How to Make a Name in Blogging, or, A Case Study in Retroactive Virtue Signaling
This piece is the third in a series of four dealing with issues of free speech, reactionary politics and notions of privilege in film.
Let's say we want to make a name for ourselves in online publishing. We have a site - a blog where we post about film. We need to be generating clicks and retweets. The best ways to generate web traffic involve either spending a bunch of money on advertising or shooting for a viral video. If we don't have content up there with viral potential and don't have the ad dollars necessary for commercial promotion, the next best thing is to try to sensationalize what we do have on our site. The only other option is just writing as astutely and honestly as we can about film and hope that as many people read it as possible. That idea's out. Much better to cut in on the trafficking of what are known as “High-Arousal Emotions”. If we don't generate some outrage - the easiest and fastest vessel for buzz - no one will read our writing and as we all know, if everybody online isn't watching something, it may as well not exist.
We'll follow the model of antagonization as seen through the lens of progressive revisionism. But man, all those big words. Sounds like a lecture. We'll pick a film that's well known and well liked by the age range that would read a film blog and present a contrarian appraisal of the movie. We'll aim to make people feel guilty for liking the movie. That'll be surprising, while propping up our forward-thinking politics. It'll paint us as writers whose views make us stand out from the crowd and flatter our values.
We'll go with Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). People love that movie. But let's tear it down. It'll be unexpected. This type of corrective deconstruction has been done already, but this is our take on it. The trick is to not let any historical or cultural context inform our appraisal. That way, our content can stand out, while avoiding having to waste precious space incorporating the finer points of film aesthetics into our argument. That'll only distance people.
We'll want to avoid using formal essayistic or academic words like "summary" and "conclusion" and focus more on incorporating subjective response words like "feel" and "experience". We'll root the entire argument strictly in our immediate emotional reactions to the work and not bother with what else the elements or moments that elicit those reactions might imply or stand for.
Let's get started.
First, we'll audit the film demographically. The main characters are white and seem to be heterosexual and cisgendered. The eponymous hero's best buddy, Cameron is rich, living in a glass and chrome Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired, prairie-style mansion that has enough room for his father's hotrod - his prized possession. The cocky hero meanwhile, while not as wealthy, looks to have been raised in a family without money issues. Upper middle class, maybe. He seems to have no trouble paying for Cubs tickets, lunch at a fancy restaurant or all day parking. The operating words for him and for the world of all the characters in this article will be "privileged" and "entitled".
Ferris (Matthew Broderick) is a kid who never expects not to get his way, and so he does. His ability to manipulate those around him is what leads to the easy gratification that he associates with the good life. Nothing appears to put a dent in his smug attitude. We'll say that his sense of entitlement is boundless: an entitlement to the cool car, to the city of Chicago and the table at the posh restaurant, to taking over the parade float as well as the disruption of the lives of his friends.
Cameron (Alan Ruck) suffers from chronic depression and appears to be heavily medicated. But he's a super-rich white kid though, so let's ignore the idea that his basis for depression is rooted in anything worthy of empathy or sympathy. Let's ignore how harder-to-remedy existential problems tend to replace material problems as a cause of depression among people living further above the poverty line. And that Cameron, who had no control over how generously the genetic lottery awarded him, is apparently trapped with an abusive father in a cold and loveless household where there is no mother figure, and he's left to fend for himself emotionally.
Let's also ignore the fact that he's just a teenager (despite the fact that teenagers in these movies are almost never played by teenagers). He's not quite a fully formed adult. Moody, confused, with hormones that have begun to scream at him. He's a mess, with a source of pain that's very real, as his unraveling near the end suggests. So we'll have to ignore all that, because for our purposes not everyone's pain is equivalent. We’ll play up how he's a spoiled brat, and his humanity has already been corrupted by his privilege and that's that.
We'll mention that it's entitled the way Ferris Bueller uses the device of Direct Address to explain to the audience how to fake being sick in order to stay home from school. Some people need their education and don't have the luxury of missing a single day. It's a blessing to people who lack economic opportunities to be able to learn in a classroom, unlike how Ferris, who will never lack such opportunities, seems easily bored with a life that would be a dream to some people. How dare he, a mere teenager, not know to go about his life in a constant sense of guilt over his privilege from the moment he hit puberty. Never mind that his Fourth Wall-breaking addresses to the camera contain some of his most humble and clear observations - suggesting that he may be more honest with himself than he lets on. He’s entitled to the camera.
Also, let’s never mind that privileging the viewpoints of the underrepresented makes little difference if the filmmakers never bother to explore or share those viewpoints. Otherwise, the people you’ve cast in your movie are just placeholders for tropes, shoring up uninspired writing. Visibility is important and a filmmaker can make whatever they want but we need to ignore any reminders that you don’t empower those groups merely by subbing them in onscreen. You merely wind up with a different flavor of stale archetype; action movies with a new photogenic demographic of murderous combatant or romcoms with a more diverse sampling of actors playing romantic leads who do all the same dopey, creepy things. No, we’ll always remind ourselves that Ferris and his smugness are emblematic of a social problem. He takes his privileges for granted and thumbs his nose at authority figures who later in life will become his political allies who are no actual threat to him and that's what we're sticking with.
That he would have the nerve to bitch about getting a computer as a gift instead of a car when so many underprivileged people have neither. Of course, being proficient with a computer and being on it all the time was looked at as uncool and different in the 80’s whereas owning a car was the dream of the American teenager. Nowadays, he may prefer the computer. All that line about “being born under a lousy sign” may mean is that he wanted something that would aid his thirst for adventure rather than keep him indoors. We'll ignore that too. Let’s take everything that happens in this comedy absolutely literally.
Yeah, that’s it!
If you saw some punkass whiteboy commandeer a parade float and take center stage with the microphone, you'd wonder out loud just who let that little twerp get away with it. No one stops him because gosh, he's just so charming. A chorus of subjugated women dance behind him. We’ll state in this piece that his bottomless need for attention and validation are always driving his curiosity about what his sense of entitlement will let him get away with. We have to remember to say that if he were black, he'd have been arrested on the spot, before he’d even sung the first line of “Danke Schoen.”
It’ll really fire people up if we mention that the only non-white characters we see in the movie are playing Hollywood’s traditional subservient roles. The Hispanic and black car park attendants who take the hotrod out for a spin are drooling over the opportunity to luxuriate in the creature comforts of the wealthy. The only other black people we see in the movie are part of a dance group in the parade sequence - we'll say they're used here like “minstrels” for inflammatory effect - enacting a synchronized dance to "Twist and Shout," the song covered by The Beatles, whose big break into fame came from stealing songs from black culture and watering them down for white consumption.
Man, this stuff writes itself.
Director John Hughes did something new in American movies in focusing his bittersweet comedies on teenagers. Before that, American movies looked at teenagers as harbingers of an uncertain new age of dissolved hierarchies and discarded traditions. After the 60's, they were useful onscreen as victims of knife wielding maniacs in the products of filmmakers who'd come to resent their youth, their bodies and their new degree of sexual freedom. So it meant something that Hughes had repeatedly chosen to depict teenagers as complex figures with brains and deep feelings, caught in a precarious position between dependency and independence. We’ll ignore all that too.
Of course, we’re not the first to point out that Hughes’ filmmaking does contain some elements with unpleasant classist or sexist overtones. He was no radical wokester. But his best movies always argued passionately for paying closer attention to the complexity and humanity of people, about whose inherent decency he had strong and clear feelings. The story of Ferris Bueller was a bit of a departure for him. It’s less interested in exploring the emotional maturation of the characters than telling a wild yarn. If we wanted to lose potential clicks, we’d waste valuable space on cross-referencing this movie with Hughes’ other, more serious works.
Anyone would agree that Ferris’s girlfriend, Sloane Peterson (Mia Sara) is barely developed at all. It’s as if Hughes deliberately tried to see if he could get away with giving her as few lines and as little to do as possible. If there’s a romance in the movie, it’s between lifebros Ferris and Cameron, who bicker and push each other’s buttons like a couple. Playing up the lack of empathy or curiosity about women typical of male filmmakers would be perfect for this piece. Sloane is one of the more superfluous characters to be found in popular cinema. We’ll go with that since it’s always mentioned, even in uncontroversial, glowing reviews of the movie.
Next, we’ll need an unsung hero - someone we can say was secretly the real hero all along. It’ll help our argument, about which there can only be two sides: ours and all the wrong ones to be lumped in with the worst aspects of human oppression. The obvious choice would be the antagonist school Principal - Dean Ed Rooney. He’d stop this brat and “put one hell of a dent in his future.” Too bad he’s played by Jeffery Jones, who was arrested for possession of child pornography in 2002. No, we’ll need someone else. Ferris’s sister Jeannie would do. She’s clearly been driven crazy by her brother’s exoneration from consequence in this life because of his charm and his ability to talk his way into and out of anything - a privilege that would not be afforded a woman.
Yeah, that’ll work.
So Jeannie is actually the unsung hero of this story. Oh wait, but in the end she cops out and lies for her brother, adding herself to the list of people who cover up and make excuses for him, a turn ignited perhaps by her warming up to the drug addict in the police station played by real-life scoundrel, Charlie Sheen. When she’s awkwardly saying bye to him after they were necking in the station house as her mother is calling her from down the stairs, it’s the most charming moment in the movie - as if she’s learning the appeal of rebellion against authority through her hormones. Jennifer Grey absolutely glows in that scene. But she’s on the side of this entitled white male in the end. So she won’t work for this idea either.
Besides, Grey was in the car accident caused by Broderick in 1987 when his rented BMW was driving in the wrong lane in Northern Ireland and collided head on with a Volvo, killing a woman and her daughter. Broderick avoided a five year prison sentence but was charged instead with “careless driving,” which carried a fine of £100 or roughly $175. He’d been dating Grey on the sly following the shooting of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and we can use this as a pretty on-the-nose example of Life imitating Art - the charming rogue who literally gets away with murder. Meanwhile, someone from a less privileged background had to bear the burden of his actions.
Man, that’s good.
So long as we make no attempt to separate movie fiction from real life. Broderick grew up in a well-to-do bohemian family. His mother, Patricia, was a playwright, actor and painter. His father, James, was a highly esteemed stage actor who could afford to send him to a fancy private school. So it makes perfect sense to point to that in questioning his lack of culpability in the collision that he'd Ferris Bueller his way out of in real life and use that against this movie. I don’t know the details of the case. I’m just quoting the Wikipedia page for Matthew Broderick. I mean, that’s research. This article has to go up. We don’t have time to investigate further. It’s sure great for this takedown though.
Ok. We have enough elements in place for a good click-worthy, takedown piece. All it took was freeing ourselves from historical perspective and context, and ignoring some of the more subtle nuances of these moments in the movie by filtering each moment through our enlightened lens of contemporary sensibility. Where can we turn our attention next? What other omissions can we accuse of bigotry? What other well-noted observations about Hollywood’s prejudices can we “discover”? What other bad faith arguments can we stir up to beg the burning social issues of the day? What movie subject should we use to pin the next ethics medal on our digital selves? Is there anything toxic to be found in Stand By Me? Bill Murray’s rapey behavior in Ghostbusters? Lebowski?.......Lebowski?
I see a lot of retweets in our future.
We need to be prepared for any counterarguments that would inform us that the characters are, for a Hughes movie, pretty unreal and that Ferris may actually be meant to embody an idea. His entire day may just be a fantasy. It certainly plays like one. They’d say his Carpe Diem attitude speaks to something in all of us that yearns to play hooky from our jobs and our lives with reckless abandon. Mocking serious people and running afoul of restrictions and social customs. That rebellious teenager in us all that longs to be unaccountable and carefree, when it seemed like there was nothing we could screw up so badly that we couldn’t bounce right back.
We might be reminded that it makes no difference whether or not everyone on the planet likes Ferris Bueller or any other childhood “classic”. That Cultural Canons are invented, arbitrary constructions and that getting hung up on the surface details of the plot and its execution rather than on its implications and larger significance is a myopic way to read a film. What happens in the story and who or what everyone is may be less important than how the experience of the movie makes us feel (bang!). The truth of our emotional response. That’s a good point, and we need to be ready to refute that. It’ll just be necessary to mention how when some kids screw up, their circumstances don’t permit them second chances, denying the idealism of this nearly forty year-old movie, the product of a far less urgent era.
Above all, we must be sure not to approach writing on film as if it were an exploration. A process we, the writers, are figuring out with the reader. No, we are sure of the ideological position that informs our appraisal and we are telling the audience how it is because they don’t already know what we know. Otherwise, it’ll come off like a lack of confidence. Of course, it’s no secret that film history is, in fact, littered with unenlightened attitudes and practices about race, social class, gender, sexuality, religion, status, patriotism and privilege. And it’s also inextricably linked with the omission and marginalizing of numerous forms of underrepresented voices. Very few legit critics disagree about this. We just need to go further.
Instead, we’ll posit the piece as a cultural interrogation - an exercise in conveying our self-image. We’ll say that the deeply problematic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off “hasn’t aged well,” as part of our lesson in accountability and political enlightenment that maintains that calling entitlement entitled or privilege privileged is a profound civic virtue rather than a desperate way of processing our own high-tech listlessness and boredom.
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