Ferris Bueller's Day Off - still relevant

So I had to do a double take the other week when by housemate Andy announced casually in conversation that he had never seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off. There might only be 5 years between the two of us, so it is really possible that this is enough of a generational gap to mean that he has never seen a film that was so pivotal to my generation's psyche in the late 1980s? Perhaps it's just one of those weird gaps for him, a film he missed but then got too old and it became redundant to watch it.

Thankfully a work colleague saved him the other day by lending him the DVD, and so for the first time in well over a decade I sat and watched Matthew Broderick ham it up to the camera as Ferris Bueller in all its 1980s materialistic bollocks glory. It's something I never realised in the past, but watching the film now it is so obvious how wedded to 80's consumerism the film is. Consider the main characters, Ferris and sister Jeanie live in an upper middle class paradise where he has a room full of technological wizardry, while she has a car and all the designer gear she wants. Ferris' best friend Cameron's Dad is so rich he has owns a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California (only a few hundred were made and they are very expensive apparently!). All of them decide they'd rather not go to school and so bunk off to Chicago where they have a great day out. Cameron is so cloistered that when they arrive in Chicago he assumes the slightly dark-skinned guy working in the car park can't speak English. Oh dear.

Of course the film exists in a complete fantasy world and as such is able to get away with a lot of this. It's a world in which it is a comic moment when a 15 year sics their Rottweiler on the school headmaster. It's a world in which Ferris - in one of cinema's great scenes - is able to lead thousands in a rendition of 'Twist and Shout' on top of a flotilla of caravans in downtown Chicago. It's the world of John Hughes of course, who is sort of an American version of Roald Dahl in that all his teenage characters are super-cool while their parents are half way to being idiots.

All this neatly comes together when the film has its own epiphany moment that ousts the draw of materialism for the empty chalice it truly is. When Cameron accidentally destroys his father's Ferrari - the film's ultimate statement of materialistic splendour - he realises that despite worrying all day long about the consequences of this happening, it's actually for the best. Cameron knows that the terrible consequences of this act will perversely allow him to connect to his father for the first time. Basically, money isn't everything and the material wealth of Ferris and his friends is irrelevant. The thing that's important is having a day out with your friends, going to an art gallery and stepping back and enjoying life while you can. As Ferris says - "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it".

Of course these things are easier to say and do when you've got tonnes of money, great friends, enough to eat, a massive house and a loving family around you - but like I said, this is the middle class fantasy land of John Hughes. It would be easy to write off 'Ferris Bueller' as a relic of a now-irrelevant age. After all, the film stars Matthew Broderick and Jennifer Grey - how much more 1980s do you want? But in our continuing age of materialism-beats-all the film is a startlingly relevant reminder that stuff isn't important, people and relationships are.