Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (19 page)

David Thompson complains in his majestic
Biographical Dictionary of Film
that in Hughes’s teen films ‘the fidelity of observation, the wit and the tenderness for kids never quite transcend the general air of problem solving and putting on a piously cheerful face. No one has yet dared in America to portray the boredom or hopelessness of many teenage lives – think of Mike Leigh’s pictures to see what could be done.’ The first thing to say is that to complain that John Hughes isn’t enough like Mike Leigh is like getting annoyed that a chocolate cookie is not trying hard enough if it’s not a roast dinner. But it isn’t fair to dismiss Hughes’s movies as devoid of ‘hopelessness’ as his repeated depiction of class issues in his films definitely shows the ‘hopelessness’ in these American teenagers’ lives.
Pretty in Pink
(lower-middle-class girl falls for wealthy boy) and
Some Kind of Wonderful
(lower-middle-class boy falls for lower-middle-class girl who has gained acceptance among the rich kids through her looks) are the most obvious examples of Hughes’s teen films that were obsessed with class injustice and how difficult it is for kids from different classes to connect (Hughes, despite his inherently romantic nature, apparently thought they couldn’t really). But it’s there in all his teen films, including
Sixteen Candles
(Jake’s house is notably bigger and flashier than Samantha’s) and
The Breakfast Club
(Bender’s somewhat implausible-sounding home life
^fn2
is compared to pampered Claire’s world in which she can give out diamond earrings on a whim). But the film that really emphasises how unfair he thought the system is
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
.

There are many reasons to love
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
, and I’ve gone through all of them. As a kid, I loved it because I thought Ferris was so cool – he was cute, he was funny and, most thrillingly of all, he could drive a car. When I finally, contrary to all my expectations, became a teenager and realised driving a car wasn’t quite as rare a skill as I’d believed as a nine-year-old, I decided that the real reason to love this film was that it was so weird. Like all of Hughes’s teen films, it has a simple premise (boy skips school and brings his best friend, Cameron, and girlfriend, Sloane, along for the ride) and takes place over a tiny period of time (like
The Breakfast Club
,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
doesn’t even cover twenty-four hours). But it is a much stranger beast than anything else Hughes ever wrote. While all Hughes’s other teen films deal with the emotional minutiae of being a teenager,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
doesn’t make even the slightest pretence to realism. The characters are all surreal exaggerations of recognisable characters – the teenager, Ferris, is just that little bit too cocky, the principal, Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), is definitely too demented – and the situations it depicts are, quite clearly, impossible.

‘John always meant for the movie to be a fable,’ says Matthew Broderick. ‘In the original, longer version of the film there were some sombre Hughesian musings about how when you’re an adult nothing matters any more. But when he was editing he decided to make it clear that it was a comedy fantasy and so cut all that out. From the start, he knew it wasn’t going to be a message-y movie, like
The Breakfast Club
. He wanted it to be about having a good time.’

For years I had a theory – and I was very proud of this theory – that
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
isn’t about Ferris at all: it’s about his miserable best friend, Cameron, and the whole movie is actually seen through Cameron’s eyes.
^fn3
This is why we see Ferris as this golden boy, the one who can do no wrong, the one for whom everything always goes right and the one who everyone loves: because that’s how Cameron sees him. Everyone had a friend in high school – and some still later in life – who, to their mind, exists within some kind of gilded halo, who is always funnier, smarter, cooler and more popular than they could ever be, and that is who Ferris is for Cameron. While Ferris happily makes out with his girlfriend by the stained-glass windows in the Chicago Art Institute (in what is the second best montage scene from an eighties movie), Cameron has a mini nervous breakdown while staring at Georges Seurat’s
Un Dimanche Apres-Midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte
, as he realises that he, like the child in the painting, is nothing more than a series of meaningless dots. Nothing comes easy for Cameron, who thinks too much about everything, but everything comes easy to Ferris, who thinks deeply about nothing. The clinching piece of evidence to my theory is that it’s Cameron who goes through an emotional change during the movie. He learns that, in order for him to achieve happiness at last in his life, he’s going to have to stand up to his father, for once. Ferris, by contrast, is as blithe and content at the end of the film as he is at the beginning.

I liked this theory a lot, mainly because I came up with it, but also because it explained all the things in the movie that I treasured. I loved the movie’s dreamy surrealism, with Ferris frequently breaking the fourth wall (Hughes loved to have his teen characters break the fourth wall but nowhere did he do it better, or as much, as in
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
) and the strange characters with their strange peccadilloes: Grace, the school secretary, pulling pens out of her enormous hair; Charlie Sheen as the druggy punk dispensing life advice in the police station; the teachers whose classes are so boring they feel like a lobotomy.
^fn4
They are all exaggerations, and that feels right if the movie is seen through a teenager’s eyes because teenagers do exaggerate everything as they feel everything so intensely. And most of all, I loved Cameron, Ferris’s miserable best friend, who increasingly felt like the heart of the film to me. Ferris, I realised, was kind of a jerk: he borrows his best friend’s dad’s vintage car, much to his best friend’s horror (licence plate: ‘NRVOUS’), just because he wants to borrow it. He manipulates his parents’ blind love for him, he torments his younger sister, and he lies to pretty much every single person in the movie.

‘It was definitely a concern when we were making the movie – is Ferris actually just an asshole?’ Broderick laughs. ‘But I saw him as the maître d’ of the movie, and it’s right that he shouldn’t have emotional development. He’s hosting the film.’

All these issues further convinced me of the rectitude of my theory: of course the film must be Cameron’s fantasy because only a teenager like Cameron (or a kid like me) would think that Ferris was cool. All adults think he is a prat. Of course the movie was seen through Cameron’s eyes.

But as an adult, I’ve realised none of this is right either. What makes
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
feel so special and warm isn’t that it’s about Cameron or the relationships behind the camera: it’s that it’s about John Hughes and, in particular, a subject especially close to his heart – social class.

Hughes wrote all his teen scripts quickly and with seeming Ferris-like ease, writing it in just two nights: ‘You know how Salieri looked at Amadeus with rage when he’d pulled it out of thin air?’ his collaborator Howard Deutch said, remembering Hughes working on Ferris, and using another eighties classic film as an analogy. ‘That was me looking at John writing a script. I’d be like, “How?! How?!”’

The reason Hughes was able to write his teen scripts so quickly was because he wrote so much of himself in them, both emotionally and in the details. It’s easy to mock the homogeneity of the world presented in these films, a world in which everyone’s white and everyone’s straight. But Hughes never meant his films to be seen as universal – they were utterly personal portraits of his own childhood, growing up as a teenager in the suburbs of Illinois (almost no one made movies set in Chicago until Hughes came along). Yet the emotions in the film universalised the movies, and with their simplistic narratives and familiar tropes, their clean divisions between good and bad, Hughes’s teen films have become to the latter half of the twentieth century what Western films were to the first: they are as central to the way Americans raised on them see their own lives, and the way non-Americans raised on them see America. There is a part of me that still feels, and probably always will feel, that I didn’t go to a REAL high school because mine – private, all girls, urban – looked nothing like the public, co-ed suburban schools I grew up watching. At my school in New York, we didn’t even have a high school – we had an ‘upper school’. So whenever people ask me about my ‘high school’ experiences, for a few initial seconds I envisage myself at Shermer High School, Hill Valley High School or even Westerberg High School.
And then I remember the boring truth.

To cite all the references Hughes put into his films that came straight from his own life would take up a whole book but a few select ones from
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
alone include Ferris’s home address (his house number is 2800, Hughes grew up in 2800 Shannon Road); the ‘Shermer High’ school scenes were shot in Hughes’s old high school, Glenbrook North High School; Hughes and his high school best friend used to talk their way into fancy restaurants, as Ferris does when he takes his friends to Chez Quis (a punning reference, as writer Susannah Gora points out, to the American pizza chain Shakey’s). But probably the most autobiographical moment in the film comes when Ferris takes Cameron and Sloane to the Chicago Art Institute. When Hughes was in high school the museum was, he said, ‘a place of refuge for me’ (in
Some Kind of Wonderful
, the male protagonist, Keith, describes the museum as ‘my sanctuary’) and ‘this was a chance for me to go back into this building and show the paintings that were my favourites’. But whereas Hughes would go to the museum alone as a teenager, here he has the teenage male lead of the film bring his girlfriend and best friend (and Hughes himself now brings his entire audience with him).

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
isn’t Cameron’s fantasy about Ferris – it’s a former teenage outsider’s self-fantasy about what their teenage life should have been like, and this is why it appeals so much to Hughes’s audience which is largely made up of current and former teenage outsiders.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
presents a nerd’s idealised view of teenage life: sanitised, safe and sweet, in which you are universally adored for being your own weird self and can do whatever you damn well want. This is a vision that would appeal enormously to a former teenage outcast (Hughes) and a future one (me as a child).

‘I sort of saw Cameron and Ferris as the two sides to John Hughes, because he could be moody and quiet, John. But he had another side to him that didn’t give a damn about anything and could be really funny,’ says Broderick

Hughes wrote
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
after
Pretty in Pink
and during his reworking of
Some Kind of Wonderful
, and both of those films feature archetypal Hughesian outcasts: Duckie (Jon Cryer) and Keith (Eric Stoltz). Ferris, by rights, should fit into this group, seeing as he is odd, has no interest in doing what people in authority tell him to do and likes New Romantic English singers. Like Duckie, he favours animal print (Duckie: shoes; Ferris: waistcoat), he talks to himself and he dances to old-school singers.
^fn5
And also like Duckie, he would be insufferably annoying if he weren’t so sweet. (That Jon Cryer looked almost identical to Broderick as a teenager further encourages identification between their characters.) But there are two key differences between Ferris and Duckie and Keith: Ferris is rich and popular and Duckie and Keith are poor and outcasts and, in an eighties teen movie, these issues are inextricably connected.

Hughes grew up in a lower-middle-class family in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood, an artistic outsider in a typical suburban high school, and he never forgot how it felt to be ‘on the lower end of a rich community’, as he told the
New York Times
. The divisions he draws between the wealthy and poor kids is done with a hand so heavy it could only belong to a man who once felt himself to be the victim of class snobbery. To be rich, in Hughes’s films, means that you are a jerk but granted instant popularity, while the noble working-class kids muddle through in the shadows.

So when Hughes decided to write a film about – for the one and only time in his career – a popular but likeable kid, he simply took the nerd from his previous film, Duckie, and made him rich. This, in Hughes’s world, was how a kid, even one as odd as Duckie/Ferris, was guaranteed popularity. The Buellers definitely have money, enough to give their son a computer and their daughter a car. Where Duckie apparently sleeps on a mattress in a bare room in
Pretty in Pink
, his alter ego Ferris sleeps in a room surrounded by computers and a giant stereo system. Where Duckie pines hopelessly after his female best friend and fantasises in vain about marrying her, Ferris dates the prettiest girl in school and she is desperate to marry him. And where Duckie seems to have no parental figures at all in his life, Ferris’s parents think he’s wonderful, even when the school principal tells them he really isn’t.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
is like Duckie’s fantasy, which it is, to an extent, because it’s Hughes’s fantasy. But because this is a Hughes film, there is, inevitably, a dig about wealth in it and this is done through Cameron.

Cameron is, clearly, much richer than Ferris. Whereas Ferris’s house is a typical but very plush upper-middle-class suburban house, Cameron lives in what looks like a multimillion-dollar bunker for a Bond villain. His father’s collection of vintage cars alone probably costs twice as much as the Bueller homestead. And Cameron is emphatically miserable. Hughes suggested that Cameron’s parents simply don’t love him (the reason there is a close-up on Mary Cassatt’s painting,
Mother and Child
, in the museum montage is because, Hughes said, ‘I thought it was very relevant to Cameron, the tenderness between a mother and a child which he didn’t have’), and Cameron knows that his father loves his Ferrari more than he loves his family. Even in a film that ostensibly lightens up on wealthy kids, Hughes couldn’t help but make the point, again, that being a rich teenager – despite how it might look from the outside – actually sucks. Even if you yourself are not a jerk, like Steff in
Pretty in Pink
or Hardy in
Some Kind of Wonderful
, chances are your parents will be.