Today someone close to me got
rear-ended on an L.A. freeway. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but he’s now
mourning the damage to his late-model luxury car. And I can’t say I blame him.
A well-designed automobile can be a thing of beauty, and I can’t laugh off the
minor damage to a previously blemish-free chassis. All of which is making me
ponder the film I just re-watched this past weekend, the 1986 John Hughes
classic, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Ferris Bueller is a comedy with appeal for the teenage kid in all of us. This story of a suburban high school senior (Matthew Broderick) who decides to go AWOLfrom his scholastic obligations makes the adult world seem pretty dreary indeed. His teachers are automatons, going through the motions of presenting facts to their thoroughly-bored charges. The school principal (buoyed up by his dim-witted secretary) is a beady-eyed prig whose personal vendetta against Ferris leads him into actions that are downright psychopathic. Ferris’s parents, well-meaning though they might be, are too caught up in their professional lives to really understand their rambunctious son, and too loving to ever suspect him of being the con artist he is. (They are, though, all too willing to suspect his highly volatile sister—Jennifer Grey—of making trouble.)
Ferris has never forgiven his sister for getting a car as a gift, when he himself “only” received a computer. But it’s his creative computer skills, along with his talent for mischief, that allows him to fake illness and then round up two friends for a thoroughly unauthorized daytrip to Chicago. Their vehicle of choice is a cherry-red low-mileage 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder belonging to the dad of his best buddy, Cameron. We never meet this father, but he seems to signify all that is wrong with American adulthood: his possessions apparently mean more to him than his son, who is as timid as Ferris is bold.
On their breakneck adventure to the big city, Ferris and the others bring their youthful exuberance to the world of grown-ups. They lunch in a swanky restaurant, have prime seats at a Chicago Cubs game, caper through the world-famous Art Institute, and wind up at a German-themed street parade where Ferris finds his way onto a float, leading the crowd in a chorus of “Twist and Shout.” Meanwhile, the fate of that Ferrari remains in question, because we in the audience know (as Ferris and his friends do not) that a couple of scruffy parking lot attendants are taking it joyriding, And, since Ferris’s idea that the odometer can be re-set if the car is run backward doesn’t actually work, Cameron arrives home in a state of panic. I will not go into the ultimate fate of the car, but it seems that his deep-rooted fear of his father is about to undergo a major metamorphosis.
What will happen to these young characters when they too arrive at adulthood? College is in their future, but none of them seems to have clear-cut goals, nor even any interests beyond having a good time. We know that all three are approaching a turning point, but where they’ll go from here is hardly obvious. Cameron may (or may not) be developing some courage. Sloane (the only girl of the trio) is clearly smitten, ready to go wherever Ferris may lead. As for Ferris himself, he’s too smart and too crafty to let the adult world cut him down to size. I see him as an early incarnation of a tech bro, the potential Elon Musk of his generation.