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smartbitches_feedThe latest bestseller list is brought to you by heating pads, mugs of your hot beverage of choice, and our affiliate sales data.
I hope your weekend reading was cozy!
selenak
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Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah!
Get ready, we’re going into the new year with candles and jelly donuts and latkes and it’s going to be a party!
Like last year, I’ve put together eight care packages designed to make your winter more fun, mellow, warm, and entertaining.
Just in time for the beginning of 2026!
First: my Hanukkah wishes for you tonight and for the next eight: may each candle lit lead to another and another, until we have all connected to bathe the world in light and warmth. May there be peace in our lifetime.
Now, let’s talk about what’s in the care packages. I used to be super great at care packages because my kids went to sleepaway camp – not the type of camp where the care packages included Gucci bags and Loro Piana slippers wrapped in an Hermes scarf or anything – and I LOVED putting them together.
I still sort of send care packages now that they’re in college because I have to send them things pretty regularly, but that’s a small item in a bubble mailer. This is a whole ass box.
So what’s in the care package?
I’m not telling!
Well, I’ll share some details so you know what to expect, but some of it will be a surprise. It might rhyme with “schmeggo.”
In keeping with my wishes for all of you to have a cozy and warm 2026, the care packages will include:
And, like last year, I reached out to folks I know in publishing, and have assorted books, of course! There will be several books in each package, including some major titles from this year. And maybe an ARC or two (shhh!).
This is a way for me to thank you for being part of yet another lovely year here at SBTB. We are still here, and it’s because of you hanging out with us each day. It’s been a big year, and we’re looking forward to more mayhem and silliness in 2026!
SO, ready to enter to win?
To enter, please comment and tell us what book (or recommendation of any sort!) that you found at SBTB that you most enjoyed?
It doesn’t have to be a 2024 book, of course. Any book that you haven’t read is a new book! But what did you discover this year at SBTB that you really liked?
Standard disclaimers apply: We are not being compensated for this giveaway. Void where prohibited. Open to international residents where permitted by applicable law. Must be over 18 and ready to be warm and cozy. May cause increased feelings of security, warmth, and delight.
Comments will close 21 December 2025 at or near 11:59am ET, and winners will be announced shortly afterward. Packages will be shipped out in January 2026.
Thank you to the indefatigable Kristen Dwyer of LeoPR for their generosity!
Good luck, Happy Hanukkah, and thank you for being part of Smart Bitches! May you have a lovely holiday, and for everyone, a peaceful new year.
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Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the greatest adventure films of all time — if not the greatest adventure film of all time, full stop — but here nearly 45 years after its release, it’s also a hugely interesting cultural artifact. When it was first made it was explicitly an act of nostalgia, a throwback to the serial adventures of the 30s and 40s, where every 20-minute installment ended on a cliffhanger to drag you back to the theater the next week to find out what happened. Filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg kept the 20-minute cliffhangers, they just strung them along into a two-hour movie. Into that movie they poured a hero who discovered ancient treasures, beat up Nazis, wooed pretty women who had spunk, and even had a few supernatural events occur, because of course they would, if you’re pilfering the storage locker of God, what do you expect would happen?
It was everything you could want in an old-timey adventure but more — “more” in this case being a decent budget ($20 million, not extravagant by 1980s standards but more than any Republic serial ever got), a rising star in Harrison Ford instead of whatever second-order actor could be cheaply assigned by the studio, and two of the hottest young filmmakers in Hollywood, Spielberg and Lucas (three if you counted Philip Kaufman, who co-wrote the story with them). Spielberg had just flubbed with 1941, so there was some minor tarnish there, but only minor, and Lucas, well. When you have a calling card like Star Wars (followed up by The Empire Strikes Back, which went out to theaters almost exactly the same time as Raiders started principal photography), you have some credibility to burn.
Spielberg and Lucas did not burn their credibility. Raiders was the smash of 1981, the number one movie of the year by a considerable margin, and a massive cultural event that might have been even bigger than it was, had its filmmakers not wedged it between a Star Wars installment and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. We were not starved for absolutely ridiculously huge blockbuster entertainments in the early 1980s, I tell you what. Spielberg and Lucas were cottage industries in of themselves.
45 years on is actually a really good time to think about Raiders of the Lost Ark, because 45 years prior to its release, 1936, was the start of a golden age of movie serials: Universal’s Flash Gordon made its debut and was an instant serialized smash, becoming Universal’s second biggest hit of the year, while Republic Pictures jammed out Darkest Africa and Undersea Kingdom, both with “exotic” locales and/or wild fantasy elements.
By the time 1981 had rolled around, however, serials were very old news. Some were re-edited and repackaged as single films that lived a weird afterlife in local TV channel movie slots, but most were just gone. Flash Gordon had enough cultural cachet that in the wake of Star Wars, Universal decided to make a big budget movie with the character, but not enough cultural cachet to have that movie actually be a hit (Lucas, who had wanted to do a Flash Gordon movie before making Star Wars, may have dodged a bullet).
The serial, as a format, was long dead before Spielberg and Lucas mined its corpse in Raiders, killed by television, a wholesale change in film distribution and theater ownership, and the end of the studio system that give film studios actors under contract that they could plug into these mini-movies at will. Raiders brought back the vibe of serials, but it also upgraded everything about it on the technical and filmmaking side, from story to special effects. No serial was ever as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark. They didn’t have to be; they were mostly filler in a whole program that also included a newsreel, a cartoon, a b-movie and a feature film. Raiders was the main course. It was always meant to be the elevated form of the serial, and was.
And now, how does Raiders fit in to the modern landscape? Well, like the serials at the other end of this timeline, its moment has run its course. The most obvious sign of this was the 2023 installment of the series, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, being the lowest-grossing installment of the series even without factoring for inflation (when you do factor for inflation… ooooof). The film also cost $350 million to make, and was the first of the series not to make a profit at the box office. There are lots of reasons for this, not the least of which was that an octogenarian action hero strained credulity, no matter how much one may love Harrison Ford in the role.
But a lot of it is simply that the world is a different place than it was. An American archeologist grabbing artifacts from their native soil plays a lot differently in 2025 than in 1981, and “it belongs in a museum!” is not the rallying cry it once was. Not to mention that Dr. Jones’ method of procurement for many of these objects is, shall we say, highly unorthodox and possibly ethically suspect. These facts were famously lampooned in a classic McSweeney’s article from 2006, in which Dr. Jones has learned that he has been denied tenure, for the reasons above, and the fact that he has “has failed to complete even one uninterrupted semester of instruction.” Even in our current new and regrettably stupid era of American Exceptionalism, Dr. Jones, his methods and his goals, are now relics.
(Plus, Raiders a little and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, rather a lot, trade in the casual racism of the era, in a way that ranges from mildly annoying to outright ugly. The 80s! What a time to be alive!)
If anything saves Raiders from this latter-day change in the opinions regarding respectable archaeology (and there will be differing opinions about this), it’s the fact that in this movie, and in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, easily the best of the sequels, his actions are at least keeping important and supernaturally-charged ancient objects out of the hands of the damn Nazis, who want them to get a mystical buff to their world-conquering plans. There has never been a bad time to punch a Nazi at any point in the last century, and, alas, this is true even and especially now. Say what you will about his methods and modes of science, but when it comes to punching Nazis, Indiana Jones has no peer.
Time may have passed on Indiana Jones for various reasons, but Raiders of the Lost Ark remains a masterclass in adventure film making. You can follow the action, for one thing — the Michael Bay style of rapid-fire cutting to give action a cocaine-snort boost is still a decade and a half in the future, and very few directors are or have been as good at coherent action and fighting than Spielberg. His battles are physical! And followable! And that makes them enjoyable to watch, rather than exhausting or disorienting, or both. Are there better action directors than Spielberg? I mean, allow me to pull John Woo, for one, from behind the arras. But if you have to deploy John Woo in this sort of argument, you’re already at an exceptionally top-tier level of action competence.
Even then, Raiders, I have to say, outclasses nearly every other action film across all sorts of levels of filmmaking. It’s not just Spielberg working here. It’s Spielberg and Lucas and John Williams and Philip Kaufmann and Lawrence Kasdan and Ben Burtt and Richard Edlund and so on. Raiders is a murderer’s row of filmmakers, all at the top of their game. The movie was nominated for eight Oscars, won four, and was given another for special achievement in sound effects editing. I would argue that you might have to wait for The Lord of the Rings for another film (taking them all as a single film, as they were shot at the same time and shared most of their cast and crew) to get at that level. And The Lord of the Rings was a very very very different sort of adventure film.
One final thing to love about Raiders: Indiana Jones is our square-jawed hero, who is (by the standards of the time the movies are set, and the time the movies are filmed) upright and outstanding… but he also gets the shit kicked out of him a whole bunch. In Raiders and the rest of the series, he bruises, he bleeds, he aches and he limps. He punches the Nazis, yes, but the Nazis sure as hell punch back (he just ends up punching them more). There’s a limit to this because Indiana Jones has to survive every adventure, sure. But in Raiders and in the other films, Spielberg and other folks crafting the stories aren’t afraid to take him right up to the line. If Indiana Jones were real, he would have a massive case of PTSD, and by the time of the final film in the series, he probably wouldn’t be able to walk.
I am a relic of the 80s as much as Raiders of the Lost Ark, and while I acknowledge how storytelling has changed between now and then, as a storytelling vehicle, in many ways it is still peerless and endlessly watchable. It’s distilled the best parts of movie serials from the past, and still has lessons to teach the moviemakers of today in terms of pacing and plot and technique.
I don’t want today’s filmmakers to make another Raiders of the Lost Ark. I want them to look at it and do what Lucas and Spielberg did when they looked at the serials that inspired it: Take all the things are amazing about it, and use today’s tech and techniques to make something that blows the minds of the audience of today.
— JS
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I search my name on a regular basis, not only because I am an ego monster (although I try not to pretend that I’m not) but because it’s a good way for me to find reviews, end-of-the-year “best of” lists my book might be on, foreign publication release dates, and other information about my work that I might not otherwise see, and which is useful for me to keep tabs on. In one of those searches I found that Grok (the “AI” of X) attributed to one of my books (The Consuming Fire) a dedication I did not write; not only have I definitively never dedicated a book to the characters of Frozen, I also do not have multiple children, just the one.
Why did Grok misattribute the quote? Well, because nearly all consumer-facing “AI” are essentially “fancy autocomplete,” designed to find the next likely word rather than offer factual accuracy. “AI” is not actually either intelligent or conscious, and doesn’t know when it’s offering bad information, it just runs its processes and gives a statistically likely answer, which is very likely to be factually wrong. “Statistically likely” does not equal “correct.”
Still, I was curious who other “AI” would tell me I had dedicated The Consuming Fire to. So I asked. Here’s the answer Google gave me in its search page “AI Overview”:
I do have a daughter, but she would be very surprised to learn that after nearly 27 years of being called “Athena,” that her name was “Corbin.” I mean, Krissy and I enjoy The Fifth Element, but not that much. Also I did not dedicate the book to my daughter, under any name.
Here’s Copilot, Microsoft’s “AI”:
I have indeed dedicated (or co-dedicated) several books to Krissy, and I’m glad that Copilot did not believe that my spouse’s name was “Leloo.” But in fact I did not dedicate The Consuming Fire to Krissy.
How did ChatGPT fare? Poorly:
I know at least a couple of people named Corey, and a couple named Cory, but I didn’t dedicate The Consuming Fire to any of them. Also, note that ChatGPT not only misattributed to whom I dedicated the book, it also entirely fabricated the dedication itself. I didn’t ask for the text of the dedication, so ChatGPT voluntarily went out of its way to add extra erroneous information to the mix. Which is… a choice!
I also asked Claude, the “AI” of Anthropic, and to its (and/or Anthropic’s) credit, it was the only “AI” of the batch which did not confidently squirt out an incorrect answer. It admitted it did not have reliable search information on the answer and undertook a few web searches to try to find the information, and eventually told me it could not find it, offering advice instead on how I could find the information myself (for the record, you can find the information online; I did by going to Amazon and searching the excerpt there). So good on Claude for knowing what it doesn’t know and admitting it.
Interestingly, when I went to Grok directly and asked to whom the book was dedicated, it also said it couldn’t find that information. When I asked it why a different instance of itself incorrectly attributed a different dedication to the book, it more or less shrugged and said what I found to be the equivalent of “dude, it happens.” I also checked Gemini directly (which as I understand it powers Google’s Search “AI” Overview) to see if it would also say “I can’t find that information.” Nope:
I’m sure this comes as a surprise to both Ms. Rusch and Mr. Smith, who are (at least on my side) collegial acquaintances but not people I would dedicate a book to. And indeed I did not. When I informed Gemini it had gotten it wrong, it apologized, misattributed The Consuming Fire to another author (C. Robert Cargill, who writes great stuff, just not this), and suggested that he dedicated the book to his wife (he did not) and that her name was “Carly” (it is not).
(I also informed Copilot that it had gotten the dedication wrong, and it also tried again, asserting I dedicated it to Athena. I’m glad Copilot got the name of my kid right, but as previously stated, The Consuming Fire is not dedicated to her.)
So: Five different “AI” and two iterations of two of them, and only Claude would not, at any point, offer up incorrect information about the dedication in The Consuming Fire. Which I will note does not get Claude off the hook for hallucinating information. It has done so before when I’ve queried it about things relating to me, and I’m pretty confident I can get it to do it again. But in this one instance, it did not.
None of them, not even Claude, got the information correct (which is different from “offered up incorrect information”). Two of them, when informed they were incorrect, “corrected” by offering even more incorrect information.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again: I ask “AI” things about me all the time, because I know what the actual answer is, and “AI” will consistently and confidently get those things wrong. If I can’t trust it to get right the things I know, I cannot trust it to get right the things I do not know.
Just to make sure this confident misstating of dedication facts was not personal, I picked a random book not by me off my shelf and asked Gemini (which was still open in my browser) to name to whom the book was dedicated.
It certainly feels like Richard Kadrey might dedicate a book in the Sandman Slim series to the lead singer of The Cramps, but in fact Aloha From Hell is not dedicated to him.
Let’s try another:
Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse may be dedicated to his wife, but if it is, her name is not “Kellie,” as that is not the name in the dedication.
Let’s see if the third time’s the charm:
It’s more accurate to say this was a third strike for Gemini, as G. Willow Wilson did not dedicate Alif the Unseen to a Hasan, choosing instead her daughter, whose name that is not.
So it’s not just me, “AI” gets other book dedications wrong, and (at least here) consistently so. These book dedications are actual known facts anyone can ascertain — you can literally just crack open a book to see to whom a book is dedicated — and these facts are being gotten wrong, consistently and repeatedly, by “AI.” Again, think about all the things “AI” could be getting wrong that you won’t have such wherewithal to check.
What do we learn from this?
One: Don’t use “AI” as a search engine. You’ll get bad information and you might not even know.
Two: Don’t trust “AI” to offer you facts. When it doesn’t know something, it will frequently offer you confidently-stated incorrect information, because it’s a statistical engine, not a fact-checker.
Three: Inasmuch as you are going to have to double-check every “fact” that “AI”” provides to you, why not eliminate the middleman and just not use “AI”? It’s not decreasing your workload here, it’s adding to it.
Does “AI” have uses? Possibly, just not this. I don’t blame “AI” for any of this, it’s not those programs’ fault that the people who own and market them and know they are statistical matching engines willfully and, bluntly, deceitfully position them to be other things. You don’t blame an electric bread maker when some fool declares that it’s an excellent air filter. But you shouldn’t use it as an air filter, no matter how many billions of dollars are being spent to convince you of its air-filtering acumen. Use an actual air filter, damn it.
I dedicate this essay to everyone out there who will take these lessons to heart and not trust “AI” to tell you things. You are the real ones. And that’s a fact.
— JS
oursinI think this is an absolutely terrible idea, and that they should be giving book tokens, and, okay, maybe recommendations, but letting people choose their books:
30 authors on the books they give to everyone
I am in particular stunned by the choices of Some People, e.g. Colm Tóibín's Christmas Downer:
There is a book I buy as a present that never goes out of fashion. It is The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.... the extraordinary plot creeps up and bites you before you know where you are. The narrative curls and twists; the narrator knows too much or too little. But at some point the appalling and ingenious nature of the treachery – what is called “cheating” nowadays – becomes apparent and you feel that you have been let in on some intriguing and explosive secret. It is perfect, thus, for Christmas.
Much as I love them, I would not press into anyone's hands Middlemarch, The Fountain Overflows, Cold Comfort Farm or The Pursuit of Love, urging that they they must read this.
I am reminded of GB Shaw's rewrite of the Golden Rule, about not doing to others as you would be done by, as tastes differ.
Take it away, Sly and the Family Stone!
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Welcome back! It’s our first Whatcha Reading of the month, and that means only one more to go before 2026. Here’s what we’re reading:
Lara: I’m reading and enjoying Dom-Com by Adriana Anders. ( A | BN | K | AB ) I’m finding the growth of trust and intimacy in this book particularly great. There’s a lot of (hot) sex/scenes but each one pushes the characters development and evolution.
Elyse: I’m reading Audition by Katie Kitamura. ( A | BN | K | AB ) It’s not romance but I’ve heard multiple people say it’s wonderful and its shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
It’s also 200 pages which is right where my attention span is right now.
Amanda: I’ve been using my TBR game board and landed on “continue a series.” Throne of Secrets by Kerri Maniscalco ( A | BN | K | AB ) is book two in the Prince of Sin series and I really enjoyed book one. My only gripe is that it’s hardcover and lugging it around is less than ideal.
Carrie: I’m polishing off The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography by Janine Barchas and Isabel Greenberg ( A | BN | K ) and it is delightful.
Sarah: I’m currently reading Magic and Mischief at the Wayside Hotel, which I just started. I think I might have a thing for “magical hotel/boarding house” stories. I know I like innkeeping stories – one of my favorite Nora’s is Born in Ice, about a woman who runs a bed & breakfast, though magic isn’t a major plot point. I’m very curious about where this book is going.
Shana: So I’m currently hate reading Fascinating Womanhood, ( A ) an anti-feminist self help guide published in 1963. It is WILD.Sarah: I’m both intrigued and alarmed.
Shana: I can’t really recommend it. The book feels a bit like if NXIVM and a religious cult had a baby, and that baby spoke with hyperbolic mania.
I’m at the point where the author explains that men’s ideal woman has the “charms of femininity, radiance, good health, and childlikeness.” Also domestic skills and inner happiness.
So a child in a frilly dress, who happily scrubs floors using her healthy body and knowledge of cleaning supplies.
Sarah: Yikes on trikes.
Whatcha reading right now? Tell us in the comments!
conulybrithistorianThis has been a super-stressful week. We had a somewhat lighter than usual round of medical appointments this week, but it was more than made up for by home repair appointments.
We had the garage door installation scheduled for Tuesday, which ended up not being completed that day, so the technician would have to come back Wednesday. Then Tuesday night I discovered that the basement drain was backing up whenever we used the washing machine, dishwasher, or kitchen sink, so I called the plumbing company for that, but they weren't able to send a plumber out until Friday afternoon.
Then Wednesday night, right after the garage door technician left, L. discovered that the washing machine was leaking (totally not related to the basement drain backing up). I tried to fix it, but ended up making it worse. So I had A. call an appliance repair service, who said they could send someone over Thursday morning.
Thursday morning the appliance repair technician came and fixed the dishwasher. Then I had to take A. to get allergy shots, then we went to Ricky's house, where I shoveled the 7-8 inches of snow we'd gotten over the previous two days. (He doesn't drive, but I had to shovel a path from the street to his door so Meals on Wheels could deliver and also to shovel his back stairs to he could let his dogs out.) I'm still sore from this.
Today I had a National Heritage Responders meeting (which went very well), then I had to wait for the plumber to arrive and fix the basement drain. We had originally had a noon to 3PM window for him to show up, which got pushed back to a 2:30PM to 4:30PM window and he ended up showing up at about 3:45PM.
All the house things have been successfully fixed, and we're planning to enjoy this weekend's cold weather from inside the house as much as possible. (It's -2°F out right now, and supposed to go down from here, then only to get as high as 0°F tomorrow, and not to get into actual positive temperatures until Sunday.) But anyway, that's why I've got a massive mental backlog of posts I want to make, and why I've got a folder in my email of comments from you that I want to respond to, and so forth. I hope you're all doing well.
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About a decade ago there was some noise made about trying to figure out what day on the calendar Ferris Bueller’s Day Off took place. The day that was decided on by the nerds who think too much about this sort of thing was June 5, 1985. This was decided largely by the fact that the Cubs game Ferris, Cameron and Sloane were seen attending happened on that day, and apparently you can’t argue with the baseball schedule.
I can argue with the baseball schedule, and I will tell you that June 5, 1985 is not Ferris Bueller’s day off. For one thing, anyone who knows Midwest school schedules knows that by June 5th, all the kids are out of school. For another thing, asserting that the Cubs game, which our trio only attend, is definitive, when the Von Steuben Day parade, which Ferris actually inserts himself into, is disregarded, is nonsensical cherry picking of the highest order. The Von Steuben Day parade was as real as the Cubs game, and took place on September 28, 1985. If any real world day has to be picked, I would pick that one.
Except that one won’t work either. September 28, 1985 was a Saturday, for one, and it’s too early in the school year for Ferris’ hijinks, for another. We know Ferris has skipped school nine times by the time The Day Off rolls around, and missing nine days when school has been in for barely a month is a lot, even for Ferris. Ferris is a free spirit, not a chronic truant.
If one must pick a specific day — a questionable assertion, as I will relate momentarily — it would most likely be a day in late April, when Baseball is in season, the kids are not quite yet attuned to things like prom and graduation (and for the seniors, college), spring has sprung in the Chicagoland area, and Ferris would decide that that the day is too great to spend all cooped up in class.
But ultimately, trying to pin The Day Off to an actual calendar day is folly — and not only folly but absolutely antithetical to the point of The Day Off. The point of The Day Off is freedom and possibility, not to pin it down with facts and schedules. Facts and schedules are for classes! The Day Off doesn’t ask for any of that. It only asks: What will you do, if you can do whatever you want?
What Ferris wants is to have a day in Chicago with his best friend Cameron and girlfriend Sloane. Inconveniently that is a school day, and while Ferris has bucked the system before (nine times!), as he says to the camera — Ferris breaks the fourth wall more and better than anyone before or since, yes, even better than Deadpool, I said what I said — if he does it again after this, he’ll have to barf up a lung to make it stick. That being the case, The Day Off needs to be a day more than just hanging with friends. It has to be an event. Making it so will, among other things, require the “borrowing” of an expensive car, the chutzpah to brazen one’s way into a place that will serve you pancreas, the cunning to evade parents and school principals and, significantly, the ability to make your depressive best friend confront his own fears.
Oh, and, singing “Twist and Shout” in a parade. As you do.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out the summer before I was a senior in high school, which meant when I watched it I was very much oh, here’s a role model. Not for the skipping of school precisely; I went to a boarding school and lived in a dorm, skipping days was a rather more complicated affair than it would have been in a public school. But the anarchic style, the not taking school more seriously than it should be taken, the willingness to risk a little trouble for a little freedom — well, that appealed to me a lot.
Before you ask, no, I did not, become a True Acolyte of Ferris. I lived in the real world and wanted to get into college, and while at the time I could not personally articulate the fact that inherent in Ferris’ ability to flout the system was a frankly immense amount of privilege, I understood it well enough. Ferris gets his day off because he’s screenwriter/director John Hughes’ special boy. The rest of us don’t have that luck. Nevertheless, if one could not be Ferris all the time, would it still be wrong to have a Ferris moment or two, when the opportunity presented itself? I thought not. I had my small share of Ferris moments and didn’t regret them.
(I even got called “Ferris” once or twice! Not in high school, but in college, at The University of Chicago, where somewhat exceptionally among my peers at that famously intensive school, I didn’t grind or panic about my grades, I would actually leave campus to see concerts and plays and to visit a girl at Northwestern, and I got a job straight out of college reviewing movies for a newspaper, in the middle of a recession. I apparently made it all look easy, thus, “Ferris.” Spoiler: It wasn’t all easy, not by a long shot, the girl at Northwestern wanted to be just friends, and I got that job because I was willing to be paid less on a weekly basis than the newspaper paid its interns. I only achieved Ferris-osity if one didn’t look too closely.)
There has been the observation among Gen-Xers that you know you’re old when you stop identifying less with Ferris and more with Principal Rooney (this is also true when applied to the students of The Breakfast Club and Vice-Principal Vernon). I’ve never gotten to that point, but it’s surely true that Ferris becomes less of a character goal and more of a character study as one gets older. Ferris himself understands that he is living in a moment that’s not going to last: As he says in the movie, he and Cameron will soon graduate, they’ll go to separate colleges and that’s going to be that for them. Ferris’ trickster status is predicated in his being in a place and time where his (let’s face it mild) acts of transgression have little consequence. The penalties for him here are of the “I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record” sort, and even those are thwarted by Cameron letting him off the hook for property damage and a soror ex machina moment. Ferris knows it, which I think is why he takes advantage of it. After graduation, things get harder for everyone, even for privileged white boys from the north suburbs.
This might mean that Ferris eventually becomes one of those people who realizes he’s peaked in high school, and what an incredibly depressing realization that might be from him (Cameron, on the other hand, will not peak in high school; once he’s out of his dad’s house he’s going to thrive. Sloane is going to be just fine, too).
I do wonder, from time to time, what has become of Ferris. Many years ago I wrote about what I think happened to Holden Caufield of Catcher in the Rye; I said I expected he went into advertising, was good at selling things to “the youth” and became a mostly functional alcoholic. My expectations for Ferris are similar, although more charitable: He goes to Northwestern, is popular but not nearly at the same level (Northwestern has a lot of Ferris types at it), gets a job in marketing, does very well at it, marries someone who is not Sloane, moves back to his hometown when they have kids and when they get old enough to go to his high school, he bores them with his stories about his time there. The kids, it turns out, didn’t ditch. Ferris has grandkids now. He keeps in touch with Cameron and Sloane through Facebook. They’re fine. He’s fine. It’s all fine.
If it sounds like I’ve given Ferris an ordinary life, well, that’s kind of the point. Early on, I said the point of The Day Off was, what will you do, if you can do whatever you want? It turns out, for all his cleverness and antics and quoting of John Lennon, what Ferris wanted was actually pretty ordinary: To have a great day with his friends, while he still could have a great day with his friends. And, well: Who wouldn’t? Just because what he wants is ordinary doesn’t mean it isn’t good, or that it wasn’t a shining moment that all three of them will be glad all their lives that they got to have. Our lives are made of moments like these, where one day you get to do what you want with the people who matter to you, and you look around and you say to yourself, yes, this.
Most us don’t then mount a parade float and lipsync to a Beatles cover, true, and if we did we would probably get arrested. But this is why Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a fable, and why the actual date of The Day Off doesn’t matter. What matters, and why I come back to this movie, is the joy of a perfect day, with the people that will make it perfect. My Day Off isn’t this day off. But I’ve had one or two of them, and, hopefully, so have you.
— JS
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