Class!

Monday is about movies, and sometimes TV. Today, a Brat Pack Flashback!

I watched Brats a few months back, it’s on the Disney channel. Might have been the last thing of any value I watched on that trash heap-scrapbook of a platform before ditching it. Brats is a documentary that attempts to tell the story of the Brat Pack — the loose collective of 80s movie stars that featured Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, and had some adjacent players like Tom Cruise and Charlie Sheen and John Cusack. Andrew McCarthy was one of the biggest names of the Brat Pack, and the one that won’t let it go — it seemed to define him more than the others. For he made the doco, and it’s based on his memoir. He basically tries to reconnect with the gang through a series of interviews and attempts to track down some of the more reluctant players (Judd Nelson).

There were the younger Baby Boomers in ensemble casts like Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Tom Berenger and Kevin Costner, all in The Big Chill.

And the younger version — the baby Gen-X’ers of the time were The Brat Pack. They were in movies like St. Elmo’s Fire, and Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and The Outsiders. Of course, there are people that will tell you The Outsiders isn’t quite a Brat Pack movie, and there are people that will tell you it’s the first. There are people that will say Molly Ringwald wasn’t quite Brat Pack, and others that will say she’s the Queen of the movement. These people, whichever side they take, are nobs. Like people being insulted by the demographic term Baby-boomer, The Brat Pack was a movement, a group, a moment; a bloody nickname. And it’s largely the job of people outside of the movement to observe and define the movement, and for the people inside it to just live with the tag, and there prize of course is to be (more than) duly compensated.

The best thing about the Brats doco — by far — is Demi Moore. She is smart, generous with her time and insight, and she’s clearly done the work on herself but doesn’t come across too preachy or all-knowing. She has pearls of wisdom for Andrew McCarthy, but he is tragically clinging on to the fact that he never kicked on beyond his first incredible run of films (St. Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink, Mannequin, Less Than Zero, Weekend At Bernie’s…)

And that run of films, and his status as the cool-nerd, the approachable, acceptable white guy whose privilege was never bulging out the sides (as with Rob Lowe’s characters) but who was still able to get away with so much due to both who he was and who he was playing — a kind of exaggerated Everyman (with perks, if not pecs) — all started with a little movie called Class.

Watching Brats made me want to watch Class again. Okay, it made me want to watch a bunch of Brat Pack movies, which is part of the point of such a documentary film — it is good for business.

So I watched Class this weekend. First time seeing it in a couple of decades at least, the film now 40 years old. And I remember watching it for the first time when I was too young to fully clock it, but at the same time, it’s a very easy movie to understand. The themes might be deemed too mature for an eight year old, but that didn’t stop the old TVNZ putting it on just after 8pm and letting it play. We had parents that let us watch those things, or didn’t know how to use the VCR, and got the kids to set it, and didn’t realise that meant the kids might get up early and watch…(That’s how I saw all of The Young Ones episodes before my parents would ‘screen’ them to decide if they were suitable, and I would just play along with the decision. The ‘banned’ episodes simply being ones I’d already seen of course, just stayed quiet and didn’t join in the family dissection of the humour in those ones).

Class was the first movie to feature John Cusack, though he’s barely in it and doesn’t fill you with hope that he’ll become a dependable, enduring cinematic presence for 40 years and counting. It also features Alan Ruck — who you know now from Succession, and before that Spin City, and before that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off…

It is also Virginia Madsen’s screen debut. She is largely there to have her shirt torn off, and to be leered at by the boys on screen. She recollects the actors all being arseholes, and it being a horrific experience for her. Thankfully, she would get a better shot the following year in Dune, and would continue to carve out roles across TV and movies, including solid horror roles (Candyman, The Prophecy) and courtroom drama-thrillers (Ghosts of Mississippi, The Rainmaker) before being recognised in some sort of second coming ever since 2004’s Sideways; taken seriously finally…

There are other people you’ll spot in the movie that you’ll know — but really the film is about two seperate sets of dynamics: Rob Lowe and Andrew McCarthy. And Andrew McCarthy and Jacqueline Bissett.

The film is, weirdly, two different movies sandwiched together. It’s partly some sort of pre-Dead Poet’s Society via Porkies, a dorm-room comedy with sex-obsessed teens and dumb pranks, with some sort of life lesson around the corner. And then, far more seriously, and rather disturbing for audiences today I’m sure, the movie tells this weird, bolted-on tale of one of the roommates having an affair with an older woman, only to find out in an awkward — Saltburn-type way — that the fling he’d been having was with his roommate’s mother.

Cue a huge fight. And then of course, because it’s a comedy, they make up — with one of the corniest, most context-less final lines in a movie. Some sort of It was all a dream-like nonsense. Just mates again. No biggie that you shagged me mum!

It is totally acceptable to give Class one star. To be insulted by its very lack of craft and taste, and erm class…to think that it’s creepy and rapey and weird, and that, 41 years on, it’s a mystery how anyone could ever decide such a thing might pass for ‘light entertainment’.

But — it’s also acceptable to see Class as some sort of four-star film (to give it five would be taking the piss). There’s something deep and dark and uncomfortable here. And though the shoehorning of the topics and gags is weird and would never fly today at all, there’s some dark heart to this film.

But I’m a product of those times. I watched Class and Class of ‘84 (two very different films, equally inappropriate for an eight year old) at around the same time. I watched The Toxic Avenger, and Jaws, and Alligator, and all sorts of other weird and wonderful films — including the inappropriate and downright silly side of the Brat Pack films — Weekend at Bernie’s had a FUCKING SEQUEL YO! And though I don’t intend to watch every single Brat Pack film ever, I am now lining up the Bernies, and Mannequin, and St. Elmo’s Fire, and one or two others. And I still think that the spiritual mother to all of these sorts of films is The Big Chill. Which is a different sort of class.