Copyright slashfilm
Every generation has its defining actors. Baby Boomers grew up flocking to the films of Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, and so many others. Millennials fondly recall lining up for the latest movies starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Rachael Leigh Cook, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Jason Biggs. And Zoomers will one day be nostalgic for the work of folks like Timothée Chalamet, Sydney Sweeney, Amber Midthunder, and Miles Caton. As a Generation X kid, I had a front-row seat to one of the most strangely over-hyped big-screen talent pools of all time. Through no fault of their own, a group of (mostly) talented young performers rose to fame by appearing in several youth-skewing movies at a time when Hollywood was just figuring out how to target our demographic. They hooked us through MTV, and spoke to our suburbanite trials and tribulations. John Hughes was our materialistic bard. Jake Ryan was our manifest romantic destiny. And Rob Lowe was a golden god. I don't think anyone realized there was a Hollywood youth movement afoot until the summer of 1984, when John Milius's "Red Dawn" reconfigured the teen comedy as a kill-the-Commies war fantasy. Suddenly, these wet-behind-the-ears kids were thrust into the real world of the Reagan era, which struck some culture journalists as a generational bid to be taken seriously. This didn't sit well with the media smart set, so when they caught wind of Joel Schumacher's "St. Elmo's Fire," an ensemble drama set in the politically aspirational Washington D.C. bubble, knives were drawn. But rather than shiv the dubious melodrama concocted by Schumacher and Carl Kurlander, one New York magazine writer backstabbed the too-open, hard-partying stars. And thus the Brat Pack became a pop cultural phenomenon.
