Rage Against The Father
Depictions of fathers in literature, television, and film range from the benevolent to the cruel, the adventurous to the mundane.
Most times, it’s the bad ones that stand out in our minds as readers, their dark personas often being the basis for the entire work.
To kick off this year’s edition of “Scary Daddies,” let’s first look at a character we never actually see or hear from for the entirety of this particular film. This film father doesn’t have a single line, but his unseen presence—the mere mention of him—invokes fear in his son, and his son’s best friend.
We’re taking about Cameron Frye’s father from the 1986 smash hit, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
We know the plot: Ferris fakes illness to ditch school and ropes in his girlfriend Sloane, and his best friend and accomplice, Cameron Frye.
The maximal enjoyment of Ferris’s fun day off hinges on the use of Cameron’s dad’s red convertible Ferrari, which sits on display in a garage on stilts at the Chicago suburban teen’s oddly cold home nestled in the woods.
Through still shots of the home, car, and the subsequent conversations about Cameron’s dad’s obsession with the car, we learn that Cameron’s father has abandoned him and his wife, creating a toxic home life, which causes Cameron’s hypochondria.
The rest of the film centers, of course, on the teens’ fun day out in the city, but every so often, the specter of Mr. Frye rears his head. Whether it’s dropping the car off at a downtown garage, staring downward to the city from the Sears Tower observation deck, or later in the film when Cameron goes catatonic upon learning that the garage workers added hundreds of miles to the odometer, Cameron’s scary father is never that far away.
The turning point of Cameron’s story, which certainly eclipses Ferris’s happy arc, is when Cameron’s rage against his father leads to his deciding to take a stand against him, inadvertently causing the destruction of the car as it flies out of the garage.
It’s brilliant filmmaking and storytelling to never have a villain come on stage, not to mention that producer John Hughes didn’t have to cast anyone for the role, but the character itself, and his manifestation in Cameron’s psychosis, shows viewers that fathers mold their children in ways that are often unseen.
Cameron’s poignant story line demonstrates how easily a father can destroy rather than create. It is through Cameron that we see the sad consequences of a father who has replaced his child’s emotional being with an obsession for an inanimate object (the car) as his own replacement for the love entitled to his family.
In the end, it’s Cameron who triumphs. Though we never see the confrontation, we can imagine that it was not good, but that hopefully it had a happy resolution, one that would warrant Cameron’s own day off. Or, at least a day away from that which was making him sick.
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