The Unexpected Heaviosity of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (2006)

It's satire - it's making fun of the protagonists as much as it's commenting on them. Ferris bueller doesn't strike me as satire in the same way.

That said, Ferris is using middle class objects (and using tricks to hijack upper-class objects) to have a good time.

Fight Club Tyler is rejecting middle and upper-class objects as fundamentally opposed to some poorly specified and wholly imagined idyllic life.

If Bob had joined Ferris for a Cubs game and brought a souvenir ball back to the house, he would have been kicked out of the cult.

Now that said, criticism leveled against regime du jour is merely the contextualized social barb (“consumerism”), with the substance of the intended strike aimed at the confining and defining social norms (which are present for any social regime whatsoever save pure anarchy). The process of destabilization necessary for revolution invariably entails undermining and devaluing foundational norms of the ancien regime.

As to the sanity of our hero, the reconstructed modern man, the message posses the question: did neuroses engender a ‘shattered social self’ or was the neuroses the side-effect of a misguided social condition?

Since each is a choice, you can ask yourself, "why did they choose it this way?" Or next level, "How do these choices contribute to the story and/or emotionally manipulate me as a viewer?"

The suggestions for classes/essays are great because you will see people's responses to these questions and also teach you a bit of the "language" of how these elements are commonly used to evoke certain effects. But the ultimate analysis is up to you and asking yourself questions about what you are watching is the way to get there.

I also find that watching a first time attempting NOT to look for these things and then watching again very closely is my preferred path. I just be the hoi paloi on the first pass, then put on my critic hat (if I think it's worth it).

Good luck!

It doesn't matter if you only end up with a few good ones, the point is to make a habit of asking questions in the first place.

Eventually you'll get bored with the shallow questions and start asking ones that begin to expose what your author is up to, like why write this story in particular?

If you notice an answer to one of your previous questions, write that down too. You're also developing the habit of looking for answers.

I learned this from my wife who is a highschool English teacher. I reread several books after picking up these habits from her and definitely got a lot more out of them the second time.

Or turn you off of movies completely, depending on whether you appreciate the tropes.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/FerrisBuellersDa...

I have to admit, I never read that deeply into Ferris Bueller. I thought the character was just kind of a charismatic bully and that he spent the movie pushing his own ideas of fun onto his introverted friend, ultimately at that friend's expense. Wildly different take-away than OP's, and neither of us are "correct".

Pick a movie that you have seen at least once, preferably recently, get the DVD for it, and watch it with the commentary enabled. In particularly good films, it can be a whole new way to see a movie. In particularly bad films, it can make the choices make sense. Not make them better. But at least make some kind of sense.

Speaking of bad movies, getting better at film analysis gave me a much better appreciation for them. To me, the rough edges and the tortured metaphors and the bad acting lay bare the bones of the movie. It makes it easier to see what people were trying to do when they made the film. They might have failed at it. But the general, ham-fisted lack of subtlety in the efforts makes it easier to pick the intentions out.

Unfortunately, Director Commentaries are victim of the streamification of modern film distribution. You can get some of the same sort of thing with Behind The Scenes featurettes that the streaming services provide alongside their big releases, but they aren't as direct, candid, or frequent as the Director Commentaries were on DVDs.

In as much as film appreciation courses and youtube critical videos can be interesting, or draw your attention to things you've missed, they're usually from an external interpretive lens. An example of where they can miss the point is Noam Baumbach's latest film 'White Noise' which is has been critically misunderstood [2]. Meanwhile all the filmmakers I know are in awe of it technically and structurally.

1 - http://kinokabaret.org/

2 - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/white_noise_2022

What is a good book? If it's older than 30 years and still talked about, it'll probably be worth a read. The same goes for other forms of media. Once you have developed good taste, you'll be able to find good art among contemporary stuff.

Basically, you have to grow as a human being, learn about the human condition, have lived through painful, difficult experiences yourself and fully experience them instead of pushing them away, and maybe seek help with these things from more mature people.

Then you'll probably come to this kind of interpretations.

But on some not so conscious level you will understand many of those things intuitively, without being able to put your finger on any single one. Because that's how art works. The artist will do most of the hard stuff for you.

Don’t go “meta” trying to read director intent etc.

Instead watch a lot of movies beyond your normal set. Start acquiring a taste for films with deeper character and emotional complexity.

Do this in life with your experiences and relationships.

What will happen is you’ll be deeply moved by something you relate to in a film. And that will drive you to ask how’d they do that.

If you don’t feel anything profound when Ferris holds back Cameron in that scene, any kind of meta-analysis is going to have an opposite effect to your overall goal.

Be warned, it is a super power those watching movies with you may regret.

When characters have emotional arcs and growth, you see a little more depth and humanity. The characters might have secret intentions or desires, unresolved internal conflicts, and often these are put in opposition with other characters. Sometimes the characters will say and do things that don't reflect how they feel. Dramas and romcoms tend to have this.

Sometimes pieces of the story contextualize or contrast against what a character is experiencing. You can play these themes in unison or dissonance as an instrument. It tends to shine when it's left unsaid, in the subtext. These stories tend to have a "meaning" that the author or director had in mind. Look for films with a lot of critical awards or accolades to find good examples.

The more a work aspires to be art, the more analogies are loaded in. You're meant to subconsciously feel a certain way or unpack that meaning with some thought or consideration.

Information can be conveyed in so many ways. Camera direction, lighting, tone, composition, pacing, music, editing, set and props, unspoken intentions, unpredicted actions, and more. And when the director embraces "show, don't tell", all of this can add up to a beautifully layered composition that transcends what the characters actually say and do.

Two things:

1. Keep a background process running for things that strike you as "interesting". In my mind, "interesting" means "improved compression speed/ability", as explained more here: https://josh.works/driven-by-compression-progress-novelty-hu... 2. Before watching a movie/tv show or reading a book, find the entry for it on Wikipedia, and read it. Often you'll find ways that the work serves as a mirror for ourselves, or some aspect of society. It'll be said explicitly or implicitly.

That's the foundation I build the rest of my "reading deeply" skillset around. If this helps, cheers! Good luck! I think this is a domain worth putting "energy points" into!

May I suggest starting with Ghostbusters: A Movie About Nothing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OB3279Vt8Y

I think it also helps to just read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies. Then by contrast you'll start to notice things that are special and/or meaningful in certain works. You could try reading reviews of movies you've watched and those can serve as a kind of guide to the interesting and important features/aspects of a movie...

In any case, try to just enjoy the watching and reading.

One of my friends insists that "The Lion King" is a metaphor that white people should rule over non-white people. He points out that Scar's underlyings are all dark and all have "stereotype of inner city low income accents". Whey they get in charge the jungle goes to shit. It takes the lighter colored, "proper" accented to rule and bring the land back to prosperous.

I don't agree with that interpretation but it's hard to un-see

Many movies and books don't have a terribly deep meaning, and that's okay. I watched John Wick for the first time a week or so ago, and it was shallow but good fun.

I find that superb movies, books or shows leave me thinking about them long after the end credits or the final page (I stopped thinking about John Wick immediately when it was over). The best stories leave the interpretation up to you, the audience, and they also tend to give you more insight on repeat viewings or readings. Once the factual matter in the pages is known, it might be easier to see the symbolism (if it exists).

Other things you could try (and I'm no expert, just armchair etc) is to watch multiple films from the same director in a row, try to see patterns and commonalities. Might be better to avoid the more prolific ones, since their repertoire will be very large. But e.g. Darren Arnokofsky's films would be good for that, there's... less than ten, lol. But the films are more low-key than e.g. Spielberg or Nolan, more about people and filmmaking and the like than big action shots or whatnot.

For example, I really liked The Fountain, but that's a controversial film because there's a nearly 50/50 split between people who love it vs those who hate it.

One I'd consider, though I regrettably don't have a convenient reference (and it really ought to be for something you've seen), is finding the director/author/composer of some work you like speaking directly about what they meant to put into the piece.

There's the whole "death of the author" concept (that it doesn't matter what they put into it, it just matters what you see), but I think sometimes that gets taken too far, if not waaaaaay too far, because if you squint hard enough, you can read anything into anything. But if you can do that, there is no point to the reading. There's a "mirror reflecting you back to yourself", and then there's just "yourself", squinting so hard that it ceases to matter what you are squinting at. I am not a big fan of this myself.

But the authors really are putting additional things into their works, and it can help to hear that from them directly.

Also, now that I think about it, the Easy Mode for this sort of thing may be sci-fi television, where the superficial distance from the viewer's life and issues lets them encode things more directly and, well, frankly, at times clumsily than a more direct handling might be able to (because everyone's psychological defenses would raise). You could start with something like the Star Trek Original Series episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708435/ Being a bit removed from your cultural milieu may also help. I dunno if I'd call this one "clumsy" but it sure is blatent. You ought to be able to work out the subtext.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun

That said, sometimes people are fond of over examination and place more meaning into something than the director intended. Like music, often lyricists will not disclose the meaning of a song because people will give it their own meaning and may diverge significantly from the lyricists intent.

For one example of a director who candidly will admit to not knowingly adding specific meaning to a scene, see David Lynch. He'll say, I don't know, it felt right, or words to that effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

You can also try dating an art student and be around while they do their assigned work. I picked up a lot this way.

Learning to look deeper is always worth it. With film it's a little easier because so many good video essays are out there. You don't have to make a few bad chairs like with woodworking.

I still have a hard time getting it from books, but I think I’m getting better.

I'm sure there's some element of in-born talent involved, as with almost anything, but nobody's purely a natural at it. It's kinda like people who can tell you all kinds of stuff about some Beethoven piece that you, a non-classical-music fan with little or no knowledge of musical history or theory, didn't notice—they don't come out of the womb being able to do that, they trained and they spent a lot of time not just listening to music, but thoughtfully listening to music, to get to the point that they seem to be able to do such analysis effortlessly, and even on a first listen. Maybe they had some natural talent, too, but it's largely a trained skill.

> I wouldn't even know how to begin to learn to do this.

Read, watch, and listen to criticism. Maybe try Every Frame a Painting on Youtube (sadly not making any more videos, but the existing ones are excellent). It covers, especially, visual storytelling. They're nice and short and fairly content-dense. Pick some for movies or directors you're familiar with, first, I'd suggest.

If you can handle the affected narrator-character, some little meta-narrative horror-tinged digressions, and a longer-form work, try Red Letter Media's reviews of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. It's basically hours and hours of someone asking the sorts of questions one asks to understand a narrative (and mostly coming up with unsatisfactory answers, because the scripts of those movies are bad). This especially covers story structure, suspension of disbelief, and character motivation.

There are tons of other Youtubers doing this kind of thing, many of them good at it, and others here have already suggested some of them.

Basically, seek out and read or watch analyses of films by people who already at least kinda know what they're talking about. It'll help you get a sense of how to approach media, and to tell when you're headed down a productive path versus when you're looking for something where there's not much to find. Then, watch movies and try to apply what you've learned.

The main habit to get into is asking questions. Why is this character included? Why is this scene included? Why is this scene so red? Why is the camera tilted in this shot? Why is the camera moving in this shot? What does this sequences of shots make me feel and how does it achieve that effect? Is there an overall mood to this piece (or scene) and what is it? How does it convey that? Are there elements in common across this film? Do those constitute or contribute to some kind of message or theme(s), and if so, what are they?

Past that, you might start to become aware of things like rising and falling tension at various levels—a scene, an act, the entire work. Those often play into the answers to the why questions.

Beware, when you get good at this and it becomes second-nature so it's not even something you can really turn off, a lot of minor reveals (that guy was a bad guy all along!) become so obvious that you figure them out tens of minutes before most viewers—sometimes within seconds of the introduction of the element you figure out :-)

Also, you may find bad or lazily-made movies worse than you did before, largely because they tend not to have much to say, and have lots of missed opportunities for better use of their medium, which can be grating when you learn to spot those—but you might, oddly enough, find very bad movies to be better! Marveling at how much they get wrong, and how very wrong they get it, can become its own kind of fun.

Much of this (except the stuff that's very tied, specifically, to cinematography) carries over to other media, like books and even (to some extent) video games, so you can practice a lot of the same skills there.

But it is funny to remind yourself to see The Narrator as a darker, adult, worn down, insomniac Cameron throughout Fight Club. And that Ferris was his teen split personality, but his adult one is much darker.

It helps that Edward Norton kinda looks like a believable older Alan Ruck and in that universe, he would probably be the right age.

I also find it works best to view FBDO thinking Cameron will become The Narrator than the other way around (perhaps because FC is such an intense movie). Just picture him saying "You are not your father's 1961 red California Spyder Ferrari"...

In any case, any excuse will do to a double feature FBDO/FC.

Sure, but:

That's why Fight Club relates to way more people and persists in a much more significant way.

That doesn’t logically follow.

(And besides that, I disagree! Both have their fans. I’d guess yourself are more familiar with Fight Club and you’re projecting from that.)

> he understands the very real crisis Cameron is facing and takes it as his role to push his friend into emotional danger.

I would disagree with this. I think Ferris didn't really know what to do or what he was doing. He was like the little drummer boy -- he only had one thing to offer (his joie de vivre), and tried to do so no matter how inadequate or inappropriate it might be.

In the end nothing Ferris actually did made a difference. It was simply the fact that he reached out with compassion and care that produced the circumstances that led to Cameron's emotional crisis, and empowered him get through it to a catharsis.

The light read is that we are not merely our cliques and labels.

Tangential, but I think part of the genius of the more recent Sex Education (Netflix) is that the setting is definitely British (accents, landscape) and contemporary (smartphones, fashions) and yet brilliantly evokes a British kid's fantasies of what a High School should be like after watching too many 80s American movies.

Oh wait - also his “swing batter batter” at the ball game, and that incredible “bloop” sonar sound he does by flicking his cheek.

Amazing voice talent.

(Having said that… I still just… can’t believe he left spacedock without a tractor beam. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111280/characters/nm0000638)

If Cameron, too, isn't real, there is no movie: a dream requires a dreamer. The whole movie, i.e. Cameron and his dream is, of course, John Hughes's dream, and then the audience's.

  If we shadows have offended,
  Think but this, and all is mended—
  That you have but slumbered here
  While these visions did appear.

https://www.imcdb.org/v002846.html

https://bringatrailer.com/2018/04/01/cameron-frye-edition-19...

https://medium.com/@raymondarsenault/the-cars-of-ferris-buel...

I don't know if this is global, but at least in Uruguay in the 80s (and perhaps earlier too) there was a saying that an Alfa made you happy twice: when you bought it, and when you sold it.

There's a scene where he's rifling through his parents closet trying to find the savings bonds they've been saving for him for college, so he can fund his adventure for the day. He calls his dad and manipulates his concern for his health into into revealing where the bonds are being kept.

Then followed by a scene with the three of them at the bank trying to cash the bonds, and a little old lady teller - Ferris introduces Sloan as Madonna and Cameron as ZZ top. Just struck me as them making fun of an old lady for no good reason. At least the maitre'd deserved the humiliation.

I remember a scene in a strip club as well. I'm sure many of these scenes were shot.

If these scenes had been included I would have been a lot harder to like Ferris as a character. Knowing what to cut is just as important as knowing what to keep. I think they did a decent job in the final film of taking Ferris right up to that "disrespectful" line, but never letting him cross it.

I liked Ferris because his winning at life was due to him always being on the right side of things, not because he was a dick. He put Cameron first as a person above the material damage to the car, etc. It just felt like he had life priorities in order... like that was the point of it. Break rules when doing so puts you on the right side of things. Wasn't that the lesson he was trying to teach Cameron?

[1] https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/ferris_bueller_shooting....

FWIW I agree, I thought the movie was boring when it came out. After all there were hundreds of other cooler movies around that time. Same with the breakfast club. As an adult rewatching them I enjoyed them more.