Leisure Still Rules: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at 40

When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” for their TV show in 1986, the two inestimable Chicago film critics gave John Hughes’s pièce de résistance one thumb up (Ebert) and one thumb down (Siskel). For a movie that became both a cultural touchstone and lightning rod, their disagreements skewed basic; Roger thought it was fun and funny and Gene did not. There is, however, a revealing moment when they show a clip of the scene in which the eponymous high school senior (Matthew Broderick) laments having to take a test on European Socialism: “I’m not European, I don’t plan on being European, so who gives a crap if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists, it still doesn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car.” Off camera and under his breath, Siskel mutters, “So much for the history of man.” He was 40 when the movie was released, just entering middle age, and though I chuckled at his line, it also struck me as blinkered. “Movies do not change,” his counterpart once noted, “their viewers do.” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” might have been fantastical, but his European Socialism line rang remarkably true from the point-of-view of so many teens and pre-teens like me who hated school. (I support public education and public schools. I contain multitudes.) Indeed, once Ferris has convinced his parents (Lyman Ward and Cindy Pickett) that he’s sick, he sits up in bed and confesses his lie by breaking the fourth wall. In 1986 this blew my eight-going-on-nine-year-old mind. He was making me his accomplice, taking me under his wing, and inviting me into his subsequent adventure as he moves heaven and earth to round up his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) to take a day off from school by leaving suburbia via Cameron’s dad’s 1961 red Ferrari GT for sunny downtown Chicago with Edward R. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), Dean of Students, in hot if comically hapless pursuit.

The following year, “Adventures in Babysitting” would portray downtown Chicago as nothing less than an urban warzone, a far cry from the gleaming metropolis of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” The truth of mid-to-late 80s Chicago likely lay somewhere in the middle, but then, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was not an in-the-middle kind of movie. Its downtown Chicago was one where the most nefarious character encountered was a snooty maître-d (Jonathan Schmock) and where Ferris could join a parade midstream, sing karaoke, and the whole city would be none the wiser. The trio repeatedly comes close to being caught, though the movie never effuses a true sense of fear or risk, illustrating not only a lack of traditional stakes but how as a character, Ferris is virtually unchanged by the end. Like Ferris, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is not playing by narrative rules, and while there is something to be said for a movie genuinely wrestling with the high school experience, there as much to be said for one that transcends it. High school is grueling, not just on account of homework and tests but from social anxieties and pressures, something to survive as much as enjoy. Ferris Bueller dared to imagine a world where none of that had to be true, for one day, at least. No wonder everyone considered him a righteous dude.

George Will certainly did. The same year The Wall Street Journal deemed the one-time Pulitzer Prize winner as the most powerful journalist in America, he called “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” “the greatest movie of all time” in The Washington Post. “By ‘greatest movie,’” he explained, “I mean the moviest movie, the one most true to the general spirit of movies, the spirit of effortless escapism.” He makes this argument as only Will could, not merely lauding Hughes’s work but dissing French, Italian, and Scandinavian arthouse movies along the way, complaining that movies have grown too serious by literally writing that “in the 1950s movies became ‘films,’” and firing figurative shots at film critics like the name-checked Pauline Kael for deigning to treat movies seriously in the first place. I wonder what Will makes of his fellow conservative pundit Mark Hemingway’s take that “Ferris Bueller is a celebration of pure individualistic liberty.” Is that too serious or is that just common sense, an eternal verity rather than an ephemeral one, a la Joseph Epstein whom Will cites in opposition to what he predicts a mere two weeks after the movie’s release will be clichéd critiques “(o)f the self-absorption of youth corrupted by the complacency of the Reagan years.” He is not only essentially quoting David Denby’s negative assessment for New York Magazine but a thousand pithy leftist Letterboxd-style putdowns word-for-word, which is not necessarily to say those putdowns are wrong but that they are not in any way new as they no doubt assume themselves to be. Verily, all that was there in the beginning, kidz.

How can you argue with ‘“Life moves pretty fast; if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it’” wondered Bonnie Stiernberg for Paste in 2016. Oh, you can argue, and plenty did and have, as Alan Siegel did in 2011 for The Atlantic, dismissing perhaps the movie’s most famous line as fortune cookie wisdom, the viewpoint of a character for whom the world is a cushy place, ensconced in wealthy suburbia, quite literally evoked in the movie’s first shot, an establishing exterior one of the Bueller home. Stiernberg, in fact, cops to Ferris’s cocoon of privilege even as she deems the story universal. Siegel, on the other hand, suggests it cannot be universal because of the privilege, the inherent classism, and the pointed whiteness of the main story. He links to a piece in The Paris Review by Caleb Crain which is some real Moby-Dick-is-the-Republic-of-Ireland stuff. Crain sees Ferris as “a child of wealth,” which is demonstrably true, everything else flowing from that, building to a concluding paragraph in which the Ferrari convertible becomes the ultimate emblem of capital, spending it rather than investing it, as he writes, destroying it for self-expressive pleasure. I laughed so hard reading this I practically had tears in my eyes.

The best “Ferris Bueller” revisionist argument is no essay; it’s Minhal Baig’s Chicago-set 2023 independent film “We Grown Now.” Told from the perspective of two pre-teen Black boys, Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), living in the Cabrini-Green project of Chicago circa 1991, their lives are diametrically opposed to Ferris, besot with the threat of violence even if their mother works hard to make their home a serene, inviting place. Mid-movie, they skip school and light out for downtown Chicago via the CTA rather a 1961 Ferrari, visiting the Art Institute where in addition to seeing Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte like Cameron they also see Walter Ellison’s Train Station. In the former, Cameron might have desperately sought to see himself only to see nothing at all, but in the latter, described by the Art Institute as foreground(ing) the harsh realities of racial injustice under Jim Crow in the 1930s,” Malik and Eric are allowed to see themselves. And it suggests that a day off in downtown Chicago belongs just as much to two Black kids from Cabrini-Green as it does to three White kids from Shermer High. Why it even belongs to a pair of garage attendants (Richard Edson and Larry Flash Jenkins), as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” itself makes clear, when they take the Ferrari for a joyride in lieu of parking it. All these characters’ backgrounds and perspectives may be different, but the experience of the day off itself is universal.

At one point during the parking attendants’ Windy City hot-rodding, Hughes cues up the “Star Wars” theme, a humorous underscoring of this day off’s inherent sense of light-hearted rebellion. That rebellion takes a sober turn in the climax, however, when Cameron rejects his and his family’s wealth and his father’s own rejection of him by sending that pristine Ferrari plunging into the abyss, “like an outtake from ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ dropped into the middle of a Bugs Bunny cartoon,” Matt Zoller Seitz would write for Slant Magazine. “(B)y showing it, Hughes subtly acknowledged that the rest of what he’d shown us was pure escapism—and that by seeking out such entertainment, we were trying to avoid thinking about our own miseries, which might not be identical to Cameron’s in all the details, but were every bit as intense and alienating.” If Cameron momentarily punctures the bubble, it seems as if Ferris’s sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) and her parallel subplot is ready to puncture the bubble entirely, on the verge of giving up her brother right at the last minute…until she doesn’t. It’s not only that’s she spurred to self-reflection by a Boy in the Police Station (Charlie Sheen in a career-best performance), but in that final do-or-die moment, she chooses to believe in the fantasy, opting to follow her brother down the path of merrymaking righteousness. 

Escapism in movies is not a bad thing. Even Hollywood Special Emissary Emeritus Orson Welles knew the value of escapist cinema. “I think it’s very nice,” he said, “to make movies for the child which is in every grown person.” The truth is, as I get older, the harder it is to remember the movie-watching child within. I stopped caring about “Star Wars” a long time ago. I did not see the new “Masters of the Universe” movie because the first time I watched a He-Man cartoon in adulthood my immediate inclination was to call my dad and profusely apologize for ever having forced him to sit through such dreck. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” has not changed in the last 40 years, I have, and yet, for me, its spirit endures. Ferris often gets yoked to capitalism and individualism, but as I have aged and changed and formed and modified a set of beliefs and values, I see him through the lens of flânerie (he even dresses like a flâneur). The poster memorably decreed that Leisure Rules and in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” he effectively transforms leisure into his own ism, demonstrating how it can enrich, fulfill, inspire, and nourish, that the very meaning of life is to stop and look around once in a while. If you think that message is banal or does not remain worthwhile then I’m willing to bet you’re still too scared to eat pancreas. 

Some Drivel On...Ferris Bueller's Day Off

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.

Forgotten Characters: the Pizza Man in Ferris Bueller's Day Off

The above moment is one of many comic interludes in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” The butt of this interlude’s joke is Edward R. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), Dean of Students, who is scoping out a suburban pizza joint for the three teens – the titular Ferris (Matthew Broderick), his paramour Sloane (Mia Sara), and his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) – on the lam. He stands near a small television set showing the Chicago Cubs game that the Pizza Man (Joey Vieira) is watching. And at the precise moment Rooney looks away, he misses the TV catch sight of none other than Ferris catching a foul ball. Curses! It’s funny all on its own, of course, but then John Hughes appends one more bit of funny.

Rooney: “What’s the score?”
Pizza Man: “Nothin’, nothin’.”
Rooney: “Who’s winning?”
Pizza Man: “The Bears.”

But here’s the thing I find myself wondering more and more: what if Edward R. Rooney, Dean of Students, isn’t the butt of this joke?

Once, many years ago, before moving to Chicago, I was working my desk job during a summer afternoon when I returned from some wholly unmemorable lunch to discover a voicemail waiting. I listened. It was not a client nor a customer but two friends of mine in Chicago at Wrigley Field where Max Weinberg, of my beloved Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, had just thrown out the first pitch. Cackling, hopped up on Budweiser I could imagine sloshing around in their plastic cups, “Glory Days” blaring in the background, they explained they just felt like they needed to let me know where they were and what had just happened. When the voicemail concluded, I seethed with envy. I seethed with more envy later in the kitchen when I caught sight of the very Cubs game my friends were at on the television. It looked nice there.

A perfect summer afternoon in Chicago, when the humidity is low, when a gentle breeze wafts in off the lake, when the sun is bright and accompanied by just a few picturesque, wispy clouds, when 80 degrees is entirely true to its number, Lord, that’s hard to beat. And while there are all manner of fine places to be in Chicago on such an afternoon, be it a porch, be it a beer garden, be it the lakefront, be it Parson’s Chicken and Fish (so long as you’re a hipster dufus), well, Wrigley Field, the Friendly Confines on Addison & Clark, even with all the bros gone rabid, might be peak Summer Afternoon Chicago. And that is naturally why Ferris, Sloane and Cameron have to end up there, at least briefly, during their infamous day off in 1985.

Movie literalists have determined this was a clash against the Atlanta Braves that the Cubs lost by a couple runs just as movie literalists have determined that there is no way Ferris, Sloane and Cameron could have visited all the places they did in the time allotted. What movie literalists incessantly miss, of course, is that the day is impossible to actually pull off because the day is an ideal, not unlike Ferris Bueller himself, living the dream and pulling the rest of us, we Cameron Fryes, along in his wake. And that’s why I always wondered what might happen if Ferris aged out of the ideal. Alas, the Honda CRV commercial for the 2012 Super Bowl in which Broderick reprised his famous role revealed that even in humdrum adulthood Ferris found a way to attain the unattainable.

And so, if we are all Cameron Frye when we are kids, the ongoing ideal of Ferris would suggest that we are all the Pizza Man when we are adults, trapped behind the counter, left to deal with never-ending orders and asinine Deans who don’t know how sports work, wistfully watching a faraway baseball game in a sunny paradise where some devil-may-care kid is catching a foul ball.

5 Insert Shots I Love

Recently on Vimeo, Josh Forrest compiled a super cut of all the insert shots employed by director David Fincher and his editors for the fantastic "Zodiac." This, as it had to, got me to thinking about my own favorite insert shots. Because insert shots, when utilized to the fullest extent of their function, can yield a kind of momentary poetry, an incision of of insight not merely into the film's mind but into the filmmaker's mind. This is because an insert shot - which are quite often those sudden close-ups you see in the midst of wider shots enveloping all the characters in their entire locale - can get right down to the true bizness in a way those Everything In The Frame shots can't.

The problem is that I have - and this is a rough estimate - 17,487 favorite insert shots. So I decided to engage in a blogging exercise. I decided to sit down with a pen and paper and scribble whatever five insert shots I love that first jumped into my head. The five that follow, I swear, came rattling right out before any others even threatened to worm their way in. Make of that what you will. Forward march.

5 Insert Shots I Love

Pulp Fiction

Well, duh.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

John Hughes' unforgettable ode to teenage rebellion is chock full of memorable insert shots, but the hilarious non-forebodeingness of who and what this one signifies has always been the first that involuntarily leaps to mind. Before you even see his face you know his cheese is about to get left out in the wind.

 Out Of Sight

Jack sits down opposite Karen at the Motor City hotel bar. He sets his beloved Zippo beside her glass of beloved bourbon. Nick passes out.

United 93

There is a simply remarkable moment in Paul Greengrass's simply remarkable "United 93" when the first jet has crashed into the World Trade Center and it is then relayed to the Chief of Air Traffic Control Operations at the FAA that the tapes having caught the hijackers' voices on tape are heard to say: "We have some planes." "We have some planes?" the Chief repeats, emphasizing the plural. And as he does, the film cuts to the above shot, a display of every flight currently in United States airspace, every goddamn one of them another potential hijack to the FAA. It's a split-second that effortlessly embodies the terror and confusion of that horrific day.

Die Hard

Per CigarettesInCinema.com there have been 7.8 million cigarettes smoked in the cinema. And of those 7.8 cigarettes, roughly 500,000 of them have been stubbed out. But no cigarette stubbed out on the silver screen has echoed with such charismatically haughty evilness as Hans Gruber in "Die Hard", the exceptional thief's exceptional designer shoes contrasting with John McClane's ravaged bare feet in the background.

5 Movie Moments Of Significant Technical Personal Influence

Recently on his site - And So It Begins - Alex Withrow broke down the infamous Spike Lee double dolly shot, the shot wherein, as Alex writes, “(Lee) sets up a dolly per usual, then puts the actor on another dolly, and moves the camera and the actor at the same time.” This gives the impression that the actor and/or the character is floating through the air.

As I communicated to him in the comments, I vividly recall the first time I saw this shot. This is because “Malcolm X” was the first Spike Lee film I had ever seen and being released in the fall of 1993 it arrived but a few short months after I had first seen “Last of the Mohicans” (on home video) and therefore just begun my free fall into cinematic obsession. I was still in the infant stages of grasping the inner-workings of a film and very late in “Malcolm X”, in a titanic performance that should have won him the Oscar (though Pacino should have won an Oscar years earlier so the Academy had to square with him first), as the title character makes his way to the Audubon Ballroom where his assassination awaits, Sam Cooke’s astonishing “A Change Is Gonna Come” augmenting the mood, he appears to float just above the sidewalk courtesy of the double dolly, illuminating Malcolm’s own sense of looming fate. It’s a moment to take away your breath. It took away mine, that’s for sure, partly because of the moment’s emotion and partly because I remember thinking, “What is the camera DOING?”

It was one of the earliest moments I consciously became aware of how a movie was being made. Those are big moments when you’re young. These were the biggest.

5 Movie Moments Of Significant Technical Personal Influence

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark. The moment in the Nepalese bar when Indy enters to greet Marion but we don’t see him – rather, we see his shadow looming over her. Although I was at an age where I still would have thought “ALF” made for good TV, I’m still pretty sure I saw this and thought, “Great shot. GREAT.SHOT.” (And almost as good was the moment later in the same scene when you don’t see the Nazi thug get shot – you see the Nazi thug’s shadow get shot.)

1 (A). Adventures of Robin Hood. Almost a copycat of the “Raiders” moment (which is to say, the “Raiders” moment is almost a copycat of this one), in the midst of the climactic fencing tete-a-tete between heroic Robin of Locksley and nefarious Sir Guy of Gisbourne (the greatest cinematic swordfight of all time, and this is NOT debatable) the two men carry their duel just off screen and we continue to watch as their interlocked shadows are brilliantly cast against a colossal castle pillar. It is breathtaking (regardless of how many times it has been parodied). At this point in my life I honestly cannot remember if I saw this shadow (as I've written many times before I was practically raised on Errol Flynn/Olivia de Havilland pictures) or the “Raiders” shadow first so they both should be mentioned.

2. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. John Hughes' 1986 day-in-the-life classic was, as I have written many times before, a seminal film in my movie-obsessed existence. But it was not merely seminal from an emotional standpoint, it was also seminal from a filmmaking standpoint. This is to say that all of a sudden Ferris (Matthew Broderick) looked right into the camera - looked right at me! - and started talking. He had broken the fourth wall, though I had no idea what the fourth wall was or, consequently, how one could break it. All I knew was I felt an unexplainable rush - he was inviting me along for his ride and I was more than ready to go.

3. The Untouchables. Sometimes I feel guilty admitting my first real comprehension of camera tricks came via Brian DePalma rather than, say, Martin Scorsese – it’s like admitting “Out of the Blue” had more of an effect on me than “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (which it did) – but when you’re barely a teen “The Untouchables” is easier to digest and process than Scorsese’s much tougher work. Late in the film that charismatic thug Al Capone (Robert DeNiro) sends a couple weapon-toting flunkies to the Racine-set flat of Malone (Sean Connery) to, as they say, take him out. One of the flunkies sneaks in through an open first floor window and tracks Malone through the elongated apartment, down hallways, through rooms, suspense heightening, and it is all seen via the flunky’s swiftly moving Point-of-View. “Wait,” I kinda remember thinking, “this isn’t the camera following Malone. This is the GUY.”



4. Pulp Fiction. I have made it more than well known that Uma Thurman’s performance as Mia Wallace is one of the greatest influences on my existence as a movie loving nut job but, of course, this landmark 1994 film was as much about its auteur, Quentin Tarantino, as Uma. And there comes the moment Mia and Vincent (John Travolta) pull up to Jack Rabbit Slims and Vincent decrees he wants to go somewhere else and get a steak and Mia says “You can get a steak here, daddy-o” (which is a line reading of a thousand compliments) and then adds “don’t be a…” which leads to her forming a square in the air which Tarantino actually outlines on the screen as she does it. Bewildered, I thought, “That’s allowed?” Why, yes, “Pulp Fiction” explained, it is.

5. Saturday Night Fever. In high school I was constantly attempting to craft short movies on this massively old-school VHS camcorder (ah, the old days) and I will never forget trying and failing to make this movie about a private detective investigating a rash of drive-by coconutings (do not, under any circumstances, ask) and trying in utter vain to rip off the still-transcendent opening of this disco-era classic. (Perhaps I failed to rip it off because you could tell by the way I walk that I am most decidedly not a woman’s man.) The editing, the camera work, the music, the breezy, Travolta-esque cocksureness, the paint can, it all blends together into an opening set with the snazziest polyester table cloth. It’s straight filmmaking, baby, and somehow, even though I didn’t know that’s what it was, I knew that’s what it was.

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