How Ferris Bueller Looks to Me Now, 35 Years Later

Ferris, Sloane, and Cameron in the Fateful Ferrari — Glamorous youth. [Image ©1986 Paramount Pictures]

***
Oh fatal Ferrari,
Oh nervous sweet ride!
I’ll soon be quite sorry,
For your crash I can’t hide...
***

“Youth to itself rebels”

I first saw Ferris Bueller’s Day Off the summer of 1986, when I was eleven. Watching it again as an adult, I still love it, possibly even more than I did as a child, but Ferris looks a lot different to me now. Perhaps I am simply doomed to view Ferris as the adults in John Hughes films usually do view young people, but I cannot help if I now notice, as I never did before, the trail of wreckage he leaves in his wake, and for some reason, while watching it last week, I kept thinking of Hamlet (and Hamlet), not for any profound reasons, but for a handful of superficial similarities: both Ferris and Hamlet are youthful, extravagant, reckless protagonists who feign illness in order to broaden their field of action; both are fond of theater (Ferris’s bedroom is practically a functioning theater, with a stage, a props department, a costumes department, and a special effects department all in one).¹ Like Hamlet, Ferris seems only able to understand himself through performance, and like Hamlet he needs to hear himself think; Ferris especially needs the audience to hear him think, needs to guide us through the movie, cannot trust us correctly to interpret the story on our own.

Such are some of the superficial similarities, but the two characters do share a deeper affinity: a dangerous streak, an addiction to risk, and a beguiling glamour. Glamour, a Fata Morgana, conceals danger beneath its shimmering surface. Ferris adds to glamour a super-abundance of personal charisma, also a quality perilous to those on whom it works its spell. There should be no surprise that characters like Hamlet and Ferris will often lead others to ruin, and indeed Ferris and Hamlet each leaves behind a stage strewn with wreckage.

I can no longer, for example, believe that Cameron’s story ends happily, that he will (or even can) achieve the heroic transformation needed for the promised confrontation with his wrathful father, for Cameron to “take [his father’s] heat,” and in so doing escape his psychological thralldom. I want to believe he can, but if you were a betting person, you wouldn’t bet on this confrontation ending well for Cameron. There’s just nothing in the movie to justify such a belief, while there’s much to justify disbelief: only eight minutes before Cameron’s “I gotta take a stand” speech (1:22:11), Ferris predicts that Cameron will “marry the first girl he lays, and she’s gonna treat him like shit […] She won’t respect him, because you can’t respect somebody who kisses your ass” (1:14:19). Are we really to believe that this same person will successfully stare down the anger of the father whose irreplaceable Ferrari he has just destroyed?

Sloane Peterson will be more collateral damage (…our Ophelia?). Her final words, as she adoringly watches Ferris run home, are “He’s gonna marry me” (1:30:33), and yet the audience already knows from a monologue (at 1:13:24) that Ferris’s marriage proposal (39:44) has passed its expiration date. In this monologue, Ferris reveals that he does not expect his friendship with Cameron to survive the end of high school, and that “Sloane’s as big a problem” (1:14:47), an odd choice of words to describe somebody he supposedly wants to marry. He claims, “I was serious when I said I would marry her; I would” (1:13:55), classic Buellerian equivocation, with its muddling of past tense and subjunctive mood, a verbal sleight of hand we should have come to expect from this master of disingenuous and self-exculpatory reasoning. Just seconds before these remarks on Sloane, he claimed all his actions that day had been motivated by nothing other than a desire to “give [Cameron] a good day” (1:13:22), which claim is so manifestly untrue: Ferris has no car, and his entire day of fun therefore depended on securing access to Cameron’s car; therefore, Cameron must needs leave his sick bed and join Ferris on an adventure of which he wanted no part. Matthew Broderick is masterful with his pouty, curled lip, evoking the spoiled ego capable of erupting should he fail to get his way—and Ferris does lose his temper with Cameron, to the point of striking him in one early scene—suggesting that even his irresistible good mood may be a disingenuous performance.

Ferris is similarly disingenuous when it comes to explaining his intentions towards Sloane. His marriage proposal to her evokes Hamlet’s taunting courtship of Ophelia, both Ferris and Hamlet delighting in verbal brinksmanship. Ferris reverses his marriage proposal even as he makes it. Rather than proposing directly (“Will you marry me?”), he asks her, “You wanna get married?” (39:46), which reminds me of the mock literalism that children find so delightful, for example this excerpt from the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
"You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”²

Children delight in such wordplay, and so do Hamlet and Ferris, though with significantly higher stakes. When Sloane calls Ferris’s bluff and accepts his marriage proposal, he immediately counters by insisting they marry that same day, essentially a game of chicken (also popular with children), thereby forcing her hand (she demurs), while he himself gets to seem the more earnest of the two. He then, confoundingly, gives three obvious reasons why an immediate marriage would be a terrible idea, but pretends to be joking. He practically engineers her rejection.

And only the most credulous romantic could believe that Jeanie’s romance with the drugged up “Boy in the Police Station” will end well for her. I question whether it really even begins well. There’s something a little odd about the way he physically resembles her brother—dark hair, pasty skin, brown eyes. At the same time, however, the Boy in the Police Station serves as her brother’s opposite: whereas Ferris is natty and energetic, the Boy in the Police Station is slobbish and strung out. This inverse doubling is telescoped earlier in the film (at 11:59) when Ferris, for no clear reason, dances to the theme from I Dream of Jeanie, almost as though he is in love with his sister; and of course Ferris’s shadow character does fall in love with Jeanie. Conversely, the Boy in the Police Station, after remarking that Jeanie wears too much eye makeup, says “My sister wears too much [eye makeup]; people think she’s a whore” (1:17:50), thereby linking his own sister with Jeanie, who looks anything-but whorish, with her perpetual scowl, her goofy-patterned Oxford and her princess-pink cardigan. The Boy in the Police Station is Ferris's opposite, and Jeanie is the opposite to the Boy in the Police Station's "whorish" sister.

How many wrecked lives does Ferris leave behind? And does he really seem to care about any of them? Watching the film as an adult, I find it difficult to believe he does. His capacity for viewing his own actions in the most favorable light is almost limitless. Unlike John Hughes’s other teen movies, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is an astonishingly cynical one, glorifying insincerity and selfishness.

***

“To everyone who has will more be given”

I also noticed, 35 years later, how strangely Biblical Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is. Moses looms large over the film, but the dominant themes are drawn from two of Jesus's most severe parables: the Parable of the Talents, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

The Parable of the Talents

The Parable of the Talents came crashing onto my attention, very early, in the scene (one of my favorites, actually) where Jeanie confronts a student who is collecting coins to help “Save Ferris.”

This student is collecting coins in a Pepsi can, and Jeanie knocks the can from his hands, spilling coins all over the hallway floor (32:30). The scene called to mind Jesus’s Parable of the Talents, I suppose because a talent is literally a coin, but also because the parable is about punishing the servant who reproaches his master for the master’s dishonesty (the master is guilty of “taking what he did not deposit and reaping what he did not sew”), and the three characters most heavily punished in the movie—Jeanie, Mr. Rooney, and Cameron—are all likewise bothered that Ferris should thrive despite his persistent dishonesty, and not just despite it, but even because of it. All three are bothered, and all three are punished.

More to the point, probably, is that Jeanie wastes her gifts, which, I think, is the generally accepted meaning of the parable: that we are called upon to use our gifts, not waste them. How many times are we told that Ferris, who wanted a car for his birthday, received a computer instead, whereas Jeanie received the car? Ferris does not, however, waste his gift: he uses it to hack the school’s computer and reduce his number of absences from nine to two, making it possible for him to skip school again: “I asked for a car; I got a computer” (10:06). Jeanie, on the other hand, uses her gift in a fruitless quest to expose her brother’s wrong-doing. Jeanie, Jeanie, Jeanie, “Why beholdest thou the speck that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own?”³

Most of all, however, Ferris exemplifies the parable’s menacing message that “to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Everything works out for Ferris, and he heaps up good fortune for himself. As Jeanie says, “Why should he get to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants? Why should everything work out for him? What makes him so goddamned special?” (41:25). It's a resentment she shares with Camerson and Mr. Rooney. “But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away”: the film concludes with Mr. Rooney fruitlessly chasing after his car, which is being towed away.

Like most of Jesus’s parables, the parable of the talents is about salvation, and “Save Ferris” is a dominant motif, if not the dominant motif, in the film. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people are trying to “Save Ferris,” and while most who invoke the famous slogan are trying to save him from illness, the polysemic nature of this rallying cry is part of this film's inexplicable string of religious significations.

Parable of the Prodigal Son

Another, more obvious, Biblical antecedent is Jesus’s Parable of the Prodigal Son. Ferris is the prodigal son, and the film charts his path both as he leaves leaving, and then returns. As if to reinforce this point, the film interpolates the audience’s own journey from home, literally a journey to the cinema where we watch the film, at the end of which, after the credits have rolled, Ferris tells us that we too must return home:

If I have any younger readers, they must bear in mind that, when this movie was released, most Americans would have been watching it in a movie theater, not in their own homes.⁴

Jeanie is of course the jealous, resentful sibling, and well might Jeanie resent her brother: he tells lies, but people believe he tells the truth; she, on the other hand, tells the truth, but people believe that she lies, as when she calls the police to report an intruder in her home, which is true, but is arrested for making a false police report. The Boy in the Police Station cures Jeanie by advising her to spend less time worrying about her brother and more time worrying about herself: “Your problem is you […] You oughta spend a little more time dealing with yourself and a little less time worrying about what your brother does” (1:18:48), which is similar to the advice Ferris gives the audience when he says that one should not believe in an ism, but in one’s self (5:32), and which again evokes Jesus's admonition, “Why beholdest thou the speck that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own?”.⁵

Moses

Cameron, meanwhile, first appears (8:00) intoning the plangent spiritual “Go Down, Moses.” Moses might well be the presiding genius of the entire movie, or at least of its psychodramatic landscape. Cameron’s father is named Morris, an Anglicized form of the name Moses,⁶ who, according to Freud, represents the primitive father-figure who dominates his tribe, and who must be overthrown.⁷ The movie’s climactic scene centers on Cameron’s resolve to defy his father, in other words, to overthrow his father, who, oddly, never actually appears in the movie, but whose influence on the story can scarcely be overstated. Cameron’s father is like God: everywhere present, but nowhere seen, paradoxically present through his absence. He’s the wrathful, godlike father who constantly threatens Cameron with punishment, if not psychological annihilation. Gazing over Chicago from atop the world’s tallest building, both Ferris and Sloane remark upon how peaceful the city looks, but Cameron says “I think I see my dad” (39:11), or does he mean (cue the antimetabole), “I think my dad sees me”? Cameron bears all the traits ascribed by Freud to the religious personality: weakness, dependence, fear, submissiveness, hypochondria…Cameron is trapped in an infantile stage of development, and even were he to succeed in casting off his father’s yoke, he would only find himself eventually longing for subjection to some other punishing figure, possibly God, possibly, as Ferris predicts, a woman (1:14:19). Cameron’s last name, Frye, ironically means free or free man,⁸ which Cameron will never be.

…some thoughts on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, after watching it again 35 years later.

Notes

1. Ferris impersonates Sloane’s father, and also Abe Froman; he drafts Cameron into impersonating Sloane’s father, a funeral home director, and a Chicago policeman; he gives two grand musical performances on a float as it passes before the Grand Marshall in the Von Steuben Day parade.

2. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Macmillan, 1866), 106.

3. Matthew 7:3

4. In 1986, fewer than 40% of American households owned a VCR, at that time the dominant technology for viewing films at home, and for all practical purposes the only way to view a Hollywood film outside a movie theater. Even if you did own a VCR, home videos of major Hollywood films were not released on a home video format until almost a year after the theatrical release (Ferris Bueller was released in theaters in June, 1986, and did not become available on video until April, 1987). Furthermore home videos were priced high (a copy of Ferris Bueller cost $79.95), so that most American would be renting a copy, which meant, for high-demand releases, putting your name on a waiting list. For the percentage of American households that owned VCRs, see David Swanson and Bruce Klopfenstein, “How to Forecast VCR Penetration,” American Demographics 9, no. 12 (December, 1987): 45. For the wholesale price of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, see Jim McCullaugh and Al Stewart, “A 'Ferris Bueller' Promo from SBI Video,” Billboard, April 4, 1987, 58.

5. Again, Matthew 7:3.

6. Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, A Dictionary of First Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 242.

7. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Random House, 1961).

8. Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, A Dictionary of Surnames (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 196.