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.

.