Totaling the Ferrari: Ferris Bueller Revisited

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http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/01/20/totaling-the-ferrari-ferris-bueller-revisited/

ON CINEMA
Totaling the Ferrari: Ferris Bueller Revisited
January 20, 2011 | by Caleb Crain


If Ferris didn’t happen to have a knack for phreaking, some other  
future would be given to him.
My husband and I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) the other  
night. He’d never seen it before, to the consternation of his Facebook  
friends, and I last saw it a decade ago, when I remember having been  
vaguely entertained. Not this time, though. “God, he’s kind of awful,  
isn’t he?” Peter commented, about ten minutes in. I agreed but was  
fascinated. Before my eyes, therentier class was daydreaming a special  
dream, a dream of getting away from the drudges and the scolds ...

I was not fascinated by the plot, which is thin. A high-school senior  
named Ferris Bueller, played by Matthew Broderick, feigns illness in  
order to play hooky and persuades a hypochondriacal friend and a bland  
girlfriend to follow him on a tour of Chicago, visiting a fancy  
restaurant, a baseball game, an art museum, and a German-American  
heritage parade. The movie depends heavily on Broderick’s charm as an  
actor, on his mix of too careful enunciation, direct address to the  
camera, and pale pink pubescence in the shower. In the opening scene,  
director John Hughes takes a rather large risk: Ferris lies to his  
parents with large calf eyes, giggling and lapsing into baby talk.  
What kind of movie hero consciously presents himself as infantile and  
duplicitous? What kind of movie hero begins by seducing his parents?

The answer seemed to be hiding in two places: in the comically  
flagrant symbol of a red Ferrari, which I’ll get to in a moment, and  
more cleverly, in moments protested by the movie’s characters as not  
worth paying attention to at all. Why, when Ferris wants to convey how  
boring high school is, does he say he’s skipping a test on European  
socialism? Why does Hughes feature as a sample of academic ennui the  
actor and conservative pundit Ben Stein’s explanation of the Smoot- 
Hawley tariff of 1930 and the supply-side economics of the 1980s?

Stein’s drone may be the most revealing voice in the film. The Smoot- 
Hawley tariff, as Stein explains, was an attempt by the U.S.  
government to protect American businesses by raising taxes on imports.  
It “proved to be one of the most disastrous pieces of legislation ever  
enacted in America,” my copy of the Reader’s Companion to American  
History observes, “for other nations had no choice to follow suit with  
beggar-thy-neighbor tariff hikes of their own.” The lesson of the  
Smoot-Hawley tariff, in other words, is cherished by those who believe  
that the only way to regulate capitalism is not to. Stein goes on to  
discuss the Laffer curve (the idea that American taxes before Reagan  
were so high that lowering them would actually bring in more revenue)  
and supply-side economics (the idea that taxes and government  
regulation generally are burdens on wealth creation more costly than  
their purported benefits). Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a movie rife  
with Oedipal conflict, and there is a strange instance of it here.  
According to Wikipedia, Stein’s father, the Nixon economic adviser  
Hebert Stein, is the first person known to have used the phrase  
“supply-side economics," a concept that the actor Stein glosses by  
quoting the early judgment on it by George H. W. Bush (weak son of  
Reagan, weak father of George W. Bush): “voodoo economics.”

How to read Stein’s irony, or Hughes’s, in this scene is a nice  
question. (Is Stein pretending to be aliberal economics teacher?) But  
I would like to argue that the movie advocates not supply-sider  
ideology per se, or not only supply-sider ideology, but something more  
pernicious.

The contradictions of the movie are most wince-making in the bad faith  
of Ferris’s attempt to cure the malaise of his friend Cameron.  
Cameron, Ferris tells the viewer, has a wealthy father who quarrels  
incessantly with his mother and who cares more about such possessions  
as his 1961 red Ferrari convertible than about his son. The paternal  
cruelty has made Cameron sick. The boy fantasizes physical ailments  
and is so fearful of breaking rules that he is unable to enjoy life.  
Late in the movie, Ferris reveals that he in fact engineered the whole  
scheme of a day off in the hope of freeing Cameron from his father’s  
shadow. Ferris’s strategy seems to have depended on persuading Cameron  
to borrow his father’s Ferrari without permission. The car’s odometer,  
Ferris calculated, would force father and son into an éclaircissement,  
not depicted in the movie, in the course of which Cameron is going to  
have to face down his Oedipal fear and at last take ownership of his  
desires.

A pretty theory, but if Cameron’s father is as ogreish as described,  
he may retaliate: He may refuse to pay for Cameron’s college  
education; he may disinherit him. By what right, moreover, does Ferris  
advocate painful honesty in father-son relations? The last quarter- 
hour of the movie sees Ferris racing across suburban lawns in order to  
reach his fake sickbed before his parents do, in order to avoid having  
to speak to his parents anything like the truth. It is hard to imagine  
a ranker example of a son trapped in a false, compliant self by his  
shyness of conflict. The viewer is distracted from this character flaw  
by the frequent confessions that Ferris shares across the fourth wall;  
he always seems to be telling the truth to us, even if he isn’t  
telling it to anyone else in the movie. (He tells his girlfriend, for  
example, that he wants to marry her, even though he tells us that he  
knows it’s going to be “tricky” when he goes away to college in the  
fall and she remains behind for another year of high school.)

There is further misdirection in the invitation to see Ferris’s  
evasiveness as an achievement. Ferris has mastered a technology newly  
emergent in the 1980s: the combination of computers, telephones, and  
digital audio sampling. We see answering machines that Ferris has  
rigged to play false messages; we see his stereo amplifying digital  
samples of his coughs and snores to create the illusion that he’s at  
home in bed. The director Hughes has cleverly divined what this new  
technology will come to be used for; it is for not being there. A few  
years after the movie, one imagines, Ferris will start a company that  
designs phone trees and voicemail systems; he will be a millionaire by  
1990. The frustration, the sense of having been hoaxed, that is felt  
by the dean of students when he realizes that he isn’t really  
listening to Ferris through the intercom of the Bueller family home  
but only to a recording of Ferris, delivered to the intercom by a  
computer—you felt the same frustration yesterday when you dialed your  
health insurer and were led into a maze of cheerful, obtuse recorded  
voices that by design denied you an opportunity to say what had made  
you angry enough to call.

When Cameron first decides to stand up to his father, he has  
reasonably solid grounds for self-defense. Though a lot of miles have  
been put on the Ferrari, it remains unharmed. As Cameron dwells on his  
grievances, however, he starts kicking the car; he busts headlights,  
dents the hood, and (spoiler alert!) sends the vehicle careening out a  
window of his house, totaling it. The totaling is unintended, but  
Cameron did mean the damage that precedes it, and that damage seems,  
as a matter of psychology, not to mention strategy, to be a bad idea.  
As soon as the car is dented, Cameron can no longer claim to be a  
trustworthy son impatient with his father’s refusal to recognize him  
as such. The outburst has the effect of proving his father right  
before the argument begins. My father is mad at me, and now I’ve done  
something naughty in order to give him a reason to be.

The destruction also suggests something rather dark about the new  
relationship to pleasure that Ferris is pushing. Cameron’s parents and  
Ferris’s parents are rich at a historical moment, the early 1980s,  
when the rich were beginning to move further and further away from the  
rest of society. Wealth was no longer going to provide the rich with a  
place in society, as it might have in earlier generations. Ferris will  
not be taking a job in his father’s firm; he is certainly not going to  
become the foreman at the family-owned factory. If the Bueller  
family’s wealth is invested in manufacturing at all, it will probably  
be invested abroad; much of their investment income will no doubt  
derive from predatory financial arrangements, designed to siphon money  
and quality-of-life away from fellow citizens. When Ferris and his  
friends run into his father at a fancy restaurant, they overhear him  
say to one of his colleagues, “You have to spend money to make money.”  
It’s one of several indications that Ferris’s father is a bit of a  
patsy. In the legacy American economy being born, the spending of  
money is a virtue in itself. Money is made, however, by figuring out  
how not to spend it—by offshoring, say, or by implementing labor- 
saving devices like phone trees. (So much for the affable, beehived  
school secretary.)

A child of wealth, Ferris isn’t worried about skipping school, nor are  
his parents. If Ferris didn’t happen to have a knack for phreaking,  
some other future would be given to him. He doesn’t need to please the  
world but only his parents, as the unsettling hints of parent-child  
incest scattered through the movie suggest: Ferris makes out with his  
girlfriend in the school parking lot while impersonating her father;  
Ferris’s girlfriend makes goo-goo eyes at Ferris’s father when their  
eyes meet by accident from the back seats of cars adjacent in traffic.  
Ferris and Cameron are two sides of the same predicament. Cameron  
fantasizes about being as clever as Ferris, so as to get away with  
pleasures without his parents’ knowledge. Ferris fantasizes about  
being as brave as Cameron, so that he could stand to let his parents  
see him for who he really is.


Why put your capital in a bank?
And the Ferrari represents capital. Cameron’s father, a miser, has  
accumulated it and doesn’t want to let it go. His son expects to drive  
it someday and resents having to wait. When the son anticipates and  
takes it for the day, he faces the problem of what to do with  
something so valuable that he could never replace it. Once the  
children bring the Ferrari to downtown Chicago, they sensibly park it  
in a garage—that is, they place the capital in a bank. But capital  
doesn’t stay in the bank where it’s deposited. No sooner does a  
depositor walk out the door than his money, too, leaves the building,  
in the hands of someone in need of a loan. While Ferris, Cameron, and  
Ferris’s girlfriend aren’t looking, the Ferrari is driven off for a  
joyride by the somewhat Hispanic-looking garage attendant and his  
black coworker, ethnicity here serving as a marker of socioeconomic  
class, as so often in movies. Why put your capital in a bank, why  
invest it in business, when the interest you earn is so low? the movie  
asks. Such an investment is tantamount to loaning your money to the  
middle and working classes for their mere pleasure. Why not just take  
it for a joyride yourself? Spend your capital instead of investing it.  
Why not take all the pleasure you can out of its destruction?

Thus the totaling of a Ferrari comes to be understood as an act of  
self-expression.

Caleb Crain is a writer living in Brooklyn.

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