October 7th, 2010
Galley Friend Mike Russell has been participating in a series of movie commentaries with Portland radio’s Cort and Fatboy. Last month they screened Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The commentary is well worth listening to, even without the movie in front of you.
Russell brings up a series of alternate readings of the movie which are highly entertaining. One is that the main triumvirate of Ferris, Cameron, and Sloan are a high school version of Star Trek’s id-ego-superego threesome: Kirk, Bones, Spock.
Another possibility: That Ferris is a creation of Cameron’s psyche, Fight Club style.
But my favorite of Russell’s propositions is that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off can actually be read as a kind of thriller, where a responsible, reasonable Cameron is lead through a series of harrowing adventures by a sociopathic “buddy” and his femme fatale girlfriend. As Russell explains, to a certain kind of super-straight-laced adolescent–you know the type, always worried about pleasing authority and staying inside the lines–this was a perfectly reasonable view of the film.
It kind of hits me where I live.
Scott October 8, 2010 at 8:28 am
Wait – that isn’t how everybody sees the movie? That is EXACTLY how I viewed it.