'Ferris Bueller's Day Off': Cameron's Ferrari Destruction Scene

This is a really touching scene, in which we see Cameron taking all of his aggression out on a valuable automobile, his dad's Ferrari. All of his anger toward his dad comes out in Cameron's dialogue with Ferris as he kicks and destroys his father's cherished car. It was a serious scene in a movie filled with jokes at Rooney's expense. It made the film a little deeper than the standard comedy film.

 

I used to cringe the first few times I saw that scene until I found out the car was just a replica made for the film.

 

I was always disappointed with the "concept" of the scene. Ferris and Cameron are entirely too intelligent to think putting a car in reverse was going to roll back the odometer. It might have been more "real world" believable if Ferris parked the car, accidentally left it in NEUTRAL, and Cameron coulda kicked the hell out of it and it rolled away into the ravine as they headed back to the house.

 

Also, they would have figured out in the first 10 seconds if the odometer was rolling backwards or not.

 

I loved the movie as a kid. As an adult, I realize that Ferris was kind of a crappy friend for pressuring Cameron to take the car.

 

My brother's best friend when we were young kids was Jonathan Smock, who plays the snobby waiter at the scene in the restaurant. His father and mine were best friends for many years. My brother and Jonathan were always doing funny skits and stuff. I never imagined he would become a comedic actor and producer. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a teacher with a PhD in education.

 

An uncut script has been online from time to time, but it gets yanked. Cameron has an extended back story which justifies the junked car.

 

And he's a crappy friend for basically walking away and wishfully saying "For the first time in his life, he's going to be just fine."

(I'd like to see the Robot-Chicken-alternate-ending where Cameron gets kicked out of his home, disinherited by his dad, and charged with multiple crimes, then ends up destitute and homeless because he's a convicted felon......while Ferris continues to float through life without any consequences for any of his actions.)

 

I always love all of these that isnt believable, what a crappy friend, who would go to a museum etc etc. revisionist/enlightened revelationistic type ponderings. Ferris was every nerdy kids hero. No one cared about the psychological explaination of how Ferris was a sociopathic narcissist in the making or whatever.

The 80s were the king years of teen movies. They were fun, they were cool and they were fantasy. Thats it. No one thought kids would act like those Breakfast Kids either. No one really thought much of anything. That was the entire point. Escapism for us teens and a reason to put an arm around your date, eat a handful of popcorn, shove junior mints down your throat, play Pacman before the movie and if you were lucky maybe get a kiss goodnight. It was a very 1950's time in the 80s. And Ferris, Andie, Bender, Spicoli etc from all those 80s movies were the backdrop to our youth. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

Do you mean The Honeycomb Kids? I always thought they handled themselves with great tact and restraint when pirates tried to raid the Honeycomb Hideout.

 

Im going to leave my post unedited just because thats too funny to mess up with a correction to my post lol

 

On a serious note...they always put the prize at the bottom of the box...making one having to open the box from the bottom

 

Disagree, as Cameron was way too uptight about his life and needed to have a day off along with Ferris. The title could also be "Ferris and Cameron's Day Off".

 

Besides the car scene, the museum part is one of my favorite film scenes of all time.

 

It settled to the bottom.

 

For me as well. Takes this movie to another level for me. Hughes has those tender moment scenes in most of his comedic screenplays, but this one in Ferris is a particular standout. The subtle brilliance of John Hughes in Ferris Bueller's Day Off for me is how he depicts the inner demons and struggles of Cameron, less through words as through the silence when he stares at that Seurat portrait "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte." Here is the brilliance of John Hughes in this scene:

"The scene, an ode to Hughes’ personal admiration for the museum, takes the film from feel-good teen flick to thought-provoking cinema, and establishes its place among the best museum movies of all time... Unlike Ferris and Sloane, who remain happy and carefree throughout the film, Cameron is constantly wrestling his inner demons. He reluctantly follows Ferris’ lead, and at the museum, he plays along with Ferris and Sloane’s spoof of the art-going experience, mimicking the positioning of a Rodin statue and running through the gallery with a group of children. But once separated from his friends, Cameron finds himself in a moment of serious introspection in front of George Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.



The camera cuts back and forth between Cameron’s face and the face of the young girl at the center of the pointillist painting. Inching closer to the canvas with each cut, the camera is eventually so close to her face that it is no longer identifiable as such.

“He’s struggling to find his place and he dives into the face of that little kid,” says Harvey. “It almost brings me to tears, because he’s having a soul-wrenching, life changing experience. When he comes out of that painting, he will not be the same.”

While Ferris and Sloane are, perhaps alarmingly, confident in who they are, Cameron is constantly searching for his raison d’être. Just as the little girl in the painting faces a different direction from everyone around her, Cameron is experiencing life differently from his peers and particularly his best friend. In this little girl, Cameron begins to understand himself." How Ferris Bueller's Day Off Perfectly Illustrates the Power of Art Museums | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian

All of this is going on while the Dream's Academy's hauntingly beautiful instrumental cover of the Smith's "Please Let Me Get What I Want" is playing takes the scene and the movie to another level. This is simply perfection when the beauty of art, music, acting, and writing come together to depict the human struggle and longing for meaning and identity.

 

Every high school has kids that act like at least one of the 5 kids in The Breakfast Club. Some people, including myself, see a little of themselves in multiple characters from that movie.

And yes, speaking of Fast Times At Ridgemont High, there are kids at every high school, especially public ones, that act like some of those too.

Every school has a stoner, a jock, a nerd, a spaz, a princess or hottie, etc. Also, some of the teachers, coaches, principals at every school act like some that are portrayed in those movies too.

I loved all those '80s teenage comedies since that is when I was a teenager and in High School.

 

Every John Hughes movie has that serious turn at the end. Sometimes it works (Home Alone, Planes, Trains) but the Ferris one really stops the movie dead for a bit. Fortunately there's the wacky race to get home and finally Ed Rooney vs. the school bus to send you out on a high.

 

To clarify what I meant in my post. Yes, of course, that was one of the points of the movie. Strong stereotypes. But it was also pretty much fantasy that anything like what they did would come true in our own lives. Yet no one was analyzing this. We just enjoyed the simplicity of what the portrayal was and related to it.

 

The kind of strict cliquishness shown in the breakfast club is exactly the way my high school was. I was in high school from 1988 to 92. In fact, it’s something that modern kids don’t really understand. I watch a lot of reaction videos, and high school culture has changed sufficiently that they find the movie unbelievable. But it’s very believable – – I lived it.

Also, Ferris Bueller is not my hero. He’s a jerk, and I thought so back then as well.

 

I agree on The Breakfast Club.

As far as Ferris, for me it's a fun movie overall and the cast is great. But yeah that's something odd about the title character that strikes me very differently than the ones in Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink. He's a kind of fantasy character that maybe we'd like to be - popular, clever, resourceful, lucky, everything always kind of goes right in the end for him. But he's kind of unrelatable or at least he's not a very sympathetic character. It is novel in comparison to those other films because Ferris talks directly to the audience, letting us in on things no one else knows. But at the same time, he is isolated and detached.

I always remember that ending after the credits, it's funny how he asks the audience what they are still doing there, the movie's over. But it also fits in with this sort of innocuous smugness and condescension, that is funny but not sympathetic. Cameron is a sympathetic and relatable character, and we do get to see good things about him, but he's not the hero of the film, not who we really focus on, despite the Ferrari scene. Nobody wants to feel like they are Cameron, he's too pathetic at times and basically spends the day being an awkward third wheel. It's not for me to suggest improvements on a decades-old classic, but it's fun to think about a slightly different version of the film that put the audience even more in Cameron's shoes, without the carefree coolness of Ferris drawing the majority of the attention.

There's something more uncomfortable than resolving in the final Ferrari scene where Cameron says he can handle the blame. Because after all, the whole day is basically Ferris Bueller's fault. It's never made as much sense to me as I'd like, it feels like it's trying to resolve the wrong thing about his character. Ferris never takes responsibility for anything, so it's odd as if this is somehow the lesson Cameron learns instead, when they didn't set Cameron up as someone who didn't take responsibility in the past. It's hard to walk away from that scene feeling like anything is actually going to be better for Cameron afterwards.

Well if I didn't find this so fun and interesting I wouldn't have written so much, cheers. I can understand the position that Ferris is a jerk. He's not an underdog character, perhaps he's more of a narcissistic fantasy that it takes some distance to enjoy watching. The better John Hughes films of that decade were all about the underdogs, that's what makes stories more relatable.

 

I have a pet theory that Cameron and Jeannie are the real protagonists of the film. They have actual character arcs, and experience growth. Ferris is just there, unchanging, like a force of nature. That being said, it is Ferris' friendship that (intentionally or inadvertently) drives Cameron to stand up for himself.

(In some versions of Hughes' script, it was intentional, but in the movie we got, it's more ambiguous)

 

Cameron enjoyed the day off from school, though. He had a good time with his friends and confronted his demons.

 

Speaking as someone who grew up watching the movie many times, I can safely say he wasn't my hero. I don't think he was a sociopath, but I recognized the type (even back then) - manipulative, using friends for his own gain. His one positive virtue in the film is the real friendship with Cameron (his relationship with Sloane isn't defined enough to be anything), but even there, he obviously manipulates Cameron to get access to the car. If he wanted to help Cameron embrace life and get out of his shell, he could have done it in other ways (like take him to the museum and the baseball game without stealing the car).

I knew kids like that in high school. I didn't look up to them. I didn't want to be them.

Now, Val Kilmer in Real Genius might have been my hero.

 

Regarding Post #3 from 'Mekka Godzilla': There was a plot point in a Perry Mason episode from long ago that dealt with being able to roll back the odometer on a certain kind of old car by going in reverse. Think it was the October 1963 episode titled "The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito" which deal with the auto and odometer 'roll back'.