If anyone should doubt the influence of writer/director John Hughes on the world of the 21st century, just set aside the hour and forty minutes or so it takes to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And then set aside the next few days to deal with what will become an obsessive compulsion. Your first assignment is to check out the various social media outlets allowing teenagers to share with the world the exciting 24-hour-show that is their lives: the gossip about fellow students, the complaints about teachers and parents, the tense decision-making process of whether to choose Baby Unicorn or Comic Book Seductress as the perfect shade of pink hair dye.
The single most influential decision that Hughes made in crafting his story of Ferris Bueller skipping a day of school was having his protagonist directly address the audience as if he was aware his life was being watched as a movie. In discussions of prescient films that predicted the rise of reality TV, most analysis targets The Truman Show as the progenitor of the genre, but a strong case can be made that the honor really goes to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. After all, Truman doesn’t know that his life is a TV show and so doesn’t act accordingly and the whole point of reality TV is that the participant do know so they can act accordingly. Which is to say that they act—ironically—not as if what is being filmed is real at all, but as if it were a scripted performance imitating expectations of reality.
Since there is obviously no camera crew that Ferris addresses, the logical idea working here is that Ferris sees life as a performance. And his whole day off does not happen organically; he goes to tremendous lengths and great trouble to manipulate reality for a specific effect. The natural extension of the influence of the rise of reality TV in the late 1990’s on the social media age of the 2010’s seems almost inevitable in retrospect. Put a camera on average people with no particularly obviously talent, abilities or personality and turn them into stars and then hand over the equipment and distribution channels to literally anyone who wants them and what else would the world would like but Ferris Buller on his day off? Even just a few short hours perusing the videos, audio, blogs, posts, comments and various site-specific add-ons that allow teenagers across the world to actually to turn almost literally every waking minute of their lives into a never-ending movie available around the globe for consumption and it is almost impossible not to see the influence of Ferris Bueller.
