I never knew that so many people actually wanted to be like Ferris in a wish-fantasy way. I’ve always though of him as a detestable character, but I liked the movie regardless. It demonstrates how well-liked sociopaths can be. It would have ruined it for me if he got caught. To quote the Cracked article:
To take this all too seriously, Bueller is the antagonist in the movie.
His friend Cameron and sister Jeanie are the protagonists, and they both change for the better. They become better people for Ferris’ rascally behavior.
So, yes, I recognize he’s not a morally good person. But I don’t want to bludgeon him - just to live vicariously through him.
Who cares what message it sends? It’s a movie. Secondly, I can’t imagine having a lower threshold for “evil.”
This is strange. I just got into an argument the other day about someone thinking that Superman being a boyscout being a bad thing. I pointed out my very real opinion that people who don’t like genuinely good people generally aren’t good people themselves.
Yet I can’t see any reason a good person can’t like Ferris, despite spelling out exactly how bad the stuff he did is. No matter what, I still get the idea from him that he is good hearted, and wants to help Cameron. I still can’t shake the idea that the principal is unfair in his large pursuit of Ferris. Even though he never gets his comeuppance, I still think of Ferris as being like Zack Morris: a troublemaker, but a decent person.
So I guess it’s all in the presentation. I can’t find fault with someone liking the bad guy that is presented as not being a bad guy, despite him clearly having all the behavior traits of a true asshole.
Now you are admiring the ideas of the board idiot. That idea has been growing on me for about 10 years now.
[quote=“garygnu, post:16, topic:610844”]
There’s always the theory that either the events of the movie, or even Ferris himself, are figments of Cameron’s imagination…/QUOTE]
But the first rule of “Ferris Club” is…
In a world much like ours where I was recently reading a historical account of armed soldiers slaughtering cowering women and children, to call Ferris evil tells me you need your evil meter checked out.
I like the movie, but yeah, Ferris was a dick. I wanted to smack the bejesus out of him when he stole the car.
What was really creepy is when he pretended to be Sloan’s dad when he picked her up…and then just made out with her in front of the principal. WTF was up with that?
Although Ed Rooney was creepy as fuck. What a fucking stalker. Yeah, Ferris WAS guilty, but when you’re the principal, you don’t ditch school just to catch one single student. He was just…well, creepy. (And the fact that Jeffrey Jones is a pedophile doesn’t help)
I also don’t see how Jeannie got taken in for a false police report. Wouldn’t she just describe to the police the intruder?
It was an entertaining movie, but Ferris was a tool. I hope Cameron lied and told his dad that Ferris wrecked the car.
I hope she also told Ferris how much that little shit owed her. I’d totally blackmail the fuck out of him for the rest of the year.
He was fucking with his mind man, I think what made it funny instead of creepy is that Ferris is clearly too young to be her father.
He who ran, I guess, with the most-appalling campaign wins.
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What exactly is it he does that’s even close to ‘evil’? Changing his absences? It’s his friends that start up ‘save Ferris,’ not him. He cuts school and persuades his friend to come and have fun. He pretends to be someone else to get into a posh restaurant. They go to an art gallery while cutting school and he rides in a parade, getting everyone to sing along and have fun. The sports car getting broken is an accident and Ferris offers to take the blame.
His sister loathes him, but we’re never show him actually doing anything bad to her.
So where’s the evil? Where’s the sociopathy? Lying to get out of school and into a posh restaurant is not exactly sociopathy.
I think I watched a different movie than most people here. Ferris was all about helping people overcome their mental or emotional stumbling blocks. He had some great advice to give too:
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
“I do have a test today. That wasn’t bullshit. It’s on European socialism. I mean, really, what’s the point? I’m not European. I don’t plan on being European. So who gives a crap if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists. It still wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car. Not that I condone fascism, or any “ism” for that matter. “Isms” in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an “ism”, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.” Good point there. After all, he was the Walrus. I could be the Walrus. I’d still have to bum rides off of people.”
“If anybody needs a day off it’s Cameron. He’s got a lotta things to sort out before he graduates. He can’t be wound up this tight and go to college. His roommate’ll kill him. Pardon my French, but Cameron is so uptight, if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in 2 weeks, you’d have a diamond.”
And that art gallery montage is one of the sweetest in any movie ever.
He wasn’t principal; he was dean of students.
So what if he ditched. You could ditch.
I also love the idea that Ferris is a figment of Cameron’s imagination.
Here’s the thing for me, though. If the movie is about the “ultimate triumph of evil over reason and decency,” it would be exactly that even in Ferris were a morally upstanding person. No one in the movie, really, is exactly a paragon of virtue. Cameron is a narcissistic hypochondriac, Rooney and Ferris’s sister thirst for vengeance, and both Ferris’s and Cameron’s parents are clueless idiots. Ferris getting caught by these people would not restore peace and justice to the galaxy. It would just be another sort of “evil” (I agree that this is hyperbole here) that wins. The characters each have good traits that get taken too far. No one can really blame Ferris for wanting to avoid a test on European socialism. No one can blame the sister and Rooney for wanting her Ferris to get caught. No one can blame Ferris’s parents for neglecting their children. (Cameron’s, I admit, are more blamable.) But what happens is that everyone goes too far, in some sense, that they stop thinking, and it’s from there that all goes awry.
And, just a couple days later, Randy Milholland posts this Something*Positive…
Spooky.
It was a fake Ferrari, but even so. He was a loathesome human being.
- he lies to his parents
- he manipulates his friends into skipping school
- he hacks into the school computer to falisfy records
- he steals a car
- lies to the restaurant. I can’t remember, does he pay for that expensive meal?
I haven’t seen the movie in probably 20 years so I don’t remember all the other stuff he did. I felt bad for his sister. He was such an asshole.
He persuades one friend to skip school - though, actually that friend wasn’t going to go in to school anyway, so he was persuading him away from lying by the pool depressed. His GF seems quite happy to skip school.
The car isn’t exactly stolen.
Hacking into school records to change his attendance is something lots of us wish we could do; it’s a bit bad, I guess, but hardly arseholish and definitely not ‘sociopathic.’
‘Lying to a restaurant?’ He lied to get in; there’s no reason he wouldn’t have had to pay. I mean, WTF? That makes him an arsehole? I bet you’ve done way, way worse things than that.
And wow. A teenager lying to his parents. Evil.
I guess I watch movies the wrong way - at least comedies. I don’t look for symbolism or motivations or, frankly, anything below the surface. Everything at face value. And I thought this was a fun movie, even with the responsible adult inside me imagining how long I’d ground my kid for pulling such crap. It was a movie. It was fiction. It was silly, and for me, it was fun.
And I’d never considered that it was all in Cameron’s head - that may affect the way I see it if I watch it again.
Oh, and I like Jennifer Grey better without the nose job.