When Ferris Conquered Chicago

“We’re seen everything good! We’ve seen the whole city!” — Ferris Bueller

When you think about Chicago in the movies, what’s the first one that springs to mind? There’s a part of me that wishes the popular answer was Michael Mann’s Thief, a premium neo-noir that not only captures the street-level grit-and-grind of 1980 Chicago, but the corruption that acts as a kind of life-support system for the criminal underworld. “The Chicago Way” is also a major feature of Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, which dressed up real locations for authenticity’s sake, rather than re-create them on the studio lot. Of a more recent vintage, the minimal dressing-up that Christopher Nolan did to Chicago for his first two Batman films, most vividly The Dark Knight, was his signal to audiences that Gotham City shouldn’t feel like an unfamiliar place. I’ll never forget seeing that film screened for us at the IMAX at Navy Pier in 2008 and critics sharing a knowing laugh as the action barreled through locations that were steps away from our usual haunt on Lake Street. Kudos to Bruce Wayne, too, for navigating the Batmobile through Lower Wacker Drive, too, as if he were a shrewd city cab driver. 

Yet the most popular answers on the Family Feud board would be one of two films: The Blues Brothers, the ramshackle musical-comedy with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, which admirably snakes through South Side neighborhoods before a car chase (also through Lower Wacker Driver) brings it closer to downtown, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a John Hughes comedy that burns through all the city’s major tourist attractions in the space of an afternoon. There’s no small amount of civic pride associated with Ferris Bueller in Chicago, because the film highlights one of those rare perfect days where it’s sunny and temperate, and the reflection off Lake Michigan makes downtown look like a glittering jewel box. While the tourist board cannot condone truancy, they would surely recognize Ferris and his friends as a decades-long boon to the city. They’d probably also be inclined to overlook the fact that the only Black character with a speaking part is shown hijacking a car for a joyride. (More on that later.) 

As a longtime Chicago resident who was weaned on John Hughes movies as a teenager, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has an outsized place in my life that such an innocuous teen comedy shouldn’t occupy. Even among the core ’80s Hughes films, you’d have to put Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club ahead of it, because of their associations with Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, and the deeper angst and longing of the adolescent experience. It’s not like those feelings are totally absent from Ferris Bueller, but “angst” and “longing” are not part of the word cloud you’d use to describe Ferris himself, who’s completely unbothered and who makes it personal mission to liberate others from feeling unbothered, too. His Chicago is a fantasy that’s only punctured by scrutinizing the film’s relationship to the city—and, by extension, Hughes’ relationship to the teenage audience he so expertly courted. 

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is the rare high school comedy where the most popular kid in school is the hero, at least in the sense that he doesn’t actually need to change. The Ringwald characters of Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club are popular but lovesick and insecure, and even a character as confident and self-possessed as Alicia Silverstone’s Cher in Clueless is given plenty of room to grow. As school secretary Grace (Edie McClurg) explains it to her boss Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), the crustiest of crusty deans, Ferris is adored by “the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, mastoids, dweebies, and dickheads.” A comparable figure like Randall “Pink” Floyd in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused can move fluidly among jocks, stoners, and every micro-clique in between, but even he’s haunted by a certain amount of senior-year ennui. Ferris Bueller is the model popular kid, in that he embodies the uncomplicated, carefree cool that other kids imagine comes with the post. There’s no second layer to him. He’s won high school!