Re: Totaling the Ferrari: Ferris Bueller Revisited

I think somebody's over-thinking things.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19860611/REVIEWS/606110301/1023

Here is one of the most innocent movies in a long time, a sweet,
> warm-hearted comedy about a teenager who skips school so he can help his
> best friend win some self-respect. The therapy he has in mind includes a
> day's visit to Chicago, and after we've seen the Sears Tower, the Art
> Institute, the Board of Trade, a parade down Dearborn Street, architectural
> landmarks, a Gold Coast lunch and a game at Wrigley Field, we have to
> concede that the city and state film offices have done their jobs: If "Ferris
> Bueller's Day Off<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=Ferris%20Bueller%27s%20Day%20Off&ToDate=20111231>"
> fails on every other level, at least it works as a travelogue.
>
> It does, however, work on at least a few other levels. The movie stars Matthew
> Broderick<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Matthew%20Broderick&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>as Ferris, a bright high school senior from the North Shore who fakes an
> illness so he can spend a day in town with his girlfriend, Sloane (the
> astonishingly beautiful Mia Sara<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Mia%20Sara&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>)
> and his best friend, Cameron (Alan Ruck<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Alan%20Ruck&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>
> ).
>
> At first, it seems as if skipping school is all he has in mind - especially
> after he talks Cameron into borrowing his dad's restored red Ferrari, a car
> the father loves more than Cameron himself.
>
> The body of the movie is a lighthearted excursion through the Loop,
> including a German-American Day parade in which Ferris leaps aboard a float,
> grabs a microphone and starts singing "Twist and Shout" while the marching
> band backs him up. The teens fake their way into a fancy restaurant for
> lunch, spend some time gawking at the masterpieces in the Art Institute, and
> then go out to Wrigley Field, where, of course, they are late and have to
> take box seats far back in the left-field corner. (The movie gets that
> detail right; it would be too much to hope that they could arrive in the
> third inning and find seats in the bleachers.) There is one great, dizzying
> moment when the teens visit the top of the Sears Tower and lean forward and
> press their foreheads against the glass, and look straight down at the tiny
> cars and little specks of life far below, and begin to talk about their
> lives. And that introduces, subtly, the buried theme of the movie, which is
> that Ferris wants to help Cameron gain self-respect in the face of his
> father's materialism.
>
> Ferris is, in fact, a bit of a preacher. "Life goes by so fast," he says,
> "that if you don't stop and look around, you might miss it." He's sensitive
> to the hurt inside his friend's heart, as Cameron explains how his dad has
> cherished and restored the red Ferrari and given it a place of honor in his
> life - a place denied to Cameron.
>
> "Ferris Bueller" was directed by John Hughes, the philosopher of
> adolescence, whose credits include "16 Candles," "The Breakfast Club<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=The%20Breakfast%20Club&ToDate=20111231>"
> and "Pretty in Pink<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=Pretty%20in%20Pink&ToDate=20111231>."
> In all of his films, adults are strange, distant creatures who love their
> teenagers, but fail completely to understand them. That's the case here, all
> right: All of the adults, including a bumbling high-school dean (Jeffrey
> Jones<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Jeffrey%20Jones&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20111231>),
> are dim-witted and one-dimensional. And the movie's solutions to Cameron's
> problems are pretty simplistic. But the film's heart is in the right place,
> and "Ferris Bueller" is slight, whimsical and sweet.
>

I think the Ferrari represents a father's mis-placed love for status over
understanding his teenage son. In that sense, crashing the Ferrari both
removes an obstacle between Cameron and his father, it is also Cameron's
coming-of-age (which he needs if he is going to continue to live). I often
wonder if I am holding too tightly to something that gets in the way of
love, of relationship. At the end of the film, order is restored for
everyone but the principal, who reaps the psychological wreckage he has
sown.

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |


On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Lance McLain <lance-X3DuywwxauBWk0Htik3J/[email protected]> wrote:

> Love it!
>
> regards,
> -Lance
>
> ----------------------
>
> 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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