Were you a Ferris or a Lucas? Did you have it all figured out in high school, like the eponymous trickster from 40 summers ago? Could you hoodwink your parents, fool your school, and charm (or manipulate) your friends so you could live a carefree, adventurous life? Or were you more like the title character from Lucas, the less-remembered high school movie, also set in the Chicago suburbs, released just a few months earlier: a peculiar kid with weird pastimes, the target of bullies, the lovelorn loser stuck in the friendzone?
You remember Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: Matthew Broderick’s charming character takes you into his confidence—breaking the fourth wall by speaking directly to the audience—as he fakes an illness so he can play hooky from school. A master of slacking off, he uses a keyboard to pretend to hack up a lung and a computer to hack into the school’s computer network; he records himself snoring and puts a dummy in his bed to fool his mother when she checks on him. But he’s not skipping just to sit around the house. He conscripts his reluctant and depressed best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) to join his antics, and together they use exceptional telephone skills to trick Dean of Students Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) and his goofy secretary (Edie McClurg) to get his girlfriend Sloan (Mia Sara) out of school.
The trio of truants head into Chicago—courtesy of a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder, the prized possession of Cameron’s father—to visit the Art Institute of Chicago, take in a Cubs game, and dine at a fancy restaurant, all before Ferris crashes a German-American parade to lip-sync to the Beatles’ version of “Twist and Shout.” Meanwhile, two adversaries set out separately to foil Ferris’s schemes: Rooney, who loathes Ferris’s disregard for authority, and Ferris’s jealous older sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey), who resents her parents’ gullibility and her brother’s new folk-hero status (“SAVE FERRIS,” reads the water tower, inspiring the name of a ’90s ska band).
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was another success in the incredible run for writer-director John Hughes. Hughes had already established himself as the unofficial storyteller for Generation X avant la lettre with Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Weird Science (1985); he also wrote Pretty in Pink, released in February of ’86. Ferris Bueller incorporates Hughes’s stylistic signatures: the cartoonish camera angles and physical humor, the quick cuts, the attention to musical detail. (Different versions of “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” by The Smiths even appear in both this film and Pretty in Pink.) Yet compared with Hughes’s earlier high-school films, Ferris Bueller is less about romantic aspirations, adolescent anxieties, and social cliques. Ferris is above all that. He’s got his girl. He’s adored by “the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, and dickheads” alike. They all think he’s a righteous dude.
It’s still fun watching Ferris get away with everything 40 years later (okay, I admit it—39 years later. I was 10 years old in 1986 and didn’t see this PG-13 movie until it came out on VHS the following year), but these days I feel more frustration with his pushover parents—especially his dad, who keeps calling his son “pal.” I had also forgotten what a bully Ferris is to Cameron, ignoring his concerns about taking his dad’s car. In the movie’s tensest scene, Cameron forgives Ferris his manipulations because, darn it, it’s about time he confronts the old man. I’m not buying it. Cameron wears a Detroit Red Wings sweater for much of the movie: He should have pulled Ferris’s leopard-print vest over his head and pummeled him like a hockey player.
The 10th highest-grossing film of the year, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off spawned a million quotations and references. “Chick … chicka chicka.” “Nine times.” “Anyone? Anyone?” It found a clever way to keep viewers in their seats through the final credits, with one last bit of ritual humiliation for Rooney (on a school bus that, for some reason, is packed at 6 p.m.) and a final address from Broderick to the lingering audience.
Although Broderick is not a large man, his character cast a long shadow into the next decade, when a wave of smart-alecky boys spoke directly to viewers. Zack Morris did it on Saved by the Bell beginning in 1989, but the watershed year was 1990, which witnessed the premiers of the embarrassing Ferris Bueller sitcom (featuring Jennifer Aniston), the far superior Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, the New York Jewish variation The Marshall Chronicles, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Yet that year’s most successful Bueller clone was Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) in Home Alone, written by Hughes himself. Kevin has Ferris’s disregard for the fourth wall and his skills with AV equipment to fool adults; plus, the pain Rooney suffers as he tries to break into Ferris’s house is dress rehearsal for the booby-trapped torture Kevin gives the Wet Bandits.
Lucas Blye is from the Chicago suburbs, too, but nobody will ever confuse him with Ferris Bueller. Written and directed by David Seltzer, Lucas stars Corey Haim as an insect-inspecting, classical-music-loving dork desperate to win over the new girl in town, Maggie (the adorable Kerri Green, fresh from The Goonies). Maggie likes Lucas, but she doesn’t like like Lucas, and instead falls for the captain of the football team (Charlie Sheen—who has a much smaller, but still memorable, role in Ferris Bueller). Sheen plays against the type of an insensitive jock, defending Lucas from his bullying teammates (including Jeremy Piven), but he also breaks up with his girlfriend (Courtney Thorne-Smith—this movie had everybody!) for Maggie. Don’t feel too bad for Lucas: A bandmate played by Winona Ryder (see what I mean?) has a crush on him. Lucas sets out to impress Maggie by trying out for the football team, culminating in a chaotic climax, in which Lucas has a popularity-clinching touchdown within his grasp.
Lucas is set in the summer of 1985, when the 17-year cicadas were emerging. If the opening image of a cicada shedding its exoskeleton doesn’t make the theme of metamorphosis clear, the Lucas/locust puns will. There’s a tender moment when Maggie tells Lucas the locusts are gone. “Just wondering where we’ll be when they come back,” he says. “I wonder if we’ll still know each other.” It’s a moving sentiment, and surely one that many people share every time those loud buggers emerge. It has more emotional resonance than anything in Ferris Bueller, which could be why it earned a place on Roger Ebert’s top-10 list for 1986.
Lucas does shed his metaphorical exoskeleton, though he does so paradoxically by wearing something the football team gives him. More progressive viewers might gripe that the film privileges the football team’s toxic masculinity in this final scene, as we’re supposed to care about the opinion of the bullies. The more reasonable interpretation is that Lucas has earned the respect of the entire school, even as everyone recognizes he will never be part of the team. That recognition is announced by the first great climactic slow-clap, which would become a high-school movie staple (including in Can’t Buy Me Love the following year).
Ferris does not metamorphose. He learns nothing. His friend and sister both realize they must accept responsibility for their own happiness. Even Kevin McCallister would come to appreciate his family. But Ferris doesn’t need to change, and the wisdom he offers at the start of the movie is the wisdom he shares at the end: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” It’s good advice and a great premise for a fun and memorable movie.
But the ’80s were the golden age of high school movies because there were also characters like Lucas, who may have been dorkier than you or me, but who were also likable people who capture the loneliness and heartbreak that are unavoidable parts of even happy teenage years.
Editor’s note: This retrospective review is one in a series celebrating 1986, arguably the greatest year in movies—inarguably if you’re Gen X.
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read!).
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