Going to watch The David Lightman Chronicles this weekend, my favorite unintentional trilogy. It’s a fascinating psychological examination of a brilliant man who achieved a great thing under stress as a teen, and then slowly devolved psychologically into the most banal of mediocrities.
We first meet David in 1983’s WarGames where David, a cute but nebbish computer nerd with a passion for hacking, discovers a fault in the latest NORAD innovation - a launch-computer named WAPR. A completely normal kid at the beginning of the movie, by the end of it, he is a wreck - emotionally and, not surprisingly, from a national security standpoint.
The stress of saving the world off his shoulders caused a near-psychotic break. The US government, seeing the opportunity, put David into Deep Witness Protection (it’s so deep you’re just hearing about it now, that’s how deep this is), giving him new parents, a new family, an entirely new life, one which matched the new personality of
Ferris Bueller. Still a genius computer hacker, David has completely re-oriented his life to fucking with as many people as he can while getting away with it, his newfound nihilism matching surprisingly well with a “this shit may end any time” knowledge. Wildly successful at this, his greatest con was convincing the nation’s 3rd largest city to wish him well while simultaneously starring as the lead singer in a city parade. Beloved by the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads, all of them thought David… I mean, Ferris… to be a righteous dude.
For societal acceptance, it was the highlight of his life. His college years… not so much. Going to Northwestern, he found himself to be just one smart kid among many. “Oh, you hacked WAPR? Congrats, I hacked IBM and the CIA. How do you think they found out about Aldrich Ames?” This is where things started to really go awry for this brilliant person: as he could not get over the acceptance he felt in high school.
So he went back.
Still paying the debt they owed David, the US Government creates an entire new identity for Ferris - Jim McCalister. Jim is a wunderkind at teaching, getting TOTY honors multiple times, being beloved by his students, helping them through their personal crisis’s - teaching helped make David complete.
But it didn’t erase all his demons, as the person of Tracy Flick - who a resentful David/Ferris/Jim saw as the embodiment of the person HE was to be if it weren’t for the fucking WAPR thing - proved to be his undoing.
The final film, Election, goes into the downfall of David. At the end, he is just a husk of what he could have been, what WAPR… and the US Government (and Sloane, but that’s another movie)… has left him with:
Nothing. Just a man who drives a Vespa.