I just saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off for the first time today (shocking!), and I noticed some things that got me thinking about the film from a philosophical standpoint.
Primarily, Ferris Bueller is about power and the subversion of it. A lot of movies are about power (Office Space comes to mind), but Bueller stands out, for a few reasons.
Ferris himself is a de facto revolutionary: He overtly usurps the power of the Dean of Students and the school system at large, this is obvious enough. But his sister, Jeanne, is the key.
For the whole movie, Jeanne is jealous of Ferris and his ability to do what he wants and get away with it (as she reveals to Charlie Sheen in the police station), but in her jealousy, she attempts to support the power structure precisely because she knows that Ferris himself is in fact not sick at all. The point is that when she tries to notify the Dean, she herself is dubbed an "asshole" and told to get back to class. No one will believe her, and all attempts to foil her brother blow up in her face.
In the final scene in the movie, Jeanne is confronted with two choices, when the Dean accosts Ferris by the back door: Which does she hate more, her brother's ability to subvert the machine, or the machine itself? Ultimately, Jeanne chooses to save her brother because of the way the machine abused her when she tried to aid the power structure in stopping her brother.
This was the correct thing to do, from Jeanne's point of view, and her story demonstrates succinctly why people become revolutionaries in the first place: They play by the rules as best they can, but their good deeds only get them in more trouble, and they see that there is no way to succeed in the labyrinth in which they find themselves. They conclude that the only chance for happiness and/or success (or whatever it is that they are after) is the complete destruction of the system of power under which they exist.
No real reason is given as to exactly why Ferris is a revolutionary; he is more or less taken for granted, but if we follow the lietmotif of his sister's complaint, he does because he can (or, from the point of view of Kant, he must, because he can).
The "Save Ferris"campaign, while just a humorous subplot, actually plays an important role in the subversion of authority, in that people truly believe that he is sick, which makes it much more difficult for the machine to exercise its power. It is through this campaign that we have a complete picture: We have the primary Revolutionary (Ferris), his allies in school who have joined the cause and launched the larger campaign, and we have the counterrevolutionary who eventually joins his cause.
Power itself is portrayed in the figure of the Dean of Students, Mr. Rooney, who makes it his personal crusade to stop Ferris Bueller. Mr. Rooney himself is an absurd, comical figure who, in his almost blind pursuit of Bueller, is the cause of his own undoing. The thoughtless overreaction of power only makes it less trustworthy, and eventually it will collapse (the Dean of Students breaking and entering a student's home!?). It could be argued that Ferris Bueller did nothing: that if Mr. Rooney had simply allowed Ferris his ninth day off (ten days is failing; anything below that is acceptable, which makes the situation of Mr. Rooney that much more absurd), everything would have gone on as normal.
Cameron remains an anomaly in this context, but his story is much more reminiscent of The Stranger by Albert Camus: He just so happened to be friends with Ferris, and more or less did whatever he was told to do for most of the film. Yet, his experience with Ferris led him to a new-found greatness, and through it he was able to assert his own agency. Much like Mersault asserts his agency when he is sentenced to die, Cameron only asserts himself when he is totally liberated from responsibility, when there is absolutely nothing he can do to hide the fact that he used his father's beloved Ferrari. Was there any kind of choice open to Cameron? Recall when he is desperately trying to decide whether or not to pick up Ferris and join in his revolutionary shenanigans: "If I don't go, he's going to keep calling me. If I do go, we're going to get into trouble." Why was he sick (Cameron was truly sick, whereas Ferris was just faking it)? Because he could not choose: he was "afraid of everything." Being with Ferris, however, opened him up to real possibility, despite his weak protests, and ultimately, through the inevitability of punishment by his father, he was able to assert himself as a free agent.
Some people boast of being able to "play the game" (cooperate with the system and get what I want), and, frequently notify me of my abject failure to "play the game". But, obviously, that isn't what is going on here: This is pure revolution, a full-scale dismantlement of the power structure (what do you think happened to Mr. Rooney after the credits rolled? How could he possibly remain at his job?). Even more than that is the ability of our protagonists to undertake their project without arousing the suspicion of lesser agents of the power structure, namely, Ferris's parents. They were preoccupied by Jeanne, whose erratic behavior was consistently misinterpreted, leading to her defection to her brother.
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