Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
John Hughes, 1986
This is not part of the 20th century series. I watched it because Ellie cited it as an example of a story in which it is a supporting character (in this case, Cameron) who goes through transformative personal growth, while the protagonist remains static: “Ferris Bueller is just a Manic Pixie Dream Boy,” she argued. To which I had to confess that I had only seen the movie once, before Ellie was even born, and remembered virtually nothing about it. Thus did the Millennial end up acquainting the Gen‑Xer with the cinema of the 1980s.
I’ve seen plenty of movies and TV shows in which the creators try to engineer things so that we’re rooting for the protagonists to pull off some sort of deceptive scheme, and in which that actually works, at least for me—i.e., in which I do find myself hoping that the scheme is successful. But for some reason Ferris Bueller stuck in my craw. Maybe it has to do with our historical moment. “He can’t keep getting away with it!” Jesse Pinkman furiously sobbed on Breaking Bad, but there is not enough space on this digital page to list all the “getting away with it” we’ve seen over the past five years. We can start with Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans stealing a Supreme Court seat, and then move to Donald Trump’s flurry of pardons last night for corrupt politicians (Duke Cunningham, Kwame Kilpatrick, Rick Renzi, more) and political figures (Steve Bannon, Elliott Broidy, Robin Hayes, more), joining previous pardons for corrupt politicians (Rod Blagojevich, Chris Collins, Duncan Hunter, Steve Stockman, many more) and political figures (Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D’Souza, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, many more). In between, we saw countless scandals come and go without denting Trump’s approval rating—I say “countless”, but as of this writing it looks like McSweeney’s has counted 1053, and if you count each lie as a mini-scandal, the Washington Post has counted 30,573. Trump has dodged over two dozen claims of sexual assault. He’s occasionally found himself on the hook for financial crimes, such as running the fraudulent “Trump University”, but has never had to face any penalty more severe than dashing off a check drawing upon fraudulently obtained funds. The Robert Mueller investigation into obstruction of justice and conspiracy with an enemy power lasted two years, laid out a roadmap to impeachment, and came to nothing, shut down after Trump replaced the attorney general. Trump’s subsequent impeachment for extortion of a foreign government to subvert the upcoming election also came to nothing, shut down by McConnell without a real trial. Yes, today Trump is out of office after a single term, and a post-presidency impeachment for inciting an insurrection is currently ongoing, but “not being president” is not much of a penalty—it’s a fate currently being suffered by everyone other than Joe Biden. We’ll see whether having lost his immunity from prosecution leads to anything, but it has been pointed out that, even if it does, for a man who embarked on a career as a swindler in his 20s to make it into his mid-70s without spending a minute in jail demonstrates that crime does in fact pay. So watching Ferris Bueller hack his school’s attendance database (shades of the Russian hack of the DNC), impersonate people on the phone (shades of John Barron), inspire a fake charity (shades of the Trump Foundation), etc., etc., and end up facing no consequences for any of it, wasn’t something I was in the mood for. I’ve had enough of celebrations of impunity.
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