I just stumbled upon this article, written by Alan Siegel, who I’ve decided is a mutant.
His primary point in this article is that the character of Ferris Bueller is unrealistic. My counter-point? Of course he is. Did you ever think about the real protagonist of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off being Cameron Frye? Of course you didn’t, because you got so excited about this column idea and how The Atlantic said yes to it that you sat down at your laptop (it’s a Dell, isn’t it? DON’T LIE) and pooped it right out.
Hey Captain Duh, Cameron is the one who changes throughout the film. The story is really about Cameron’s journey. Of course we can’t really identify with Ferris. It’s like identifying with an ideal, which only pricks do (or the occasional essayists).
The audience is Cameron. And I am Sloane.
I will say that I’m not going to hold the movie up as any kind of groundbreaking piece of art. Indeed, many of Hughes’ films—and I’ll even say large parts of the Breakfast Club—aren’t great, or don’t hold up after time. What the film does do well is entertain and make me (and I believe many others) laugh. But I will also say that—during my time in an all-boys Catholic high school—we wrote papers in an English class on “Christ-figure” films. I’m sure there are better things we could have spent our time on in high school (namely for me, math), but all the same, the exercise is interesting and points to a certain genre of filmmaking.
To strip it into secular terms, a character embarks on a exhilarating, sometimes trying, and ultimately painful journey with some kind of oracle. This character comes out on the other end changed, and most of the time bettered. Other examples might include Withnail & I, or even Hughes’ own Planes, Trains, & Automobiles. Fuck, the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was this. The protagonist in these films is never as interesting or as fun to watch as the invincible oracle character. Think about it: in Withnail & I, the protagonist doesn’t even really have a name. In Pirates, it’s the wooden, terminal coma-inducing performance of Orlando Bloom. Pirates 4 doesn’t work because Jack Sparrow is invincible and unchangeable. It also doesn’t work in the same way a LOT of Mountain Dew doesn’t work for your body.
In Planes, Trains, & Automobiles, the character of Del Griffith is the exact opposite of Ferris in almost every way. Slovenly, rude, clueless, irritating, needy. But his one un-selfish trait is the same as Ferris’ one un-selfish trait: caring for another. Cameron is “saved” just as Neil Page is “saved.” This film is arguably Hughes’ best because it’s a really clever inversion of the Ferris Bueller structure. Regardless of creed, you’ve got to admit it’s a powerful Western myth.
Still, the most important thing to remember is that Ferris Bueller is just a fucking riot. It’s funny. “Funny” is when you forget your intellectual culture theories and laugh at something without immediately understanding why. If you don’t laugh at at least SOME of Ferris Bueller, odds are it’s because a pair of scissors or a scalpel was left inside you during the last surgery to tighten your butthole.
Also, Ferris Bueller was made for a certain audience. Why would you blame people for having a nostalgic connection to it in their later years? I’m waiting for Siegel’s next article to be GET OVER YOUR PARENTS BECAUSE THEY’RE OLD NOW AND ARE JUST HUMAN BEINGS, DUMMY.
Siegel also raises complaints that the film has no diversity to it and that one of Ferris Bueller’s detractions seems to be that he’s wealthy and white. First off, I’d say Ferris is MAYBE upper middle class (he asked for a car and got a computer, remember?). And he’s white, like a kid in Oak Park or Elgin or Elmhurst or Winnetka or Evanston or Glenview MIGHT be when choosing a straw of available races of his particular suburban neighborhood.
Also, this was the 80’s, when race in films—especially studio comedies—was represented by characters like Takashi, Long Duck Dong (also Hughes, I know), and the gay black dude Lamar from Revenge of the Nerds. Seems like Ferris Bueller gets off easy. I mean, it’s true that sometimes white kids go to high school, right?
*Note: the guy that plays Lamar also plays a bad ass from the Kobra Kai dojo in Karate Kid, so he found some redemption.
This is the kind of article where if it were brought up in a bar during a fun night of conversation, I would roll my eyes and reiterate to my wife afterward in the car ride home “WHY are we friends with that guy? God, he sucks the life out of everything.”
This seems like the favorite argument of the kid who lived down the hall from you freshman year in the dorm—the guy who woke up at 3pm every day, ate waffles for dinner because he LOVED the cafeteria waffle maker and wrote a 300 page script about Cambodia during Vietnam for screenwriting class even though he was a white kid from Eden Prairie, Minnesota whose dad worked for Raytheon and the script had insufferable pages of really ignorant, clunky dialogue that never ended. He was one of the first kids to give up, move back to Minnesota and occasionally freelance for the Eden Prairie White Person Chronicle on how hybrid cars feel too cramped and “plastic-y” inside.
When I read things like this I feel arthritic pain growing in not only my knees, but the knees of my generation.
Get over Ferris Bueller? Get over yourself.
