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One of the myriad reasons that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is such a remarkable movie is that it turns over so many cinematic stereotypes about teenagers, which is not, to be brutally frank, something one can say of many of the late and undoubtedly great John Hughes’s movies.¹⁵ For example, when Ferris, Sloane and Cameron¹⁶ manage to evade grown-up supervision, they don’t cause chemical havoc (Weird Science); they don’t get high, dance on their desks to eighties music and sneak around school for no apparent reason (The Breakfast Club): they go to a French restaurant, a museum and a parade. These are not cunning teenagers enjoying a rare day of freedom, this is an elderly couple on vacation enjoying their final years of mobility.

This in turn reflects the most interesting stereotype that this film craftily overturns: that popular kids are inherently evil. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is the only movie – and certainly the only 1980s or 1990s comedy – I can think of in which a teenager who is deemed by his peers to be cool is not portrayed as a rich bullying jerk who will eventually get his or her comeuppance by being killed in a fight (Edward Scissorhands), losing a sports match (Teen Wolf), spending the rest of his life washing his former victim’s car (Back to the Future), being humiliated at the school reunion (Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion), being humiliated by and then having to go out with Judd Nelson (The Breakfast Club), being killed (Heathers), getting tricked into becoming fat (Mean Girls), sinking into probable alcoholism (Pretty in Pink), being humiliated at his own party (Some Kind of Wonderful), or working for ever for his dad (Peggy Sue Got Married). Underdogs are an obvious protagonist staple for most narratives because, obviously, the kid who is being bullied is more sympathetic than the kid who is doing the bullying. But considering what a bad rep popular kids now have thanks to the movies, one could argue that they are actually now the underdogs.

Ferris Bueller is a slightly odd, funny, tech-smart boy with a weak spot for Wayne Newton. In short, he is exactly the kind of boy who is usually portrayed in films, and especially films by Hughes in the eighties, as the bullied geek. Duckie in Pretty in Pink, which came out right before Ferris Bueller, is basically the nerd version of Ferris, down to his sweater vests and fondness for singing along to old songs, and the fact that both characters are played by actors (Jon Cryer and Matthew Broderick) who look, quite frankly, identical only underlines this. Yet in Ferris Bueller – which Hughes directed, unlike Pretty in Pink, which he ‘only’ wrote – the geek inherits the earth.

That this film instead makes Ferris the hero of not just the school but the whole town is partly why it has proven to be so much more timeless than any of Hughes’s other eighties teen movies: it is simply more original. Moreover, it is a much more satisfying fantasy for all the loner geeks who, one suspects, made and continue to make up a significant portion of Hughes’s audience.

The cinematic stereotypes about high school kids and what happens to them after graduation are more well trodden than the taped-up glasses of the class dork beneath the foot of the school bully: popular kids are shallow tyrants whose social success will peak in their school years; dorks are sweet and smart and they will achieve eventual vindication. And, like the previous example about women being universally resistant to men’s charms, this lazy convention almost undoubtedly has some of its roots in the autobiographies of male screenwriters who were, by and large, high school dorks. If Hollywood had an epitaph it would be The Revenge of the Nerds.

Some cool kids may indeed peak in high school and spend the rest of their lives ‘thinking about Glory Days’, as Bruce Springsteen once put it, a tad gloatingly, and as epitomised by the character of Billy, played by Rob Lowe, in St Elmo’s Fire, doomed after college to a lifetime of wearing a bandana and making nonsensical speeches about the cosmos to Demi Moore (no wonder he gets depressed). But like all generalisations, this one is ridiculous.

As I’ve already said, I was by no means a popular kid (only in movies do kids with names like Hadley or Ferris attain mass popularity as teens), so this defence of popular kids is not some poorly disguised self-justification. But rather, it’s just to point out that this trope, aimed at geeky, unconfident, oversensitive teenagers like the one I once was, is false consolation and that is worse than no consolation because it is a lie.

While some kids (and grown-ups, sadly) attain social success through bullying, luck of genetics, generosity with sexual favours and simple sporting prowess, most do it through two factors that are simultaneously far more complicated and far more simple: self-confidence and random chance. As to the first of these, yes, self-confidence in school is probably much easier to come by if you are excellent at sports; it is harder to attain if your only talents are – oh, let’s say, just off the top of my head – not needing to wear a bra until you’re eighteen and knowing all the words to the theme song of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. But it’s the confidence that brings the coolness, not the athletic ability.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s brilliant first novel, Prep, is the literary equivalent of Ferris Bueller in regard to this subject and also, come to think of it, in giving the characters some truly extraordinary names. So although some of the cool kids in her book are awful, the main ones – the unforgettably monikered Cross Sugarman and Gates Medowski – are simply blessed with preternatural self-confidence. All that holds back Prep’s protagonist, Lee, is her painfully heightened self-consciousness, and the fact that this novel became a bestseller suggests widespread recognition of the nugget of truth in the novel’s narrative.

Yet for every Prep, there are about a million Mean Girls and these movies, however well intended, reinforce the rigidity of the school caste system because they teach geeky kids that there is no chance of them ever crossing that social barrier, certainly not without the very high risk of mockery and possible physical assault. The best they can hope for is eventual professional success, which smacks oddly of fanatical religious doctrine: suffer now, reap the benefits later. Becoming president of a computer company, enjoying seventy-two virgins in heaven – you say tomayto, I say tomahto.

These movies also suggest that being an outcast at school endows one with moral superiority as an adult, which explains the cliché of successful actresses and models (Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Aniston …), claiming in interviews that they were geeks in high school, a claim that is usually followed by an insistence that, honestly, they just can’t resist French fries.

Prep, like Napoleon Dynamite – the other side to the Ferris Bueller coin – was brave enough to point out that, actually, not all dorks are adorable martyrs with encyclopedic knowledge about indie music and inherent academic genius. They are humans. This means some are nice and some are not and some are president of the physics club and some don’t know how to spell physics.

But again, these are the exceptions. The more common approach is to insinuate that the school outcasts are the ones who will grow up better, richer and happier.¹⁷

In other words, these movies are saying that, actually, it DOES matter what group you were in at school, and it apparently matters even more than the bitchiest queen bee even realised in her heyday because its importance lasts beyond graduation day.

To buy into the idea that it matters a jot what social set anyone belonged to in school, and that it has any bearing on what that person was like at school and is like now completely nullifies any success you get in later life that you can flash at your next school reunion: you’ve already let the bullies win.