Bueller. Bueller.

Maybe I only find this indescribably hilarious because I've been reading economics theory and then watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but here's a paragraph from a story about a pro-intelligent design movie that's narrated/hosted by Ben Stein:

On a blog on the “Expelled” Web site, one writer praised Mr. Stein as “a
public-intellectual-freedom-fighter” who was taking on “a tough topic with a bit
of humor.” Others rejected the film’s arguments as “stupid,” “fallacious” or
“moronic,” or described intelligent design as the equivalent of suggesting that
the markets moved “at the whim of a monetary fairy.”

Hee hee, rationality's a bitch!

Anyway, just for fun, here's an alternate reading of Ferris Bueller. The "normal" interpretation is that Ferris is a fun guy who's got it all figured out, and the oppositional interpretation is that Ferris is a condescending, smug jerk who's expressing troubling anti-intelletual tendencies and sealing the fate of his generation just before the 1987 stock market crash. But I think the real key to the movie is in what the English teacher is saying just before the nurse comes in to get Ferris' girlfriend: "irony." There's a remarkably complex irony going on in the movie's view of Ferris. Take, for instance, his initial monologue:

I do have a test today. that wasn't bullshit. It's on European socialism. I mean, really, what's the point? I'm not European. I don't plan on being European. So who cares if they're socialists? They could be fascist anarchists. It still doesn't change the fact that I don't own a car. Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself.

Traditional reading of that is either yay being anti-isms and right on that you shouldn't worry too much about tests, or just that it's funny. Oppositional reading is that this is a hollow and meaningless opinion driven by and leading to ignorance. But Matthew Broderick delivers it with a little twist, a little, well, irony. You get the sense that he knows he's just repeating hoary old cliches with the isms stuff, and the way he lands on that last line gives it a sense of self-aware false profundity. He's just justifying his desire to take a day off, a desicion he's well aware is the wrong one, with a little speech that doesn't even sound convincing to him. This is whistling past the graveyard. After all, this is a guy who occasionally talks to some sort of imagined audience. If we take Ferris as the narrator, which given his direct-address monologues he basically is, then arguably he's a very unreliable one. He's supposed to be this miracle worker, but all we ever see him actually do is be a negative leader, which is nice and all, but it's hardly the sort of thing that would inspire a town-wide "Save Ferris" campaign. Does that even actually exist? The whole premise of the film is that the three kids are taking a day off from their pressure-filled lives, but there's only one scene in the entire movie where they're actually having fun, and it has nothing to do with Ferris. Think about it: on the Sears Tower they're terrified, at the restaurant they're nervous, at the art gallery they're contemplative, and driving around Cameron is freaking out. The only scene that's any fun is the parade scene, and the only thing Ferris has to do with that is he got up on a float and lip-synched. In fact, it is a startling scene in its nearly pure expression of joy, but it only becomes so as the focus goes away from Ferris and to the crowd, with Cameron and Ferris' girlfriend walking through it. (Another way of looking at this is that the only time Cameron is happy is when Ferris isn't there.) Full credit to John Hughes and/or the city of Chicago, but even when watching the film with a gimlet eye, you can't help but be swept away by the impression that everyone really is having a good time. (The babies and toddlers help, but still.) As the fun grows, Ferris is envealoped by it and gradually disappears.

This is all a long way of saying that Ferris is mainly delusional. The incredible events of the movie don't actually happen, they're just in his inventive little head, and he's employing an entire nonsensical philosophy to justify this to himself and to "us," the imaginary audience that he's playing to, even though in the context of the film we don't atually exist. What's more, a self-awareness of his delusional state (see above) slips out in Broderick's performance just enough to let us know that Ferris is willfully choosing this delusion over the reality of his suburban life.

What exactly is he hiding from, though? Think of the two scenes where we actually hear his parents talk about business. In the scene outside the restaurant where the gang encounters Ferris' dad, the dad is unsucessfully trying to get a client to make an ad buy. In the scene where the mom picks up the sister from the police station, all she can talk about is how she blew a deal. In other words, the Bueller family is failing. It seems petty when Ferris bitches about getting a computer instead of a car, but by the mores of the Chicago suburbs, it's abnormal for Ferris not to get a car. So what's up? The house itself is considerably dumpier than the only other house we see, Cameron's, and all we know about the parents' work lives (and note that both parents have to work) is that they're failures. The dream of the suburbs is crashing down around them; Ferris' talk of college is hollow. There's nowhere for him to go.

If you don't believe me, think about the final chase scene. How does Ferris get home? He runs through the other suburban backyards, from yard to yard, making his way across the whole town, and, minus a swimsuit, that is the plot of John Cheever's "The Swimmer." A suburban man swims his way across the backyards of his friends and neighbors, stopping to have conversations and drinks, but the conversations get progressively more strained, until the ending, when the main character reaches his own house:

The place was dark. Was it so late that they had all gone to bed?...He tried the garage doors to see what cars were in but the doors were locked and rust came off the handles onto his hands...The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked up until he rememebred that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.

Of course, when Ferris gets home, the house is not dark (though it is locked--the principal has taken the key under the mat). It is full of parents who love him and a sister that finally decides to help him. But he's a kid, not a working guy; there's a whole system designed to keep him safe, no matter how crazy he gets. It doesn't change the fact that the days of that system are numbered, and Ferris knows it. Why else would he so ostentatiously and self-destructively blow off school? Why else would he have made it so easy for himself to get caught by literally parading down the street in Chicago? It's the 80s version of a punk rock attitude: "no future" with a smug grin on your face.

Looked at this way, the oppositional view is still right, but the reasons are wrong. Ferris isn't a jerk because he's priviledged, he's a jerk because his priviledge is going away, and he's using it while he still can. The film is well aware that he's being an asshole, but it's trying to make us sympathetic towards him still, as films always do, by showing us that he's not just another spoiled rich kid. His future's being taken from him, and being powerless, there's not a damn thing he can do about it but say "fuck it" and blow everything to hell. The grin that's always on Ferris' face is a conscious echo of Reagan's, that smile that persisted whether he was talking about puppies and flowers or nuclear bombs and the starving poor. It's the smile of psychosis, of a loss of emotional affect. It's the swimmer, merrily winding his way through a familiar landscape of priviledge and leisure while everyone around him tries to make him see that it's all over for him. But he does not listen, and in the case of Ferris, he will never listen.

Labels: ben stein, ferris bueller, john cheever, movies, pop

posted by Mike B. @ 8:23 AM