Save Saint Ferris
My two cents, with compounded interest on the post directly digitally south:
Gruppenfuher Siegel’s issue with FBDO’s being set in the 80s airheaded era misses the point you touched upon - Ferris Bueller is an allegorical enlightenment figure, a Buddha for the consumerist decade. The movie is a ninefold path to joyous adulthood, compressing the often languorous narrative of personal development into a twelve hour drag race:
1) You enjoy the trivialities of childhood: shower mohawks, a roomful of toys. A blithe, but earnest appreciation of the immediate world around you. Ignorance is bliss.
2) As self-awarness blooms, you make your first adolescent stabs at hatching a self-informing philosophy. At last you finally settle on one that sets the marrow of your bones to humming. You begin a lifelong two but not two, one but not one zen romance with your own capacity to think yourself into meaningfulness. But this is not enough…
3) This sea change enlightenment demands you take it for a real world test drive (in this movie, quite literally) to determine if your truth, in fact, is true. This quest for personal authenticity of course requires a separation from the herd. As such, you break rules that may have very good reasons for standing in place (don’t play hooky), but at the moment appear to you stultifying and silly (these rules are the life blood of North Shore high schools, let me assure you).
4) Now alone, armed with nothing but a cause, you assemble your tribe. Embedded deep within our simian DNA lies the knowledge that adventures are not events, they are series of experiences. Spurred on by the fervor of your belief, you assemble a chosen family to provide feedback, support, course correction, augmentation, and emotional lab rats. This newly assembled tribe of like but different is the instrument through which you ping the mysteries unlocked by your philosophy.
5) The events become experience. There are victories. There are defeats. There are close calls, triumphal parades, and moments of too good to be true that confirm that indeed, you’ve unlocked the key to your flourishing within the universe. You hone your application of knowledge and true your aim.
6) Yet, as you yourself win, others within the tribe are slower to grow, their foundering boats failing to lift on your rising tide. The period of adult self-differentiation has begun. You come to find you are ultimately on your own, and your philosophy, no matter how brilliant, will not save your tribe, let alone the world.
7) But love will. Your philosophy’s internal fission outwardly manifests as an unceasing enthusiasm to share your adventure, a connection that brings the soulsick from the brink back into the circle to hear your heart’s song (music plays a paramount role in all of JH’s work). Your love saves them from drowning.
8) Sublimity is shared freely amongst the tribe and united, all achieve a heightened level of being. It is friendship. It is the coward gaining courage. It is feeling compelled to marry the moment forever. To eternalize.
9) A realized adult, you glow within your worldly conduit to your childhood joy. You are home. You reflect upon the journey behind, patching up the dents and dings to your philosophy, and expand your ambition to prevail over the widening gyre of the uncertain future.
OH YEAH.
