The 1980s teen comedy genre isn’t a field known for producing great art or artists. Nostalgia blinds most contemporary viewers to the weed and fornication-fueled subversion beneath the presentable Reagan-era exterior. As film critics have pointed out, Hollywood got even more subversive in reaction to the conservative political turn. And shlock abounded between the propaganda.
If there’s one teen comedy director who could be looked back on as an honest craftsman, it’s former National Lampoon scribe John Hughes. Parts of his catalogue might be corny or vulgar, but on balance his movies were made with heart – a rare commodity these days.
For my money, the Hughes film with the most heart is the lesser masterpiece – after Gen X anthem The Breakfast Club – but the fan favorite, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Full disclosure: I used to discount Ferris Bueller as a fluffy bit of silly fun. But on a recent umpteenth viewing, I spotted themes and structural touches that conveyed hidden meanings only accessible after the West’s descent into Clown World.
To get the rather straightforward plot synopsis out of the way, Hughes invites us to join picaresque teenaged fixer Bueller on his last caper before graduating high school. In the course of the movie Ferris orchestrates a series of cunning deceptions to make Heath Ledger’s Joker proud. But instead of bank heists and bombings, Ferris uses his wits, technical know-how, and limitless confidence to flummox the authority figures standing between him and a good time.
The even shorter version is that he fakes sick to cut class and spend an afternoon in Chicago with his friends.
It sounds simple, and it is. You’ll find no complex Tarantino style plotting here.
Where Hughes’ genius shines is in his characterization and themes. And Ferris Bueller’s Day Off might be his richest picture in both regards.
Which, against expectations, makes this comedy romp Hughes’ most haunting movie in retrospect.
If you think I’m kidding, or putting on airs, consider the context.
Ferris is the quintessential Gen Xer, born in the first year of that cohort. His parents – and all authority figures that make up the movie’s antagonists – are Baby Boomers.
Chief among them is Ed Rooney, the Dean of Students who pursues Ferris like an obsessed police inspector, though more Zenigata than Javert. Rooney’s stated motive at the beginning of the film is to give Ferris some much-needed discipline so he doesn’t ruin his future. But as Rooney’s arc unfolds, it becomes more and more clear that he’s out for petty revenge.
Remember, this movie came out when the Boomer generation, who’d spent their youth rebelling against authority, bought into the system and took over as the authority figures. Rooney’s generation fought the system, only to become the system. So Rooney hates Ferris because he waged his own rebellion all throughout school and succeeded. When Rooney says he wants to stop Ferris from ruining his future, he really means he wants to make sure Ferris sells out just like he did.
And Ferris knows it. In fact, Ferris knows a lot more than anyone else in the movie. He breaks the fourth wall, and more than once, another character notes how everything always seems to just work out for him. Yet Hughes takes care to show that Bueller’s exploits aren’t just due to dumb luck. We see his meticulous but not obsessive planning. And his depth and breadth of knowledge – including the exact height of the Sears Tower and the precise number of restaurants in downtown Chicago. In this light, Ferris almost looks like an omniscient narrator.
It’s also noteworthy that we first meet Ferris at the end of his storied career. A modern director would have opened with him scamming other kids out of their lunch money in third grade, and flashed back to him talking a fifth-grade bully out of thrashing Cameron to explain their friendship’s origin. Of course, we’d have been inundated with flashbacks to Ed Rooney’s many humiliations at Bueller’s hands.
But Hughes understands that audiences give great weight to what the people in a story say about each other. They credit other characters’ opinions of the protagonist – even those of a villain like Rooney. So note to writers: Readers love it when you do this.
Hughes also understands timing – the heart and soul of comedy. His mastery transcends knowing when to deliver a punchline. So it’s no accident that his movie about a high school prankster begins on one of his last days of school. This is also where Ferris’ uncanny knowledge takes on deeper significance.
In his commentary on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, John Hughes mentioned how personal elements of this movie are to him. And it shows in the finished product.
Think about it. Here we have the story of a teen rebel who stays true to his code against the same fears and temptations that got the best of the Boomers. Now consider that the story’s writer is also a Boomer.
It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see the vicarious wish fulfillment trip Hughes indulges in with this movie. And again, another director would have screwed it all up and shat out another piece of solipsistic autoethnography. But Hughes’ motives come across as honest.
If only I could go back and do it all over again, knowing what I do now.
That’s your explanation for Ferris Bueller right there. He’s a Gen Xer who’s gone back in time armed with the horrible knowledge of Clown World to relive his childhood without fear.
So that Boomers can experience vicarious catharsis through him – which is how Boomers have experienced everything since 1979.
Ferris lets this subtext slip when he says that he’s pulling the whole complex scheme just for Cameron’s sake. Note all the grim pronouncement Ferris makes about Cameron’s future:
- He and Ferris will go to different colleges, and their friendship will end.
- His college roommate will hate him for being so uptight.
- He will marry the girl who takes his virginity.
- He’ll put his wife on a pedestal, and she’ll resent him for it.
As Ferris’ pseudo-omniscient narration indicates, these dread prophecies aren’t speculation. They are knowledge he has of Cameron’s future. Granting that premise, the movie can be taken as a feature-length Quantum Leap episode in which Ferris leaps back to 1986 in order to avert his friend’s ruination.
The ways in which Ferris brings about Cameron’s salvation are significant – and nigh on prescient in hindsight. He starts by rejecting Prussian model, state-mandated K-12 education.
Visual language of film check: Observe that when Ferris’ sweetheart Sloane is introduced, she’s sitting in an English class in front of a wall paneled in vertical wooden bars while the teacher lectures about prison symbolism in literature.
And while the movie upholds the common wisdom that college is necessary to have any kind of future, it gets in some implied critiques of the Boomer universal college paradigm. College looms over the movie like a storm cloud on the horizon. It’s stated in no uncertain terms that going to college will destroy Cameron and Ferris’ friendship, and even Ferris sees it as a daunting obstacle to his courtship of Sloane. You could even call it a secondary antagonist.
Keep in mind, nobody would have questioned the wisdom of everybody going to college back in 1986. But Ferris comes close.
Then we have the aforementioned critique of Boomerism, personified in Cameron’s dad’s prized Ferrari.
Hollywood has long recognized the automobile as the symbol of American power, wealth, and freedom. So it can’t be a coincidence that this movie’s iconic car is owned by a materialistic, neurotic, workaholic Boomer who gives it the affection he denies his son.
What does the prophetic Gen Xer out to save his friend do with the car? He steals it from the greedy, absentee Boomer dad, takes his best buddy and main squeeze on a righteous joyride, and [SPOILER ALERT] stands by as it’s destroyed.
And before that, in another subtle red pill, Ferris leaves the priceless ride in the hands of two minorities who steal it for some joyriding of their own.
But the scene that’s the most haunting now is the museum sequence.
Dismissed by many, even the director, as a bit of artistic self-indulgence, Ferris’ & Co’s visit to the Chicago Art Institute has deep resonance today. For Gen Y viewers in particular.
The scene opens with a tour group of grade school kids. It’s 1986, which makes these youngsters members of Generation Y. Ferris, Sloane, and Cameron insert themselves into the younger cohort’s field trip for some whimsical fun.
Lest you think I’m seeing patterns where none exist, watch the scene with the director’s commentary.
Note the demographics of the Gen Y tour group. Then go back and make the same observation about the makeup of Ben Stein’s economics class.
That’s a trenchant reminder that in the 80s, movies could depict people’s everyday experiences. Because it wasn’t yet secular heresy to notice and discuss what everybody saw outside their windows.
It’s also a reminder to get your copy of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on physical media before the Death Cult gets around to censoring it.
And get your copy of my breakout mil-SF novel inspired by landmark 80s mecha.
I’m surprised they haven’t taken it out by now. Do you recommend the other John Hughes films, or does it stop with Bueller?
I’m not going to speak for Brian, but John Hughes is one of the best directors of the 1980s, up there with Walter Hill, John Carpenter, and Robert Zemeckis in how they consistently nailed a vision that didn’t quite fit with the modern times which, ironically, made them fit in even more. Even movies he was only involved in one aspect, like the Great Outdoors, still works today.
For me, I’d say aside from this, Uncle Buck, The Breakfast Club, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Weird Science, Home Alone, and Christmas Vacation, are probably the ones he’s most well known for. But there’s usually something worth seeing in everything he did, even the family films he wrote before he retired.
I’ll second JD’s placement of Hughes in the pantheon of visionary 1980s directors. Of the movies he directed, I also recommend Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science.
Can a Millennial like me get a Niemeier-Cowan – approved canon for the 80s director pantheon? I’d like to buy more DVDs while I can still afford them.
Those purchases will not affect my ability to pay off your editing fees, if that concerns you. My cover will feature “Edited by Brian Niemeier” even if I have to become a hobo.
Specifically for the 1980s? I’ve got a few.
John Hughes
Walter Hill
John Carpenter
Robert Zemeckis
Joe Dante
John Woo
John McTiernan (His ’90s works included)
Michael Mann (His ’90s works included)
David Lynch (Everything, to be honest)
John Landis
Other than them:
William Friedkin is fantastic, but his best movies jump around from the ’70s to modern day. The Exorcist, Sorcerer, The French Connection, and To Live and Die in LA, are all excellent.
Rob Reiner is a contentious choice, but I would argue he made three classics that hold up. This Is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, and The Princess Bride.
Richard Donner is close, but he’s a bit too spotty at times. His best movie is The Goonies and is well worth seeing. Ladyhawke and Scrooged are up there, too.
Ivan Reitman put out consistent comedies in the 1980s, capping off with Kindergarten Cop in 1990.
Spielberg is a popular choice, but I have to admit that he’s never done much for me. He’s helped produced things I’ve enjoyed, but nothing he’s personally directed is a favorite of mine. I can’t think of a single movie he’s made I would consider a classic more than influential (like Jaws) but not much fun to watch.
Solid list. To that I would add …
James Cameron (including his 90s work)
David Cronenberg (his whole catalogue)
Tim Burton (Everything before Mars Attacks)
Harold Ramis (Including Groundhog Day)
Paul Verhoeven (Nothing after Starship Troopers)
Terry Gilliam
George Miller
I would exclude George Lucas and Ridley Scott, whose success looks to have been accidental.
JD Cowan,
While I have a couple of nitpicks with your list*, I LOVE that you included Joe Dante. He’s my personal favorite 80’s movie director.
Innerspace is probably my all-time favorite movie, even more so than Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom**.
I’m not sure if I have ever seen such a fun, frenetic, complex story captured and executed as well as Dante accomplished with Innerspace. It was a Science fiction movie that had comedy, action, suspense, and romance. Somehow, Dante balanced it all, and stuck the landing. It was an imaginative and fun movie. I probably pull my Blu-Ray out two or three times a year to re-watch it. My kids love it too and we always make a bag of popcorn for it. Dennis Quaid is terrific, Martin Short is funny while being reined in by a good director, and Meg Ryan was still charming and beautiful.
*For reasons I can’t explain, I loathe the John Woo aesthetic.
**I understand Temple of Doom is considered by many to be the worst Indiana Jones movie, besides, of course, the 2008 abomination which “Launched The Fridge”, that shall not be named. I was never really a fan of Dr. Jones until Temple of Doom. I like Last Crusade, but I have always preferred the darker edge of Temple of Doom. Perhaps because it wasn’t Spielberg hijacking Christianity’s relics and repackaging them the Hollywood way.
I watched Weird Science for the first time since its original cable run not too long ago. I had remembered it as a somewhat amusing but incoherent bit of silliness, but with a fresh viewing I was kind of blown away by how smart it actually is. No wonder it triggered Joss Whedon into a fit of apoplexy.
There was this period in the ’00s, especially the period between when he retired and when he died, where all anyone talked about was how he was the king of teen movies. There was a terrible documentary about a bunch of older Gen Ys going across country talking about how his teen films (and only those) affected their lives and how they wanted to buy the reclusive family man a pizza, and there were all kinds of “Hughes inspired” teen films that owed far more to Porkys or American Pie than anything he did (like that terrible “Easy A” movie), at the same time he was sort of worshiped for this thing he didn’t actually do.
It’s changed a bit in the decade since his passing, but for a long time it felt as if no one really understood what John Hughes was actually trying to do or trying to see who he was. They were more interested in their own shallow interpretations of how it related to them personally. This is kind of ironic because this is the opposite of what a lot of his movies were meant to be–the opposite of boomer narcissism and the journey of those lost in the modern world trying to navigate through rough waters.
One of the reasons I can still watch his films, teen movies or not, is because in many ways they are about the loss and gain of important things. He values the family, friendship, love and romance, and a life where all those are instrumental to making it better. He in fact believed it so much that once his close friend John Candy died, he could no longer make movies anymore, not even just as a writer and instead shifted to family responsibilities as Hollywood fell even further into the gutter.
As for his beliefs, aside from obviously being considered a fascist today (especially when Molly Ringwald threw him under the bus for peanuts), Michael Weiss and Ben Stein said he was Reagan Republican, while PJ O’Rourke had this to say:
“I have no idea how, or if, John voted … John and I never bothered to talk much about our politics. What we did talk about was the 20th century’s dominant scrambled egghead bien pensant buttinski parlor pinko righty-tighty lefty-loosey nutfudge notion that middle-class American culture was junk, that middle-class Americans were passive dimbulbs, that America itself was a flop and that America’s suburbs were a living hell almost beyond the power of John Cheever’s words to describe … We were becoming conservatives—in the most conservational sense. There were things that others before us had achieved and these were worth conserving … Family was the most conservative thing about John. Walking across the family room in your stocking feet and stepping on a Lego (ouch!) was the fundamental building block of society.”
That puts a lot of his movies in context and what they are truly about.
The most ironic thing out of all this is, I think if Hughes had stayed in the game a few more years and had met the fresh out of SNL Chris Farley before he walked away, they would both still be alive today.
Hughes knew. It’s impossible to watch his movies on anything deeper than the most surface level and not see that he knew.
“…the Dean of Students who pursues Ferris like an obsessed police inspector, though more Zenigata than Javert.”
I literally burst out laughing at that line. Bravo.
I too noticed a lot of these themes when I watched the movie a year or two ago for the first time in a decade-plus. I thought I remembered it as Ferris being a sadistic jerk to Cameron, the villain of his own movie, so I was blown away at the realization that he actually loves and deeply cares for his friend, and what Cameron experiences as suffering is actually just what he needs. There’s a profound and thoroughly Christian truth to that, far beyond what you’re likely to find in some celebrity pastor’s sermon.
“I literally burst out laughing at that line. Bravo.”
Chalk it up to inspiration.
“There’s a profound and thoroughly Christian truth to that, far beyond what you’re likely to find in some celebrity pastor’s sermon.”
FBDO is more morally complex than a film in its genre has any right to be.
One one hand, Ferris is far from righteous. Each of his lies to his parents, Rooney, and other authority figures is a grave sin, for instance. Then there’s the grand theft auto.
But it’s clear that he knows Cameron well enough to understand his friend’s problems without needing to be told. He also knows that Cameron wants to do all of the mischievous activities Ferris has planned, but he feels like he needs permission.
Like every major character in the movie, Ferris completes an arc. He starts out using all his considerable talents to avoid responsibility for his misdeeds. Then, at the end, he volunteers to take the blame for an act he didn’t commit in order to spare his friend a severe punishment.
Remember, these are two characters who’ve known each other since at least fifth grade.
When I watched another Hughes film, Home Alone, last Christmas I was similarly struck by the scene where Kevin meets his scary neighbor Marley in the church on Christmas Eve. I was practically thrown off my rocker by how touching and emotionally resonant this scene was, without coming across as saccharine or cheesy. I think Hughes had a talent rarely seen in Hollywood for depicting the “other types” of love besides eros – a perspective sorely missing in most modern entertainment.
Good observation. Home Alone is one post-1980 family film I can recommend without reservation.
I recognize all the art in the museum sequence not because I’m an art buff, but because like many Gen X’ers, we played Parker Brothers ‘ “Masterpiece”, which featured all the famous works from the Chicago museum. And I knew all about Georges Seurat because I saw “Sunday in the Park with George on Broadway in ’84. Thanks for the trip down amnesia lane!
You’re welcome.
Regarding Ferris Bueller, There are two scenes which have always stood out to me that have not yet been mentioned.
1. The famous Ben Stein Scene, where he talks about the Great Depression and the Smoot-Harley act. It captures the boredom of students in school. The monotone voice of the teachers that is standard in school. While the scene is hilarious, I’ve always stopped and thought a little about why the students are bored. They are living and enjoying the fruits of the Greatest and Silent Generations have built. On some level, they don’t need to be lectured on capitalism, they see it work, they know it works. Every day in small ways we in the 80’s took or granted even if they can’t articulate why. I always found this moment as very ’80s.
2. The other scene is when FB’s sister is in the police station and meets Charlie Sheen. In many ways, FB’s sister is the precursor to the modern-day Karen. Good advice is given, and in many ways, it anticipates where our over mothered society can live. It’s a small scene, but it adds weight to the movie and completes a minor character’s arc in a satisfying manner. That advice applies to anyone but holds special significance for the Karen segment of our society.
Great Review and it has given me more food for thought on this film.
Jeanie’s arc exemplifies the movie’s moral complexity. She’s right to denounce Ferris’ dishonesty, but she indulges her anger for the wrong reasons. Then she learns to shift from an external to an internal locus of control, and her first use of it is to aid Ferris’ deception.
In a movie, the winning behavior shows you what ethos the film maker wants to promote.