Page 120 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

as little more than a farce run by dunces. The adults in Ferris Bueller’s
Day Off are irrelevant and impotent. Ferris’s nemesis, the school disci-
plinarian, Mr. Rooney, is obsessed with “getting Bueller.” His obsession
emerges from envy. Strangely, Ferris serves as Rooney’s role model,
as he clearly possesses the imagination and power that Rooney lacks.
Rooney’s responsibility is to ensure that students show up for school.
Ferris has decided to take the day off. By capturing and disempowering
Ferris, Rooney hopes to accomplish several things. First, he wants to
reduce Ferris’s influence over the other students, which would reestablish
adults, that is, Rooney, as traditional authority figures.
In addition, Rooney dreams of sentencing Bueller to a condition of
servitude now common to adults—powerlessness, mindless subservience
to rules, and loss of identity. However, Rooney is essentially a comedic
figure, whose bumbling attempts to discipline Ferris are a primary source
of humor in the film. The perfect bureaucrat, Rooney’s efforts can only
lead to his self-destruction. Casting the principal as a comic figure ques-
tions the competence of adults to provide young people with effective
direction—indeed, the value of adulthood itself.

Conclusion

Adolescence emerged as a social class in twentieth-century America,
largely as a product of industrial society and popular culture. The evolu-
tion of the youth culture film provides considerable insight into the chang-
ing power and status of young people in society and the role of popular
culture in shaping and defining this social class. In Andy Hardy’s world,
generational relations are planted in traditional standards that support the
authority and capacity of adults to socialize adolescents into adult roles.
Generational conflict emerged as the dominant theme of postwar youth
films such as Rebel Without a Cause, which questioned the competence
of adults to provide young people with effective direction, even the de-
sirability of adulthood itself. By the 1980s, adolescence, even with its
uncertainties, emerged as the center of popular culture, with adulthood
reduced to irrelevance.

Richard Rosenfeld, Ph.D., is Professor of Criminology at the University
of Missouri–St. Louis.

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