Claire Birkenshaw
“Hey Cameron, do you realise if we’d played by the rules right now, we’d be in gym?” (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986)
Scholars Hunter and Frawley (2022, p.14) argue that use of film as a ‘pedagogical tool’ can help students better understand abstract theoretical concepts to aid their application in imaginative ways. For Aitken (2018, p.1), use of film can enable both academics and students to engage with “complex and challenging issues” concerning children and childhood with the hope this may result in a paradigmatic shift in thinking and child practitioner practice. For this blog then, I wish to explore Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (dir. John Hughes, 1986) through a Foucauldian lens, in particular Michel Foucault’s concept of pastoral power and counter-conduct. As Ball (2013, p.7) champions, use of Foucault can support thinking differently in “new spaces”. In this case, through film.
Directed by John Hughes, the “philosopher of adolescence” (Ebert, 1986, n.p.), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off belongs to the “golden age for the American teen film” (Baughan, 2018, n.p.), the 1980s, which includes classic ‘teen films’ such as, WarGames (dir. John Badham, 1983), A Nightmare on Elm Street (dir. Wes Craven, 1984), and The Breakfast Club (dir. John Hughes, 1985). While the teen film is subject to academic criticism because of its “unrealistic portrayal of adolescent experience” (Driscoll, 2011, p.8), the genre does, however, offer opportunity for theoretical examination due to its inclination to view adolescence as “both object of training and subject of crisis” (ibid.) within its moral tone. As Shary and Smith (2021, p.7) note, Hughes took “the everyday concerns of teenagers seriously”. Thus, Hughes’s oeuvre of teen films, such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, are worthy of “academic study” (ibid., p.11) in order to analyse the portrayal of those ‘everyday concerns’.
Hughes’s storyline for Ferris Bueller is simple enough: a trio of American teenagers, Ferris (Matthew Broderick), Cameron (Alan Ruck) and Sloane (Mia Sara), truant high school to explore the grown-up world of Chicago, while circumventing capture from the grown-ups who attempt to govern their conduct, such as their parents and their High School’s Dean of Students, Edward ‘Ed’ Rooney (Jeffrey Jones). On the surface, the film initially appears to be “a sweet, warm-hearted comedy”, as Ebert (1986, n.p.) describes it, underpinned by a “silly movie plot” (Adams, 2024, n.p.). However, a Foucauldian perspective on the film brings to light something much deeper and more complex: the workings of pastoral power on teenage lives and teenage resistance to it through counter-conduct. Hence, a study of Ferris Bueller can help both academics and students theorise the changing nature of conduct in school and its objective.
The concepts of pastoral power and counter-conduct were initially discussed and theorised by Foucault across in his course titled Security, Territory, Population, delivered during the spring of 1978. In these lectures, Foucault guides us to contemplate and analyse how contemporary conduct – our behaviour – in the West is governed, and to trace its genealogy (Foucault, 2007). Crucial to this genealogy are two words: govern and conduct. First, Foucault explores the meaning of ‘to govern’ and demonstrates that in France, it had a “wide semantic domain” (ibid., p.122) before it acquired its “statist meaning” (ibid., p.120) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Prior to the sixteenth century, ‘to govern’ essentially referred to “the control one may exercise over oneself and others, over someone’s body, soul and behaviour” (ibid., p.122). Importantly, Foucault (ibid.) claims that “one governs […] people, individuals and groups” and not, as imagined, “a state, a territory, or a political structure.” Later in the course, Foucault shifts his attention to the meaning of ‘conduct’ and explains it can relate to the act of conducting: orchestrating the actions of others or oneself. In other words, conducting is ‘to conduct’. Moreover, conduct can also refer to how one behaves. To govern people’s behaviour then, is to “conduct the conduct” of people (Walters, 2012, p.25), and the “art of conducting” (Foucault, 2007, p.165) conduct, Foucault (2007) proffers, was devised and developed over millennia by the Christian pastorate through of a technology of power he terms as ‘pastoral’.
Pastoral power, Foucault advances, is fundamentally “beneficent” (ibid., p.126). It is conceived as a “power of care” (ibid., p.127) and of “doing good” (ibid., p.126) – its “raison d’être” (ibid.). What is more, ‘doing good’ was connected to the Christian pastorate’s spiritual mission: ensure salvation for the “economy of souls” (ibid., p.193) under its watchful care to the “world beyond” (ibid., p.154). To address the continual “problem of salvation” (ibid., p.183), the Christian pastorate fashioned their technology of pastoral power to take “charge of [people] collectively and individually throughout their entire life and at every moment of their existence” (ibid., p.165); it is a “government of souls” (ibid., p.121), and a “prelude” (ibid., p.184), of sorts, to the modern political art of governing people – governmentality. And pastor as shepherd was key to this salvation ‘in the next world’ orientated form of governance.
Like a shepherd’s concern for the welfare of their flock, the pastor’s concern was with and for the souls of their “human flock” (ibid., p.144), especially their “moral conduct” (Waring and Latif, 2018, p.1083) and “spiritual direction” (Foucault, 2007, p.123). As Foucault (ibid., p.174) remarks, the pastor’s primary role is not as a judge of souls, but as doctor; the wellbeing and sickness of each soul was his salvation responsibility, necessitating “all means to save everyone: to save the whole and to save each” (ibid., p.169); no sheep left behind, as it were. Moreover, the pastor’s salvation was tied to the salvation of their human flock, their merits and faults, his too.
To safeguard salvation for one and all, required the pastor’s “exhaustive observation of the life of his sheep” (ibid., p.181). In order to direct, guide, lead, take in hand, monitor, manipulate, and urge each soul on “step by step” (ibid., p.165) to salvation, the pastor had to know what their human sheep had been doing and thinking about. This required the practice of confession: self-examination of one’s conscience and relaying of one’s deeds and thoughts, good and bad, merits and faults, to reveal “a certain secret inner truth of [one’s] hidden soul” (ibid., p.183) to the pastor for him to analyse so that he can “judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile” (Foucault, [1978] 1998, pp.61-62) through a tripartite intersection of law, truth and salvation. In essence, the pastor conducted the “conduct of souls” (Foucault, 2007, p.193) through a permanent “relationship of subordination” (ibid., p.182) and obedience that was both individualising and totalising for their human flock. However, this pastoral ‘conduct of conduct’, orchestrated by the Christian pastorate, was not always welcomed, nor accepted by all members of the congregation, and was, as Foucault details, met with resistance through “anti-pastoral struggles” (ibid., p.204) across time and place. This should not surprise, as Foucault ([1978] 1998, p.95) famously remarks, “Where there is power, there is resistance.”
In a lecture given on 1st March 1978, described as “one of the richest and most brilliant moments” (Davidson, 2011, p.26) in the entirety of Security, Territory, Population, Foucault shifts his pastoral power analysis to chart how ‘conduct of conduct’ was resisted, revolted against, and countered by different groups of people at different times. Foucault offers three germinators of ‘anti-pastoral struggle’ during this lecture. First, in response to the claimed authority of the Christian pastorate to conduct conduct in order to quell all forms of disorder and standardise religious practice. Second, in connection “to other conflicts and problems” (Foucault, 2007, p.196), such as the status of women in society. Third, in reaction to emerging forms of civic government superseding the Christian pastorate which were beginning to take “responsibility for people’s conduct” (ibid., p.197) through its institutions, such as the military or hospitals. Foucault encapsulates these resistance enterprises with the term counter-conduct, which he defines as “a sense of struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others” (ibid., p.201). In essence, counter-conduct seeks different forms of conduct, “to be conducted differently, by other leaders (conducteurs) and other shepherds, toward other objectives and forms of salvation, and through other procedures and methods” (ibid., pp.194-195).
With the emergence of the modern state across the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Foucault (1982, p.783) posits that “a new form of pastoral power” started to supplant its previous incantation due to changes in the concept of salvation. No longer is this newer form of pastoral power concerned about directing people toward salvation in the “next world” (ibid.,784), now the ‘problem of salvation’ is about “ensuring it in this world” (ibid.). Consequently, salvation, through different government institutions, aided and abetted by their secular “agents of pastoral power” (ibid.), took on new meanings, new objectives, new forms of conduct, and began to be repurposed for national security concerns to improve the strength of the nation. It is a reformulated approach that seeks to shape individual and collective life to “a set of very specific patterns” (ibid., p.783) to enable and ensure the “controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production” (Foucault, [1978] 1998, p.141). Along the way though, counter-conduct continued to make its presence felt in response to the “administration of bodies and the calculated management of life” (ibid., p.140). Now, Foucault (2007, p.199) contends, counter-conduct objectives where more likely to be revolutionary – politically or socially – “but always with an aspect of the pursuit of a different form of conduct: to be led differently”, as demonstrated by various political and social campaigns and movements throughout the history of the modern state.
While Walters (2012, p.25) cautions that we should avoid thinking that the modern state is “simply the sheepfold writ large”, there is no doubt, in his view, that the pastorate’s pastoral power, in one way or another, has “exerted a lasting impression on the [Western] modern world” (ibid.), and one institution that continues to draw upon this technology of power is, arguably, the school. To consider this, we now turn our attention to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
The film begins with its protagonist, Ferris Bueller, lying in bed being examined and consoled by his worried parents because of his array of unhealthy symptoms: seeing spots, blurred vision, stomach cramps and cold, clammy hands. Despite Ferris pleading to be allowed to go school to take an all-important test so that he can “go to a good college” to secure a “fruitful life”, his parents conclude, based on the evidence they have seen and heard this morning, that he is “truly, a very sick boy” and must stay at home. However, as his parents depart his bedroom and leave for work, Ferris sits up, directs his attention to the camera and states disbelievingly:
“They bought it. Incredible. One of the worst performances of my career and they never doubted it for a second”,
suggesting that fabricating illness to miss school, and not always telling the truth to his parents, or anyone else who has authority over him, is something that he has a habit of doing. As he later confesses, it is his nineth absence this semester. Additionally, Ferris is acutely aware that any more school absences will result in the penalty of having to repeat the academic year again, unless he “barfs up a lung”, and that today’s absence will not go unnoticed by the school, due to its attendance monitoring systems. Knowing this, Ferris hacks into the school’s electronic attendance records and alters the digital data held on him, from a perilous nine recorded absences to a much safer two. Unfortunately for Ferris, Rooney observes this digital alteration, much to his vexation, on his office computer in real time. Suspecting that “something is going on” and that Ferris is behind the manipulation of the school’s attendance truth, Rooney sets about rounding him up, to “put one hell of a dent in his future” and to demonstrate to the rest of the school population “that the example [Ferris] sets is a first-class ticket to nowhere.” As far as Ferris is concerned, being pursued sheep doggedly by Rooney is a risk worth taking for having another day off school, especially when the day’s sunny and dry weather supports an illicit adventure in downtown Chicago. Plus, Ferris has another fish to fry, the salvation of his neurotic best friend, Cameron.
Hughes depicts the high school in Ferris Bueller as a place of well-ordered drudgery, testing, monitoring, and mind-numbing boredom, reinforced by Hughes humorous scene use of classroom pedagogy to speak for silenced students. For example, discussion of the ‘Great Depression’ during an economics class and emphasis on the word prison during an English literature class – along with the word ‘despair’ written on the chalkboard – mirror observable student facial expressions, as if Hughes is using the film as vehicle to air teenage views on their experience of High School education: a holding pen for both body and mind, and as Ferris opines, something that is “a little childish and stupid”. Thus, Hughes uses these relatable classroom moments to give credence to the trio of teenagers skipping school to pursue, albeit briefly, a different form of conduct – a counter-conduct – so that they all can “live a little” and find some form of teenage salvation before they too are inserted into the ‘machinery of production’. However, it is through Rooney that the lasting impression of the Christian pastorate’s pastoral power on the modern state can be theorised, in particular pastor as shepherd, or in this case, Dean as shepherd.
As Dean of Students, Rooney leads and watches over his human flock of students. Indeed, students that experience misfortune, such as Sloane’s ‘bereavement’, are thought of by Grace, Rooney’s secretary, as “poor little lamb[s].” Like the Christian pastor, Rooney is fully aware that he is held accountable for the conduct of the student souls in his care, both individually and collectively. Their High School education, “a whole detailed economy of merits and faults” (Foucault, 2007, p.173), are tied to his governance. Thus, Rooney is subject to “coercive accountability” (Burns, 2018, p.51), which, according to Burns (ibid.), is “a punitive disciplinary system that effects power as institutionalized knowledge, reduced to data, on students and teachers and university faculty to create a self-auditing subjectivity.” As a result, Rooney’s conduct of student conduct is directed with this in mind, and anything that jeopardises his ability to “effectively govern” the study body to ensure acceptable accountability outcomes must be addressed before it contaminates and corrupts “the whole flock” (Foucault, 2007, p.169) and threatens his career. This explains the lengths Rooney will go to find evidence to prove, once and for all, the truth of Ferris’s untruthful attendance conduct, so that he can hold Ferris to account and administer the necessary punishment of “holding him back another year” to prevent widespread attendance disobedience and other forms of “revolts of conduct” (ibid., p.194).
If Rooney can be conceived of as a shepherd of students, then Hughes presents Ferris as a sort of rival shepherd who appeals to a broad church of teenage identities because he not only understands and cares about their plight but is able to commune with them on their level. Grace puts to Rooney:
[Ferris is] very popular Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads – they all adore him. They think he is a righteous dude.”
Furthermore, Ferris seems to have a sophisticated range of knowledge and skills that he is able to draw upon to not only help him “handle” school but counter its conduct requirements for both himself and other students, such as helping his peers get “out of summer school” or doing favours for them. These forms of counter-conduct orchestrated by Ferris, Grace concludes, makes Rooney “look like an ass.” Moreover, the student body’s campaign to ‘save Ferris’ due to his ‘illness’ adds further injury to Rooney’s attempt to conduct student conduct. However, it is Ferris’s pastoral care for his friend Cameron that reveals the true purpose of their day off from school: to save Cameron by giving him a “good day.” As Cameron later admits to Ferris and Sloane, their illicit day off together was the “best day of [his] life.” As a consequence, Cameron realises that he needs to stop being afraid of “school, parents, [and the] future” in order to live his life without fear.
Arguably, Hughes presents two versions of shepherd for teenage souls. On the one hand, there is the “egotistical shepherd” represented by Rooney. As Foucault (ibid., p.140) reminds us, the egotistical shepherd is a “contradiction in terms” because, unlike the “true shepherd”, they put themselves first. For Rooney, being Dean is about their image, career – “good pasture for their profit” (ibid., p.128) – and the ability to wield “disturbing power” (ibid., p.128) to ruin his students’ future lives as he sees fit. Ferris, on the other hand, is presented as the ‘true shepherd’ since he is willing to “sacrifice himself for [the] salvation” (ibid., p.138) of Cameron, as demonstrated by his dialogue to Cameron following the ‘killing’ of the object of Cameron’s father’s love and passion, an extremely rare 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California:
“Cameron it’s my fault. I’ll take the heat for it. We’ll wait for your father to come home and when he gets here, I’ll tell him I did it. He hates me anyway.”
Finally, Hughes story arcs the film by ensuring Ferris, at the film’s end, is back to where he was when his parents left for work in the morning in preparation for their return at 6pm. Conversely, Rooney is not spared by Hughes. Hughes punishes an outwitted and dishevelled Rooney by returning him back to the student flock and making him ignominiously ride the school bus home, much to the utter disbelief of the students aboard. In doing so, Rooney notices a student folder with ‘Save Ferris’ emblazoned on its front cover and looks to the camera with abject despair.
While Ferris Bueller is open to criticism due its “unadulterated celebration of what it’s like to be young white, middle class and well-heeled in mid 80s America” (Smith, 2024, n.p.), the film does offer an opportunity to consider how education supports “a broader disciplinary system” (Burns, 2018, p.34). To do this, Foucault (2007, p.116) suggests we shift our analysis away from an “institutional-centric” approach to one that is “off-centre” so that we can take into account institutional functions. For Foucault (ibid., p.117), this method “entails going behind the institution and trying to discover in a wider and more overall perspective [the] technology of power.” As Burns (2018, p.35) reminds us, “Institutions do not function in social, political, or historical isolation”. In addition, he argues that since the 1980s Western “educational institutions have functioned in the context of the strategies and tactics associated with neoliberal capitalist globalization” (ibid.). As such, the film’s location, Chicago, should not go unnoticed. Chicago is the university home of neoliberal economist, Milton Friedman, “best known for selling the idea that markets and ‘freedom’ should be one and the same” (Barker, Bergeron and Feiner, 2021, p.99); nor should mention of the napkin inspired ‘Laffer Curve’ in the economics class that Ferris and Cameron abscond from, which was used to promote “the idea that tax cuts could increase tax revenue” (Parkin, 2014, p.737) under the United States’ Reagan administration (1981-1989). While subtle, Hughes is drawing attention to neoliberal “ascendency” (Barker, Bergeron and Feiner, 2021, p.100) and the emergence of a precariat subjectivity shaped by neoliberal conduct of conduct during the 1980s. This growing sense of employment precarity that teenagers faced in the 1980s as they edged toward the job market, is reflected in conversation between Cameron and Sloane in which Cameron reveals he does not know what to do when he leaves High School because there seem to be no viable options other than go to college. Fast forward to now and this continues to appear to be the case.
Lastly, any Foucauldian analysis of Ferris Bueller should be ‘off-centre’ to ‘discover a wider perspective’ of its meaning. This means moving the focus away from Ferris to examine other characters and going ‘behind’ the film to contemplate the portrayal of conduct and counter-conduct themes to theorise the ‘intersectional’ nature of the ‘broader disciplinary system’ we exist in. As Ferris points out to Cameron at the baseball game, “if we played by the rules right now, we’d be in gym”, which, for Hughes, seems to mean laboured circuits of going nowhere. Perhaps then, it is time for educators to think about contemporary education’s ‘conduct of conduct’ and its wider purpose, to then work with and for students to fashion different rules and modes of pastoral care to improve their experience of education.
References
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Suggested citation:
Birkenshaw, C. (2024) Thinking with Foucault and Ferris. Altered States of Academia, 30 June [Online blog]. Available from:<https://alteredstatesofacademia.blog/2024/06/30/thinking-with-foucault-and-ferris/> [Accessed?].
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