Life Moves Pretty Fast

I had a birthday a few days ago.

I know, I know, hold your applause. I'm the kind of person who treats birthdays the way most people treat jury duty: an obligation to be endured quietly, preferably while keeping my head down and hoping no one in the building notices.

"You do realize you're required to acknowledge your own existence at least once a year," Amy informed me. "It's practically the law."

"It's not the law. I looked it up."

"It should be, Cowboy. You spent your birthday morning organizing a junk drawer. That's not a celebration, that's a cry for help with extra steps."

She's not entirely wrong; the older I get, the more birthdays come bundled with a little melancholy I didn't order. Names and faces and places that used to be part of the celebration and aren't anymore, for one reason or another. That part doesn't get easier. I don't think it's supposed to.

But here's the thing about The Circular Journey; we rarely arrive where we set out for, and yet somehow that detour usually delivers something worth keeping. This year, in the middle of all that birthday fog, I once again found my way back to the same place I always do: an '80s movie that has spent forty years refusing to let me feel sorry for myself for very long.

Enter Ferris

On June 11, 1986, John Hughes handed the world a popular high school senior who fakes being sick to skip school, and in doing so gave several generations of otherwise responsible adults a permanent excuse to romanticize truancy. Ferris Bueller's Day Off hasn't lost an ounce of its style in the forty years since, which is more than I can say for my own '80s wardrobe choices.

"You wore parachute pants," Amy reminded me, unhelpfully.

“They were bat-wing pants.”

“They were parachute pants with a gecko-design all over.”

“Amy, we agreed not to talk about that.”

“I agreed to nothing, Bubba.”

Matthew Broderick doesn't just play Ferris Bueller;  he is Ferris Bueller, so thoroughly that it's followed him through his entire career, the way a really good nickname follows you home from summer camp. 

I know something about that. My childhood nickname was ‘Smo.’ My best friend’s father, called me Cimolio after an outfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers. My friend shortened it to Smo.  

“The baseball player’s name was Gino Cimoli,” Amy corrected. “You friends spelled it with an ’S’ and then added an ‘O’ to the end.”

“Whatever, Amy! I only brought it up because my friend and his father are no longer around and no one calles me Smo anymore.”

From the moment Ferris talks his parents into a sick day, Broderick breaks the fourth wall, looks the audience dead in the eye, and invites us along for the ride. As the school secretary puts it: Oh, he’s very popular, Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads—they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.

Guys want to be him. Girls want to be with him. I, personally, just wanted his ability to talk his way out of anything, a skill that would have served me well approximately every time I've tried to sneak onto a film set.

Ferris can't have a day off alone, of course, nobody worth knowing does. He recruits his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck), commandeers Cameron's father's Ferrari, and the three of them descend on Chicago: the Sears Tower, Wrigley Field, the Art Institute, and in what might be the single best scene in '80s cinema, a parade float, a rendition of Twist and Shout, and an entire city that stops what it's doing to dance along.

Why It Still Works

When I first saw this movie, I identified with Ferris, the kid clawing to hold onto his freedom before adulthood swallowed it whole. Watching it now, older and considerably more junk-drawer-organized, it's Cameron who gets to me. Ferris doesn't just want a fun day for himself; he wants to hand his best friend a little confidence, a little proof that he's worth more than his father's approval. That's the version of the story that ages with you.

The film's two “villains," Ferris's sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) and dean of students Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) spend the whole movie trying to catch him and never quite manage it, which feels less like a plot hole and more like a promise: some people are just going to have a good day no matter what you throw at them. 

The Line That Still Lands

That famous line early in the film hits differently on a birthday than it does on a random Tuesday:

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

I've spent my recent birthday thinking about the people and places that used to move alongside me and don't anymore, and I'm not going to pretend a movie fixes it. But it does remind me to stop and look around at what and who is still here with me. And most years, that's enough to turn the day around.

"So," Amy said, "are we throwing you a party next year, or are we going back to the junk drawer?"

"Ask me again in 364 days."

"I'm setting a reminder, Biscuit Brain. You're not getting out of this that easily."

“I never get out easily, Princess. It’s not in my nature.”