MY MOVIE SHELF: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 269  Days to go: 263

Movie #108: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

It seems unbelievable that I was only eleven when Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out, because it feels like it informed my entire adolescence. Then again, I had a sleepover birthday party one year (it must have been my twelfth), and we’d rented the movie from our local Mom & Pop video rental place (pretty sure this was before Blockbuster existed in my neck of the woods). All of us cracked up at the scene when the florist drops off a bouquet for Ferris with Mr. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) on Ferris’s front porch and departs with a friendly “shave and a haircut” horn honk, only to receive Rooney’s “two bits” middle finger, but my mother had her back turned so when we laughed she asked what happened. We were all frozen, except for this one girl who would of course go on to be super popular and eventually Prom Queen and definitely not friends with me anymore once we hit junior high. She just repeated the gesture for my mom like it was no big deal. I would never been that afraid and impressed in front of my mother in my later years (and like I said, that girl barely said two words to me the entire six years of school following that one — except the one time we both had detention and she was too busy being popular and hilarious on the bus home to get off at her stop, so she got off at mine and hung out with me in my room ’til her mom picked her up, all the while wondering what position, exactly, Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” was referencing), so it must’ve been when I was eleven that I first saw the film. Hell, maybe that’s why it informed my entire adolescence — at the nascent point of my transition from child to young adult, I was given a look at someone who was everything I ever could hope to be.

Between the ages of eleven and eighteen, there was no one in the world I held in higher esteem than Ferris Bueller. I honestly think that’s the truth. He got away with everything. He had all the friends in the world, a secure and loving family, a perfect girlfriend and a charmed life. He had no worries. He’s an all-around great guy. I truly believed there was nothing Ferris Bueller couldn’t do, and I wanted more than anything to be like him.

I never was as elaborate in my fake illnesses as Ferris (Matthew Broderick) was. I never could fake a fever anyway and my parents didn’t give a hoot about my clammy hands, so there was no point in licking my palms. But I did — especially by my senior year — come up with numerous and varied ways of getting out of class. My best friend and I were masters at it, and even when we didn’t cut out entirely, we still managed to take a super long lunch every day. We had that place wired. Of course there was never a dead grandmother, and we didn’t have our own phone lines so as to redirect the calls of school administrators, but we knew enough tricks to get away with a lot. I mean, really a lot. I’m pretty sure one of my friends is still angry with me for handing in a paper for ninth grade honors English over a week late with the flimsiest of excuses imaginable and still eking out a better grade than she got turning the thing in on time.

The problem is, however, that my work ethic was always more eagerly applied to planning and doing fun things than to actual, you know, work. I despised actually applying myself and hated and resented the entire bullshit experience of high school, so I consistently managed to do just enough. Just enough to get by, just enough to get grades that would keep my parents off my back and not make me feel like a dummy, just enough to skate through. I remember once hearing about a possible show or movie being developed about Ferris’s adulthood and I couldn’t help but think he’d maybe be in the position I found myself — not doing anything spectacular really, but doing just enough to pay the bills and have nice things and go on great vacations every once in a while. After all, a job is a job, but a  vacation is quality time. Then tonight I remembered that Ferris lives under some sort of lucky star, so he’s probably more like the guy who was plucked from obscurity on Twitter and given a job writing for Late Night with Seth Meyers. Actually, that guy is even from Illinois. Maybe he IS Ferris Bueller!

In addition to Ferris, I also desperately wanted to be Sloane (Mia Sara). She was beautiful and together and had an amazing boyfriend who loved and wanted to marry her. She had a great body and her own phone line and she was totally chill and “not embarrassed” when Cameron (Alan Ruck) saw her change out of her clothes to go swimming. In all my life, I have never met a teenage girl so comfortable with herself, and yet Ferris Bueller’s Day Off made me really think they existed. In truth, I was probably a lot more like Jeanie (Jennifer Grey), angry and snotty with everyone, thinking I was always getting shafted when really that’s not the case at all. I mean, if you notice, Jeanie spends no more time in class that day than Sloane does. So what’s she so pissed about? (“What a little asshole,” indeed, Grace (Edie McClurg), amirite?) But at the same time I was wearing my sarcasm like a defense shield à la Jeanie, I was also really internalizing the wisdom of Charlie Sheen’s drugged out guy (such a stretch for him): “Worry about yourself, not what your brother does.” This can be a hard lesson to learn, and I didn’t have it mastered back then at all, but as I grew older I really developed more of a “live and let live” philosophy — as long as no one’s getting hurt, it’s really none of my business how someone else chooses to live his or her life. I believe that intensely, and I try to teach my kids that you can’t control what other people do, but you can always take care of yourself and make sure you’re on the right path for you. In its own small way, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off planted that seed in me.

I loved every line of the movie (it might be the most well-produced film of John Hughes’s oeuvre), and still can recite the whole thing to this day, but it seeped into my DNA quite a bit as well. However, it wasn’t until years after I first saw it that I realized how important Cameron’s story line was as well. Cameron is the real focus of Ferris’s adventure — he states it clearly, though it can be easy to miss. He doesn’t think Cameron is a very happy guy, and he wants to bring him some happiness. He does more than that, though, he brings him strength. The Cameron that stands tall at the end of the movie, looking at the wreck of his father’s prized car, you know with certainty that whatever happens, he’s going to be okay. For as much as I got away with at school, there were many ways at home that I was not okay. It took me until I was about 21 to get the kind of strength Cameron achieves here, and I find that watching the movie now I empathize and connect much more with him than with anyone else. It’s astounding to me that throughout maybe a hundred viewings, maybe more, it never occurred to me that Cameron was the heart of the film, but he so clearly is. It makes me love the movie even more.

I also have to give a lot of credit to Ben Stein as the history teacher, because otherwise I would’ve never known what “voodoo economics” was. (Everything I know, I learned from a movie.)

“Anyone? Anyone?”

MY MOVIE SHELF: Dirty Dancing

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 289  Days to go: 278

Movie #88: Dirty Dancing

Dirty Dancing is classified as a romance, a romantic drama, a chick flick. What it really is, is a coming of age story for women. The coming of age story is a time-honored tradition that is revered around the world in many of its forms — but almost exclusively with regard to the coming of age of men. That is not to say there aren’t coming of age stories about women — there are many — but they are frequently downplayed as something niche, something not palatable for large audiences, as if more than half the population wouldn’t be predisposed to relate to them. Still, the term “chick flick” is almost always said with a tone of derision, of snide condescension. Even in Sleepless in Seattle — a movie I love — when Rita Wilson’s character explains the plot of An Affair to Remember and Tom Hanks’s and Victor Garber’s characters start crying about the plot of The Dirty Dozen — a scene I love — the hilarity comes from the idea of chick flicks being silly emotional sobfests.

Yes, there is romance in Dirty Dancing, but there is romance in almost all coming of age stories, because love is something that grows within us as we come of age, as well as something that brings about that change. Love matures us and matures because of us. The evolution and discovery of romantic feelings for someone is a hallmark of growing up.

The opening lines of Dirty Dancing introduce this as a coming of age film right away when Baby (Jennifer Grey) says in voiceover: “That was the summer of 1963 – when everybody called me Baby, and it didn’t occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn’t wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I’d never find a guy as great as my dad. That was the summer we went to Kellerman’s.” It’s a story of an innocent — they literally call her Baby — on the verge of a great awakening, in her personal life and in the world at large.

Baby is incredibly idealistic at the start of the film, and also incredibly privileged but almost too naive to realize it. She really sees no issue with her helping with the luggage or wandering into all areas of the resort or consorting with the lower-class dance staff. (“I carried a watermelon??”) She sees people for who they are — including the reprehensible Robbie Gould (Max Cantor) the rest of her family is so impressed by just because he goes to Yale and flatters Baby’s sister Lisa (Jane Brucker). The coming of age, then, is a cruel introduction to the fact that some people are given the benefit of the doubt and others are forever under suspicion — how she can prove Johnny’s (Patrick Swayze)innocence by revealing her relationship with him, but he can still be punished because he had the audacity to be with a girl above his social class — to step out-of-bounds. And no matter that she came to him, he’s clearly seen as having taken advantage of her, and she is seen as having been sullied somehow, of having been taken advantage of.

That inequality registered strongly with me. When Baby confronts her father (Jerry Orbach, who I still miss every day as Lennie Briscoe on Law & Order) about the double standard he raised her with — “You told me everyone was alike and deserved a fair break, but you meant everyone who was like you. You told you wanted me to change the world, to make it better, but you meant by becoming a lawyer or an economist and marrying someone from Harvard” — it really stuck with me that there are all sorts of injustices out there, and they can’t be fixed by lip service. They have to be addressed by actually doing things differently, by walking the walk. And I love that while Baby has stood up for everything she’s believed in in this movie — has defended Johnny and has looked out for everyone else — that when she’s disillusioned by the outcome, he is the one who fights for her, because if nothing else, she has made a difference in his life and she has taught him change is possible.

I’ve seen Dirty Dancing more times than I could ever count — I know every inflection and every goofy sound Jennifer Grey makes through the entire thing (there are lots of them) — but honestly the things I love the most are so tiny I wonder if anyone else has noticed them. In the family’s first merengue lesson, for example, Penny (Cynthia Rhodes) has the men join her in a round robin and the ladies to do the same in an inner circle (“Come on, ladies, God wouldn’t have given you maracas if he didn’t want you to shaaaake ‘eemmmm.”) and when she says stop, the ladies will find the “man of their dreams.” When they stop, Baby is faced with her father, but is cut off by Penny, who takes his hand instead, leaving Baby to dance with an apparently addled little old lady we’ll find out later is Mrs. Schumacher — the very woman whose subversive behavior leads to the climactic ending that exposes Baby’s relationship with Johnny. Or when Johnny and Baby come back from the performance at the Sheldrake (and Baby has conveniently changed into a pretty, lacy bra from the boring Cross-Your-Heart deal she had on earlier that day when trying on the dress with Penny’s help) and Johnny checks her out in his rearview mirror as she changes — or flat-out turns around — like a half-dozen times (I’ve counted). Or how Max (Jack Weston) is completely blind to the cougar sexpot tendencies of Mrs. Vivian Pressman (Miranda Garrison). Or how Neil (Lonny Price) is such an oblivious, awful, arrogant snob, literally all the time. It’s really funny.

The movie is also great because of the dancing and the perfectly integrated soundtrack and because it features the great Kelly Bishop (of Gilmore Girls and Bunheads) as Baby’s mom, though it’s unfortunate she doesn’t have more to do than fail at golfing and saying “I think she gets this from me,” when Baby and Johnny dance their final dance.

Dirty Dancing resonated with a lot of women when it came out — I remember hearing about a club of people who had all seen it more than a hundred times — not just for the romance but for the story of women coming into their own, of finding their way. A friend once said that “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” was such a strong statement for teenagers — and her especially — at that time, is because at that age it always feels like someone is putting you in a corner, especially as a young woman always being silenced by experience and circumstance. She was exactly right, of course. There have been many times when I was younger, and even some as I’ve grown, when I felt put in a corner, when I felt my voice silenced. I think most women can relate to that feeling, which makes Dirty Dancing a hugely significant movie, not just a chick flick.