This year marks the 39th anniversary of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” not the 40th, but it does mark the 40th anniversary of the school day Ferris Bueller and cronies skipped. At least, it does if you believe the internet sleuths who have in part used the Chicago Cubs game the hooky-playing trio attends to pinpoint the date as June 5th, 1985. (The Cubs lost to the Atlanta Braves 4-2 in extra innings when Lee Smith surrendered a two-run homer to Rafael Ramirez. “I’ve got nothing to say,” the wire services reported Smith as saying afterwards, which was probably about as much as Edward R. Rooney, Dean of Students, had to say on June 5th, 1985.) And in some ways, this 40th anniversary feels more useful than the official anniversary by illustrating how John Hughes’s classic 80s comedy has come to be viewed less as a movie to be critiqued and more as a cultural artifact to be endlessly re-interpreted and mined for content. The three most popular quote-unquote reviews of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” on the social media movie-watching diary Letterboxd implicitly prove the point.
The first one is a common revisionist analysis that every yute who watches “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” for the first time thinks they just invented, the second embodies how long ago the film’s art stopped imitating life and life became a way to deliberately imitate its art, and the third demonstrates its emergent status as a pop culture philosophy lodestar. I’m not immune to all this myself. Though it often gets derided as an emblem of Reagan era radical individualism, well, Ferris himself is the one who tells us he doesn’t trust “isms” in any form and who does that sound like? Gen-X, that’s who, slackers like me that went from rhetorically asking “How can I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?” to “How can I possibly be expected to handle work on a day like this?” And though I’m not sure you could deem Ferris a true flâneur, a leisurely observer of urban life, given his spiritually itemized list of stuff to do on his day off, there is still plenty of crossover between that lifestyle and the Ferris mantra memorably imbued on the poster: Leisure Rules. Yeah, it does!
But look at me, interpreting, when I should be talking about how “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was made, how its story was told, how I can now confirm with some manner of authority that Hughes effectively encapsulated the way a perfect summer day in Chicago makes you feel. Indeed, I have always thought of white cumulous clouds not as “Simpsons” clouds but as “Ferris Bueller” clouds. More than anything, though, writer/director John Hughes innately impressed upon me the concept of mise-en-scène before I would have had any idea what mise-en-scène meant, let alone flâneur. Hughes had Ferris break the fourth wall to render us co-conspirators in his caper, costumed the eponymous character’s best friend Cameron in a Detroit Red Wings jersey to evince how he viewed himself as an outsider in his own mind, turned props like flip-up sunglasses into punchlines, utilized the Art Institute to create a sequence of reverie, and emphasized faces of other characters as much as his principals. Like the roll call scene featuring Ben Stein’s hapless economics teacher.
It is difficult to pinpoint “Ferris Bueller’s” most famous scene out here in the future (present). But even before tariffs became foremost in every frightened American’s thinking, that Ben Stein scene and his monotone asking “Bueller? Bueller?” had become a staple of our meme culture. Before he gets to the absent Bueller, however, he goes through a litany of A names. As he does, Hughes provides a shot of each student, each one and his or reply comical in their own way. Yet, what I had somehow never noticed, or maybe just never fully ingested, despite having watched this movie, I dunno, 52 times over the years, was the unnamed student who doesn’t speak in the background as “Adams” confirms his presence in the foreground.
At her facial expression, I erupted with a hearty unanticipated laughter. That expression is a little disgusted, a little pained, and a little perplexed. In “Superbad,” when Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) tells the girl the time without her having asked, that spiritually evoked how I felt during most of high school. And this extra’s deer-caught-in the-headlights-aura evokes it too. Like her, every day in class I wanted to be anywhere else in the world. Like her, I knew of no other option than to grimace and bear it. Like her, I never would have followed Ferris Bueller and seized the day.