Now, you can say that it is pointless to try to seek some sort of deeper societal gestalt from pop culture, but let's face it, it's the culture we've got, and if we're going to take it somewhere we must start by determining where we are. But that's just an argument. I honestly believe that it's all just exactly what it seems. Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for example, is a genre classic, a fine work of genius in American cinema. Like the Republic, it seems to be a book of many but it is in fact a book of only one.
The secret of Ferris Bueller's apparent narrative is that the central character is Cameron. Ferris is simply a foil. Now, you may protest, that Ferris has almost all the lines, but Cameron has the most important lines. He is the character who undergoes genuine crisis and emerges from it transformed.
In fact, Ferris is Cameron's Walter Mitty, a fantasy of a life lived free of restrictions. In fact there is only one character in Ferris Bueller, and he is unnamed. Ferris Bueller is a code name, the story of his Day Off a tale of a desperate attempt to save a soul from dissolution. Consider the totemic repetition of exhortations to "Save Ferris." Ferris is a symbol of a fundamental archetype of culture refracted through the strange lens of American culture, and the tale of an individual struggle with an entropic element of that same culture, a struggle which must not fail.
And of course, to merit inclusion in the Pentagon Files Ferris is a novel of five parts, cunningly contained in an acid jelly bon-bon of that mysterious drug factory, Hollywood.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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