Movie Quote of the Day (Ferris Bueller, on How to Fake Out Parents)

Ferris Bueller (played by Matthew Broderick): “The key to faking out the parents is the clammy hands. It's a good non-specific symptom; I'm a big believer in it. A lot of people will tell you that a good phony fever is a dead lock, but, uh... you get a nervous mother, you could wind up in a doctor's office. That's worse than school. You fake a stomach cramp, and when you're bent over, moaning and wailing, you lick your palms. It's a little childish and stupid, but then, so is high school.”—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), written and directed by John Hughes

A quarter century ago on this date, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released, quickly cementing John Hughes’ reputation as the auteur of Teen America. After Home Alone four years later, Hughes never again matched his streak of success in the Eighties, and, though he kept writing screenplays that were produced, he simply withdrew from all things Hollywood.

But when he died of a heart attack almost two years ago, at age 59, I was surprised at how much a chord his teen comedies still struck with the middle-aged. A number of my friends on Facebook, for instance, mourned his passing, quoting especially from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

What makes Ferris so well loved by the middle-aged? Well, he embodies everything we wish we could have gotten away with in high school but probably didn't. He thinks high school is “childish and stupid”—an inarguable truth, I think.

And yet, there is nothing mean about Ferris, and nothing really risky like alcohol and drugs. (Okay, maybe that business with his friend’s car is a bit…but aside from that…) When it comes to creative excuses and eluding a fascist school administrator—well, he’s a veritable Einstein.

In a way, I feel sorry for the teens of the last decade. For their film fare, they’ve been stuck with a vapid vampire franchise and the “Saw” horror films. Twenty years before, they could have watched movies that gave them, for all their sweet and sassy surface, something resembling their own lives.

If John Hughes earned the nickname given him by critic Roger Ebert—“the philosopher of adolescence”—it might have been because, in the words of the late writer-director: “I don't think of kids as a lower form of the human species.”