So this week, on May 15 and 18th, TCM is teaming up with Fathom Events to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Ferris Bueller’s Day off by returning it to theaters for a select engagement. You can click this link to find a local screening and book your tickets. And, in honor of this event, I’m taking the day off. See y’all later!
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Greetings, Movie Morlocks readers. I am Julie Stapel, the only member of the Stapel-Kalat family not to have guest blogged here. And what better time to do it than now—when David has gone on a madcap Chicago adventure just like our protagonist Ferris Bueller (see photos).
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off means a great deal to me and I’m happy for the opportunity to talk about why. First, a bit of origin story on me. I grew up in Columbia City, Indiana, a bodaciously small town (to quote Charles de Mar in another of my favorite movies, Better Off Dead). Growing up, Chicago was my Shangri-La—mythical, perfect. I was fortunate to take both family and school trips to Chicago with some frequency when I was growing up. I would cry as soon as the skyline came into view and again as the skyline faded into the distance as we were going home. Now I commute in every day for work and it still gets me sometime. It’s an impossibly beautiful city.
So imagine my delight when, in 1986, when I was 16, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, was released. Of course, Columbia City had no movie theater at the time so we had to go to Fort Wayne to see it. (Fort Wayne is very nice too but never had the ability to quite capture my heart with its skyline). Not only was I precisely in the John Hughes age demographic, but the movie is a love letter to Chicago with its sweeping aerial shots of the lake and the city that served no narrative purpose at all. They were just beautiful. I saw it at least 5 times in the theater and dozens of times on TV and video in the years since then, including with my own children who never had to long for Chicago.
Now I’m no film scholar and my observations are a bit meandering, but here goes . . . .
The Technology
Upon re-watching Ferris Bueller on an iPad on an airplane equipped with wifi in preparing for this post, I was struck by the movie’s deft use of pre-cellular and wireless technology, especially telephones. It’s really a wonder the movie wasn’t a long-form product placement for Radio Shack with all of the gizmos and devices that Ferris employs for his eponymous Day Off.
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First, he has to create the sound effect of his own snoring. Then, Ferris and Cameron have to call the school as the grieving Mr. Peterson to get Sloan out of school. (As an aside, one small detail that I love is that Sloane puts on her jacket, her very 80s white-fringed jacket, when the nurse walks into the classroom before the nurse says a word.)
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To trick the snooty maitre d’ at Chez Luis into believing that Ferris is the Sausage King of Chicago, the gang has to use a pay phone (!) to call the restaurant.
Also, we learn that Ferris has used an answering machine to answer the doorbell speaker and explain that his diminished state keeps him from being able to answer the door. He also apparently calls a pay phone at the school to establish his alibi by playing electronic generated wretching noises to fellow students talking to him on the phone. There’s also the hacking into Mr. Rooney’s computer to delete the number of absences. And those computers from the mid-80s are always good for a laugh, aren’t they?
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The irony is much of the caper depended on the ability to deceive people through telephones and recording devices. Thirty years later we find ourselves with once mind-blowing technology in the palms of our hands and I venture to say the technology would not have made the caper any easier. In fact, I wager it would make it harder. First, if Ferris’s parents are like David and me, they would have the ability to track Ferris’s cell phone. Second, how do you impersonate George Peterson in the era of caller id? Also, if the maitre d’ could readily Google a picture of Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago, Ferris’s cover would be blown. Not to mention the fact that if Ferris were a teenager today he would be hard-pressed to avoid Snapchatting and Instragramming his exploits. Apologies for that “get off my lawn” moment, but I really think the anonymity on which the caper is based has been lost. And maybe that’s sad. I’ve read interesting commentary on whether that ability to sneak out, to get away with something is a key part of becoming an adult that we have eliminated with our spiffy technology and modern parenting’s impulse to protect kids even from “normal” teenage shenanigans.
As an aside, I love the sub-plot regarding the dissemination of misinformation about Ferris’s condition. Not only is there the sublimely absurd report from Ferris’s classmate that her “best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this kid who knows this kid who’s going out with a girl who saw Ferris pass-out at 31 Flavors,” but also the Save Ferris collections at school, Save Ferris on Wrigley’s iconic green sign and painted on the water tower in the Bueller’s town. This was an internet hoax before the internet, a social media campaign before social media.
The City
I couldn’t help but wax poetic about Chicago right out of the gate, but I want to turn back to the topic for a just a little bit.
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Many of the movie’s landmarks, the Sears (now Willis) Tower, Wrigley Field, the red Alexander Calder sculpture in front of the Federal Building and, of course, the incomparable Art Institute of Chicago, are still here. Others are not though. Ferris, Sloane and Cameron visit the Chicago Mercantile Exchange where hundreds of traders in color-coded jackets traded commodities (the color of the jacket indicating the commodity) from the chaotic trading floor. The trading floors are no more; having gone entirely electronic in the past few years. Similarly, the real life counterpart to the fictional Chez Luis where the gang goes for lunch was legendary Chicago restaurant Chez Paul, which closed in 1995.
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And now please allow me one moment of curmudgeonly digression. The timing in this movie doesn’t work out. At. All. On numerous levels. First, the trees are in full bloom and the movie tells us it will be 70-something in Chicago that day. We also know Ferris and Cameron will graduate “in a couple of months.” When do they graduate? August? Because it is NOT that nice in Chicago until June. Second, they leave at some indeterminate point in the morning (we know that Sloan has at least started her first class) and then, before returning to the north suburbs by 6pm, they visit the trading floor, have lunch at Chez Luis, go to a Cubs game, go to the Art Institute and participate in the Von Steuben Day Parade. I’ll forgive it though, because I can’t blame them for wanting more Chicago.
The Adults
So I think this is the “big theme” of the movie. Adulthood is a complete drag. Avoid it for as long as possible. The adults in this movie are unfailingly ridiculous. The most benign are Tom and Joyce Bueller, Ferris’s parents, who are merely clueless and gullible, but not malignant. Cameron’s parents, whom we never see, are portrayed as neglectful, self-centered and unconcerned with their son’s well-being. And the school personnel really speak for themselves. There is the now ubiquitous dialogue from Ben Stein when doing roll call and teaching his history class, “Bueller, Bueller, Anyone, Anyone . . . .”, which has become a “go-to” line in many settings where there is radio silence. And assistant principal Ed Rooney is a cartoon villain come to life. His secretary Grace, in a wonderful comic performance by Edie McClurg, channels an Airplane-esque level of spaciness, with great sight gags like pulling pencil after pencil from her bouffant hairdo and her penchant for stating the obvious.
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Why on earth would anyone want to become one of these people? They are reminiscent of the adults in Peanuts cartoons, off-screen, nonsensical moaning noises. The ridiculous matire d’ at Chez Luis sniffs melodramatically upon encountering Ferris, Cameron and Sloane, and says “I weep for the future.” And so do our heroes. The movie is about grabbing on to life before the future happens to you. It does not take an astute film scholar to come to this conclusion. One of Ferris’s early lines is: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you could miss it.” Several scenes focus on the angst of being a senior in high school. Where will you go to college? What will you do then? As the parents of a high school senior, we know these questions, unlike the technology, are very much relevant today and keep the movie from completely dating itself.
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The mission Ferris gives us, if we choose to accept it, is not to be afraid to embrace a day off, even if adulthood has happened to you. You’re not all lucky enough to live in Chicago, but wherever you live, there’s probably something cool to do or least someone cool to do it with. So do it. Life does, indeed, move pretty fast.