Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Ferris Bueller's Day Off
1986 · John Hughes · Ferris Bueller's Day Off on Sightlines
Ferris Bueller starts talking to you before the movie has properly begun. He has just fooled his parents, and he turns to the lens to explain how it's done. The camera holds him in a clean, centered frame, as if it were perfectly normal for a boy to stop a story and lean out of it. Within a few minutes the trick has become grammar, and you are his accomplice.
Hold on to that frame, because the film is built around two ways of looking, and this is the first.
Ferris belongs to what Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, called the movement-image. In that kind of film a character sees a situation and acts on it, and the action changes the situation. Classical Hollywood ran on this loop, and Ferris runs it at full power. He sees a school day and takes it apart. His bedroom is a control room: a synthesizer for the cough, a recorded snore rigged to the doorbell, a mannequin on a pulley in the bed, a phone he uses to become Sloane's father. Every obstacle gets a device. Hughes has written a teenager who can out-engineer the adults in his own house, and in 1986, with consumer electronics newly in kids' hands, that was a real and specific fantasy.
The opposition is just as classical. Deleuze calls it the binomial: force against force, each side defined by the duel. Ed Rooney, played by Jeffrey Jones with the wounded dignity of a man who believes he is the hero of a different film, hunts Ferris, and Jeanie, the sister who carries the film's other real grievance, runs her own campaign. Paul Hirsch, who had cut Star Wars and Blow Out, braids the three lines in near-continuous crosscutting against the clock of a single day. This is the parallel montage Deleuze traced back to Griffith, separate lines racing toward a collision, near-miss after near-miss. It is the great American suspense machine, put to work on truancy.
So far this is a flawless action film dressed up as a lark. Here is the odd part. Ferris never changes. He doesn't learn. He explains. His ancestors are easy to spot. Albert Finney winked at the lens in Tom Jones (1963), stringing Fielding's picaresque into a chain of escapes in place of a three-act plot. Michael Caine broke off mid-scene in Alfie (1966) to lay out his tactics, a charming operator who never grows. Annie Hall (1977) gave American comedy the stop-the-scene aside, and Ferris's kitchen and shower monologues use exactly that mechanic. All of these characters know what kind of story they're in. Deleuze noticed that once characters become aware they are moving among clichés, the old action loop starts to fray. Ferris is that awareness made charming. He knows the teen movie well enough to float above it, which is why he can't really be its subject.
The subject is Cameron. Alan Ruck, noticeably older than the high-schooler he plays, gives him a worn quality that reads as depression rather than moodiness. Ferris has to pry him out of his sickbed and out from under a father whose Ferrari sits in a glass pavilion like an exhibit. That garage has its own ancestor in Tati's Mon Oncle (1958), where a modernist house holds its owners hostage to its surfaces. In the Frye pavilion, the car is a display object that must not be touched. Cameron lives in a house that works like a museum.
Then we go to an actual museum, and the film changes key. At the Art Institute the three drift through the galleries to a cover of the Smiths' "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want," and nothing here moves Rooney's pursuit forward or ticks the clock. Hughes and his cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto, find Cameron in front of Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and keep cutting closer. Each shot is tighter and more abstract, until the canvas breaks into its dots and his face can no longer be read.
This is the second way of looking, and Deleuze has words for it. For him the close-up is the affection-image: a feeling registered on a face and not yet released into action. A great close-up pulls a face out of its setting, so that it stops telling us where we are and tells us only what is felt. Here Hughes pushes further, and the face dissolves along with the painting. Cameron has become what Deleuze calls a seer, caught in a pure optical situation where a character can only look, with no action available, and the looking itself becomes the event. Deleuze locates the birth of modern cinema in moments like this, first in Italian neorealism and later in American films of the 1970s, where people stand before situations too large to answer.
Why does this lens matter for a comedy? Because it shows what the comedy is organized around. Deleuze borrowed from Bergson the idea of the living being as an interval, a gap where what we perceive doesn't pass straight into what we do. Ferris has no gap. Every perception goes directly into a scheme. Cameron is nothing but gap. Hughes puts that gap at the dead center of his film and lets the sequence end in stillness rather than a punchline.
The address to camera is often traced to vaudeville and to Brecht, whose broken illusions were meant to make an audience think instead of melt into the story. Hughes keeps the device and drops the chill. We aren't distanced. We're recruited, and the recruitment is what makes the museum hit so hard. The friend who flattered us into his day is suddenly not the one the camera cares about.
The film's structure carries other debts. A Hard Day's Night (1964) modeled the escape-from-the-handlers day out, where a song, not cause and effect, sets the length of a sequence. You can feel that in the self-contained episodes: the restaurant, the ballgame, the Skydeck. Fujimoto had worked on Badlands (1973), and he brought its habit of exposing for daylight into a studio teen comedy, so Chicago looks like itself, bright and slightly overexposed, a second subject rather than a backdrop. Earlier teen films had mostly defaulted to California. This one loves a Midwestern city.
What Hughes did to the form was put both regimes in one frame. A sensory-motor hero who can solve anything stands next to a boy who can only see, and the film's charm depends on the first while its seriousness belongs to the second. It became one of the most quoted American films of its decade, and it gets misread as a hymn to charm. Watch it with Deleuze beside you and the misreading falls apart. Next time Ferris turns to tell you how it's done, look past him to the edge of the frame. See who's standing there, and what he's looking at.
Concepts in play
- action-image — Ferris's opening demonstration of control: the synthesizer cough, the snore rigged to the doorbell, the mannequin on a pulley, the phone impersonation of Sloane's father. Every situation he perceives is immediately turned into an act that changes it.
- binomial — Ferris against Dean Ed Rooney (and Jeanie's separate campaign): a force-against-force duel, with Jones playing Rooney as a man who thinks he is the hero of a different film.
- montage-organic-american — Paul Hirsch crosscuts three lines (Ferris's day, Rooney's pursuit, Jeanie's unraveling) almost continuously against the ticking clock of a single day, built on escalation and near-miss.
- consciousness-of-cliches — The repeated direct address, inherited from Tom Jones, Alfie and Annie Hall: a protagonist who never changes and who stops scenes to explain himself, aware of the kind of story he is in.
- affection-image — The Art Institute sequence: increasingly tight, abstract close-ups of Cameron before Seurat's La Grande Jatte, pushing in until the painting dissolves into dots and his face becomes unreadable, a feeling held and never released into action.
- the-seer — Cameron in the museum, written and played as a worn, depressive watcher rather than an agent, set beside Ferris's frictionless competence.
- pure optical & sound situations — The gallery drift to the Smiths cover, where nothing advances the pursuit or the clock and the sequence ends on stillness rather than a punchline: looking becomes the event.
- the interval — Cameron as the film's center of hesitation, pried out of his sickbed and out from under his father's dread, set against Ferris, in whom perception passes straight into scheme.