Has there ever been a less villainous villain than Edward R. Rooney? The dean of students at Shermer High School, and the principal antagonist of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, could have been up there with Hans Gruber and Keyser Söze in the pantheon of movie baddies. Facing off against Ferris Bueller, perhaps the most famous school skipper in cinematic history, Mr. Rooney has the makings of an all-timer. He is deluded. He is depraved. He is dangerous in the way that supervillains tend to be: He has much less power than he wants and much more than he deserves.
Fortunately for Ferris, though—and unfortunately for Ed Rooney’s spot in movie-villain Valhalla—Shermer’s embattled dean is also a thorough fool. Mr. Rooney is the kind of guy who, hearing that the score of a baseball game is nothing–nothing, wonders who is winning. He is wrong, not just casually but chronically: a dean who spends the day stalking a student, an adult who does battle with a kid, an administrator so intent on enforcing the rules that he repeatedly breaks the law. Ferris Bueller, a film about road trips and rebellion and coming of age, is, at its edges, an epic; Mr. Rooney—a villain who serves as comic relief—seals its status as a farce.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off premiered in the summer of 1986; even as it celebrates its 40th birthday, though, the film keeps refusing to show its age. It owes some of its perennial-classic status to Ferris himself (and to Matthew Broderick, the baby-faced actor who plays him). But it owes some of its endurance to Ed Rooney and his off-kilter brand of villainy. For everything Mr. Rooney is wrong about, after all, he gets one thing notably right: He’s right about Ferris. He intuits that the teen’s “illness”—rumors of which will spread, with a kind of virality, among the citizens of Shermer, Illinois—is a hoax, and indeed it is: Ferris is spending a sparkling spring day not sick in bed but gallivanting around with his best friend and girlfriend in tow. Mr. Rooney’s knowledge does not mitigate his foolishness; it does, however, add dimension to his villainy. His pursuit of Ferris may be wildly unreasonable; it is also rational.
Mr. Rooney is one of the few characters in the film who are immune to Ferris’s charms. He is one of the few who see Ferris as the film’s audience does: a performer going to his own absurd extremes to enable his day of school-skipping. He is also one of the few who understand the stakes of Ferris’s fun. “The last thing I need at this point in my career,” the dean tells his secretary, “is 1,500 Ferris Bueller disciples running around these halls.”
Shermer’s dean knows the same thing its famous student does: Popularity is currency. It is celebrity. And his insight helps explain why Ferris Bueller has endeared itself to so many generations of viewers—and today feels strikingly prescient. Ferris does not merely have a high school full of friends. He also, as the film progresses, draws fans—or, as we’d call them now, followers. He is more than the film’s central character. He is its influencer.
When Ferris Bueller premiered, its success was somewhat unlikely; teenage truancy is not, on its own, the stuff of comedy gold. But it was another movie from John Hughes, bard of American adolescence, and it did the same thing that made Hughes’s previous films so beloved: It honored teenagers. Hughes, famously, drafted the original Ferris Bueller script in a single, caffeine-fueled week. Paramount, just as famously, green-lighted the thing pretty much immediately. But Hughes spent the time between Ferris Bueller’s drafting and its filming engaged in constant revision, in some cases making changes that were deeply consequential.
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A new book, released in commemoration of the film’s anniversary, offers some startling insights. Ferris Bueller … You’re My Hero: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Day Off, by the comedian and author Jason Klamm, is a work that, like the film it celebrates, might be easy to underestimate. An origin story of Ferris Bueller and an analysis of its impact, it is largely an oral history, and it certainly benefits from the more than 100 interviews that Klamm conducted with the film’s creators and crew. It is most revelatory, though, because of the access Klamm had to various drafts of the film’s ever-evolving script: iterations showing the extent to which Ferris’s character was subjected to honing, rethinking, editing, re-editing.
In an early version, for instance, Ferris smokes cigarettes—lots of them—and makes assorted allusions to his bong. The day’s adventures include a visit to a strip club: Ferris drags his girlfriend, Sloane, and his best friend, Cameron, there. Neither can resist him. This Ferris, in other words, has proved himself to be exactly what Mr. Rooney most fears: a bad influence.
No wonder that at one point, as the book reveals, Ferris might have been played by the actor who instead appears—briefly but memorably—in a deliciously bleary-eyed cameo: Charlie Sheen. Can you imagine? Ferris Bueller, that paragon of low-stakes disobedience, as a rebel akin to Judd Nelson’s Breakfast Club bad boy, John Bender? Audiences were spared that version in part by Broderick, who invested the character with his childish charisma. But we were spared, too, Klamm suggests, by one of the Paramount executives who oversaw Ferris Bueller’s production—and who shaped the film, and the character, with a crucial insight: that popular movies, like popular people, can have an outsize influence on their fans.
Lindsay Doran, before making her way to film, had worked in public broadcasting. And “when you work in public television,” she told Klamm, “you’re very aware of the messages that you’re sending.” She was also aware that Hughes was coming to Ferris Bueller not only with a string of box-office successes but also with a growing reputation as a teen-comedy auteur. Ferris Bueller was, very possibly, a classic in the making. And Ferris himself stood a good chance of becoming, in the fullest sense of the word, an icon—or, perhaps even more powerful, Doran believed: a role model.
If Ferris was destined to be an enduring influence, Doran did not want him to be a bad one. She convinced Hughes that Ferris would be more compelling as a character—and more responsible as a cultural power broker—were his rebellion framed as a daylong lark rather than a way of life. Thus Hughes edited the joyride that Ferris takes with Cameron and Sloane into a journey that is, in the end, notably wholesome. (No strip clubs in sight.) He turned Ferris into a rebel with a decidedly vanilla cause. He is a teenager who skips school to expand his horizons, who frees himself from the stultifying confines of Shermer High and receives a more meaningful education from the wide world beyond the school’s walls.
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As Hughes honed his script, Klamm reports, he came to realize something else: that to make the film work, his protagonist would have to be much more than a typical teenager. He would have to be, somehow, invincible.
What this meant was that Ferris would face multiple challenges but extremely few consequences. He would be perpetually unafraid—of getting caught, of getting punished, of disappointing the people who loved him. Ferris Bueller would take the trials of teenhood, with all of their possibilities and insults and fears, and cloak them in magical realism. The character who emerged from Hughes’s tweaking embodies the idea, Broderick told Klamm, “that you could just [say] screw everything and do whatever you want for a while.” The winsome Ferris, in getting to live out every teen’s fantasy, became a character to like—and someone adults and kids wished they could be. He was free.
Ferris’s freedom, in the film, takes on a notably modern edge. Popularity, for Ferris, is more than power; it is a source of his invincibility. This is what Mr. Rooney recognizes all too well. Ferris’s fame gives him the ability to be everywhere and nowhere at once—to achieve the kind of transcendent popularity that social theorists sometimes describe as “ambient awareness”: He and his illness are effortlessly, endlessly there.
“Save Ferris,” a volunteer offers early in the film, roaming the hall of Shermer High and collecting alms for the supposedly ill boy, with an analog version of a GoFundMe page: an empty Pepsi can jangling with coins. Ferris’s sister, Jeanie, disgustedly bats it away. Later, she looks up to see the volunteer’s plea painted, with all-caps urgency, on the side of a water tower: SAVE FERRIS, towering above the town, proving that Ferris’s fake illness has gone viral. His popularity has expanded from a social fact to an environmental reality. Rumors of his death may have been greatly exaggerated; they are also now part of the town’s infrastructure.
SAVE FERRIS is a plea and a punch line and, in retrospect, a protean hashtag—the distillation of an information campaign that, being fast-moving and well-meaning and based on a lie, translates easily to the attention economy of today. As Ferris the person traipses through Chicago, Ferris the trending topic speeds through Shermer in a memetic frenzy, his rumored illness steadily worsening, his condition characterized as ever more dire. Everyone—students, administrators, the town’s 911 operators and police detectives—seems to know about Ferris’s supposed pain. Will he get caught? the audience keeps wondering. And in scene after scene, he gives truth the slip. One of the day’s “That was close!” moments finds Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane in a taxi that pulls up, at a red light, next to one occupied by Ferris’s dad. They escape detection in part because Mr. Bueller is reading a newspaper—whose front page announces: COMMUNITY RALLIES AROUND SICK YOUTH.
But the people of Shermer and Chicago are hardly Ferris’s only audience. This is one of the film’s sly tricks, and another prescient move: Regularly, Ferris speaks directly to camera, talking to the viewing audience through the movie’s extremely permeable fourth wall. He converses. He confides. He offers advice. (This includes, at the film’s outset, a step-by-step guide to DIY illness-faking that appears on the screen, as Ferris talks with infomercial-style urgency.) Ferris is more than an emcee, though. He is essentially a trickster god, one with the power to flap his arms and make weather for everyone else.
Ferris Bueller’s day off is not just Ferris’s day—it is also, because of his decisions and actions, Jeanie Bueller’s day at the police station, Cameron Frye’s day of reckoning, and Ed Rooney’s day of degradation. The film’s best-known line—“Bueller? Bueller?”—is the one that establishes Ferris’s absence from school. Its most revealing line, though, may be the one that comes afterward: the explanation offered by Simone, a cheerful classmate, for Bueller’s lack of response. “Um, he’s sick,” Simone says. “My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night.” Seeming to sense that the information might benefit from a summary, she adds a TL;DR: “I guess it’s pretty serious.”
Simone is describing an age-old phenemenon—the rumor mill, a game of telephone—and the process through which “facts” about Ferris’s fake illness become “truth.” Each person amplifies the lie. Each person makes SAVE FERRIS just a little more real. Ferris exerts a parasocial hold over the people of Shermer. He exerts a similar influence over his audience. He is an idol. He is a brand. He is an opt-in proposition until, suddenly, he isn’t. This is, despite Ferris Bueller’s age, an extremely relatable form of power—and is why the film, at 40, feels so fresh. You may like Ferris. You may not. You’re subscribed to him either way.
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