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\n\t\t\tPosted by\t\t\tJohn Scalzi<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a0\u00a0
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About a decade ago there was some noise made about trying to figure out what day on the calendar Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off took place. The day that was decided on by the nerds who think too much about this sort of thing was June 5, 1985. This was decided largely by the fact that the Cubs game Ferris, Cameron and Sloane were seen attending happened on that day, and apparently you can\u2019t argue with the baseball schedule.<\/p>\n
I can argue with the baseball schedule, and I will tell you that June 5, 1985 is not Ferris Bueller\u2019s day off. For one thing, anyone who knows Midwest school schedules knows that by June 5th, all the kids are out of school. For another thing, asserting that the Cubs game, which our trio only attend, is definitive, when the Von Steuben Day parade, which Ferris actually inserts himself into, is disregarded, is nonsensical cherry picking of the highest order. The Von Steuben Day parade was as real as the Cubs game, and took place on September 28, 1985. If any real world day has to be picked, I would pick that one.<\/p>\n
Except that one won\u2019t work either. September 28, 1985 was a Saturday, for one, and it\u2019s too early in the school year for Ferris\u2019 hijinks, for another. We know Ferris has skipped school nine times by the time The Day Off rolls around, and missing nine days when school has been in for barely a month is a lot, even for Ferris. Ferris is a free spirit, not a chronic truant. <\/p>\n
If one must pick a specific day \u2014 a questionable assertion, as I will relate momentarily \u2014 it would most likely be a day in late April, when Baseball is in season, the kids are not quite yet attuned to things like prom and graduation (and for the seniors, college), spring has sprung in the Chicagoland area, and Ferris would decide that that the day is too great to spend all cooped up in class. <\/p>\n
But ultimately, trying to pin The Day Off to an actual calendar day is folly \u2014 and not only folly but absolutely antithetical to the point of The Day Off. The point of The Day Off is freedom and possibility, not to pin it down with facts and schedules. Facts and schedules are for classes! The Day Off doesn\u2019t ask for any of that. It only asks: What will you do, if you can do whatever you want? <\/p>\n
What Ferris wants is to have a day in Chicago with his best friend Cameron and girlfriend Sloane. Inconveniently that is a school day, and while Ferris has bucked the system before (nine times!), as he says to the camera \u2014 Ferris breaks the fourth wall more and better than anyone before or since, yes, even better than Deadpool, I said what I said \u2014 if he does it again after this, he\u2019ll have to barf up a lung to make it stick. That being the case, The Day Off needs to be a day more than just hanging with friends. It has to be an event. Making it so will, among other things, require the \u201cborrowing\u201d of an expensive car, the chutzpah to brazen one\u2019s way into a place that will serve you pancreas, the cunning to evade parents and school principals and, significantly, the ability to make your depressive best friend confront his own fears. <\/p>\n
Oh, and, singing \u201cTwist and Shout\u201d in a parade. As you do. <\/p>\n
Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off came out the summer before I was a senior in high school, which meant when I watched it I was very much oh, here\u2019s a role model. Not for the skipping of school precisely; I went to a boarding school and lived in a dorm, skipping days was a rather more complicated affair than it would have been in a public school. But the anarchic style, the not taking school more seriously than it should be taken, the willingness to risk a little trouble for a little freedom \u2014 well, that appealed to me a lot. <\/p>\n
Before you ask, no, I did not, become a True Acolyte of Ferris. I lived in the real world and wanted to get into college, and while at the time I could not personally articulate the fact that inherent in Ferris\u2019 ability to flout the system was a frankly immense amount of privilege, I understood it well enough. Ferris gets his day off because he\u2019s screenwriter\/director John Hughes\u2019 special boy. The rest of us don\u2019t have that luck. Nevertheless, if one could not be Ferris all the time, would it still be wrong to have a Ferris moment or two, when the opportunity presented itself? I thought not. I had my small share of Ferris moments and didn\u2019t regret them.<\/p>\n
(I even got called \u201cFerris\u201d once or twice! Not in high school, but in college, at The University of Chicago, where somewhat exceptionally among my peers at that famously intensive school, I didn\u2019t grind or panic about my grades, I would actually leave campus to see concerts and plays and to visit a girl at Northwestern, and I got a job straight out of college reviewing movies for a newspaper, in the middle of a recession. I apparently made it all look easy, thus, \u201cFerris.\u201d Spoiler: It wasn\u2019t all easy, not by a long shot, the girl at Northwestern wanted to be just friends, and I got that job because I was willing to be paid less on a weekly basis than the newspaper paid its interns. I only achieved Ferris-osity if one didn\u2019t look too closely.)<\/p>\n
There has been the observation among Gen-Xers that you know you\u2019re old when you stop identifying less with Ferris and more with Principal Rooney (this is also true when applied to the students of The Breakfast Club and Vice-Principal Vernon). I\u2019ve never gotten to that point, but it\u2019s surely true that Ferris becomes less of a character goal and more of a character study as one gets older. Ferris himself understands that he is living in a moment that\u2019s not going to last: As he says in the movie, he and Cameron will soon graduate, they\u2019ll go to separate colleges and that\u2019s going to be that for them. Ferris\u2019 trickster status is predicated in his being in a place and time where his (let\u2019s face it mild) acts of transgression have little consequence. The penalties for him here are of the \u201cI hope you know this will go down on your permanent record\u201d sort, and even those are thwarted by Cameron letting him off the hook for property damage and a soror ex machina moment. Ferris knows it, which I think is why he takes advantage of it. After graduation, things get harder for everyone, even for privileged white boys from the north suburbs. <\/p>\n
This might mean that Ferris eventually becomes one of those people who realizes he\u2019s peaked in high school, and what an incredibly depressing realization that might be from him (Cameron, on the other hand, will not peak in high school; once he\u2019s out of his dad\u2019s house he\u2019s going to thrive. Sloane is going to be just fine, too). <\/p>\n
I do wonder, from time to time, what has become of Ferris. Many years ago I wrote about what I think happened to Holden Caufield of Catcher in the Rye; I said I expected he went into advertising, was good at selling things to \u201cthe youth\u201d and became a mostly functional alcoholic. My expectations for Ferris are similar, although more charitable: He goes to Northwestern, is popular but not nearly at the same level (Northwestern has a lot of Ferris types at it), gets a job in marketing, does very well at it, marries someone who is not Sloane, moves back to his hometown when they have kids and when they get old enough to go to his high school, he bores them with his stories about his time there. The kids, it turns out, didn\u2019t ditch. Ferris has grandkids now. He keeps in touch with Cameron and Sloane through Facebook. They\u2019re fine. He\u2019s fine. It\u2019s all fine. <\/p>\n
If it sounds like I\u2019ve given Ferris an ordinary life, well, that\u2019s kind of the point. Early on, I said the point of The Day Off was, what will you do, if you can do whatever you want? It turns out, for all his cleverness and antics and quoting of John Lennon, what Ferris wanted was actually pretty ordinary: To have a great day with his friends, while he still could have a great day with his friends. And, well: Who wouldn\u2019t? Just because what he wants is ordinary doesn\u2019t mean it isn\u2019t good, or that it wasn\u2019t a shining moment that all three of them will be glad all their lives that they got to have. Our lives are made of moments like these, where one day you get to do what you want with the people who matter to you, and you look around and you say to yourself, yes, this. <\/p>\n
Most us don\u2019t then mount a parade float and lipsync to a Beatles cover, true, and if we did we would probably get arrested. But this is why Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off is a fable, and why the actual date of The Day Off doesn\u2019t matter. What matters, and why I come back to this movie, is the joy of a perfect day, with the people that will make it perfect. My Day Off isn\u2019t this day off. But I\u2019ve had one or two of them, and, hopefully, so have you.<\/p>\n
\u2014 JS<\/p>\n
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