I enjoy chugging a nostalgia cocktail of The Breakfast Club or Better off Dead as much as any other
eighties brat, but I can’t say I’ve ever yearned to visit Shermer, Illinois, or
Greendale, California. So I didn’t expect the location-centric premise of Kevin Smokler’s new book
Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to ’80s Teen Movies to be a big wow.
However, Smokler uses the physical and temporal settings of the films he swiftly analyzes as a means
to get into themes and concerns that extend beyond mere zip codes. And when you
think about it, the Rockwellian ideal of Kingston Falls that serves as the
setting of the gremlins’ rampage in Gremlins
or the dead-end dreariness of Milpitas, California, where a
teen nihilistically murders his girlfriend in River’s Edge are essential to those films’ unique states of mind. Smokler
convincingly suggests that Reagan’s love of Back
to the Future had less to do with Marty McFly’s match-making exploits than
it had to do with the conservative’s-wet-dream setting of 1950s Hill Valley.
Smokler’s entertaining, non-academic tone makes his
travelogue as entertaining as a viewing of Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off, though the trip is a bit too speedy at times. I could
have spent more time in some of these locales even as I realize that the
author’s decision to cover as many films as he does necessitates such
accelerated velocity. Along with the usual bumper crop of John Hughes movies
there are less typical items such as Over
the Edge, Hairspray, and Stand by Me, as well as key proto-eighties teen
movies such as American Graffiti, The Warriors, and Breaking Away. I didn’t always agree with his assessments (I think
he overstates the racism of Gremlins
and understates the racism of Sixteen
Candles, for example), but I consistently enjoyed the journey, which he
makes more fun by picking up bitchin’ hitchhikers such as Savage Steve Holland,
Amy Heckerling, Martha Coolidge, and Daniel Waters for little side trip
interviews along the way.
