guilt and non-pleasure in my life, I seem to be unable to quit). Most were unsparing enough that I guessed (correctly) I would have a slightly more forgiving review. People of the internet nearly always bristle when a celebrity acknowledges the many not great parts of fame; “whining about privilege” is a phrase you often hear reported, and there was no shortage of that take. Furthermore, the publicity around this release seemed to tease a fun and frothy nostalgia romp suffused with the reckless glamour of the misspent 1980s – almost like discovering a hidden trove of photos and priceless anecdotes to accompany them, like a prehistoric version of Instagram. Which of these immediately recognizable, for the most part enduringly famous actors were the closest? Which were rivals? Who dated whom? Where did they hang out? What did they talk or fight or bond about? Or maybe the audience at home was hoping for something akin to 2021’s Friendsreunion: come on guys, talk about your favorite memories, reel off some of your best lines, tear up a little upon greeting and farewell and invite us to do it too! Let us in on the secrets, acknowledge that it meant as much to you as it did to us. Give the fans what they want.
They never thought they’d feel so old at 62.
Mr. McCarthy did not do that, and though I wish he had spent more time tackling the general problem of fame at a pretty young age, I ultimately had to acknowledge that the thesis he did commit to was tailor-made for our day and age. He gathered these disparate skeins of IP from the 20th century and shuttled them through a very 21st century loom: because these days, is any story about the past not fundamentally about trauma or disorder? Not when the World Wide Web makes “Where are they now?” positively irrelevant, and “Didn’t we have fun?” is noble but too earnest to be interesting. What does always get our attention is how do you feel – especially when the answer is “kinda bad?” If the lines of dialog that could be said to represent Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire respectively are “I just wanna let them know they didn’t break me” and “It’s our time on the edge,” the one most emblematic of Brats – as well as the times we live in – is the filmmaker’s conclusion “All we ever want in life is to be seen.”
Though McCarthy’s apparent clumsiness in understanding his emotions about the past comes as a bit of a surprise (isn’t examining feelings the better part of an actor’s job description?) as a person born in 1962, we can imagine he comes by it honestly: the generation that preceded and ultimately raised his not only had no access to even the most rudimentary tools of psychotherapy, many of them were explicitly instructed to forget the past in order to survive. Of course, we adults of today are a (mostly) different breed, we know better. At this point in history, even the most emotionally stunted person can probably translate the aphorisms of therapy/self-help/recovery, like “you’re only as sick as your secrets,” “if it’s hysterical, it’s historical” and “there’s no ‘around,’ only ‘through.’” We are people who have summarily rejected the idea of “toxic positivity,” which begs that we not dwell on anything that causes us pain and simply talk and think our ways into bluer emotional skies. Though we know we often have more control than we might think over our “energy,” we also accept merely telling ourselves we are happy overall does not make it so, and to not have to fake it has hopefully given many of us some relief.
But sometimes I wonder if the mothballing of those falsely optimistic takes have swung too far in the opposite direction. Increasingly we are a culture that seems to labor over every single emotional misstep – especially when it’s someone else’s. We’re constantly dragging things out into the light, crowdsourcing them, committing them to writing and film, vowing “justice” and eliminating the possibility of redemption or forgiveness. How else could we tip the scales back toward healing? This is when I am reminded of my personal belief that the rules of this kind of excavation mirror the ones you should heed with furniture that requires assembly: follow the directions, have the right tools on hand, and know when it’s time to bring in a professional.
As mired in his process as McCarthy is, he does seem to know intuitively that the answers he seeks lie not with his peers – who mostly seem to be moderately to significantly more self-actualized – but at the source. So he finally pays a visit David Blum, who penned the New York article that kicked off the crisis of identity that he has been feeling so deeply all these years. The author manages to be circumspect without being dismissive or self-flagellating, and though there is less than a decade between the two men, you feel something of the reckoning that most of us will have (or wish for) with someone who had power over us at some point in our lives. While it seems that McCarthy wishes for something more confessional in the end, what he is sent away with is something that’s much more honest and probably relatable: most of us just do what we know to do, with the knowing he have at the time. Conspiracies and bad intent exist, of course, but they’re often rarer than we might initially [want to] believe.
Mike Tyson’s autobiography 2013 Undisputed Truth contained a piece of wisdom which I will paraphrase here: life is not about acquiring shit, it’s about losing it. I have no idea if he is the first person to have said this, but I swear it was the first time I heard it, and it stuck. But if I had to qualify it at all, I would say that some of this shit leaves by force or arranges its own departure, while some surrenders to the shadows that fall over the existence of every thing. But it’s important to remember much can simply be lost – shed, freed – because we allow it to be. Because we come to understand that gripping too tightly drains us of our energy. So we let go.
Where toxic positivity goes astray is in the idea that we get to choose how and what affects us, while it seems that the peril of rigorously “trauma-informed” self-assessment is that it lashes us to the idea that many of our choices are lost forever. My impression is that the “truth” appears somewhere between these two poles. So while I did appreciate the evergreen caution Brats offers about being mindful of what we say to and about others (especially in writing) lest we cause them unintentional and/or grievous harm, the key to a grudge-free life is to not to stop caring entirely about what people think of us, or to only solicit the attention of those intent on flattery. We cannot avoid having our feelings hurt by the judgements of others – whether their evaluations are inaccurate (though these usually hurt less) or because they are dead on target, or located in zones we’d rather not visit. These are the times when it feels easier to villainize the perpetrators, or attempt wipe the slate of memory entirely: if you leave, don’t look back. “I haven’t talked about this in 30 years,” McCarthy says more than once, and if there’s anything for which he alone bears responsibility, it’s this. Three decades is a long time, and while we can’t say it was wasted, it’s hard not to wish that it had been happier for him. If you have stuff to unpack – and presumably we all do – consider doing it sooner than later; otherwise, we risk being pursued by the demons and ghosts who will conspire to inform and interrupt every story we will ever tell.