Twenty-two years ago I was too young to compare my all-time favorite movie characters to see which one would be the ideal mate. I was a little young for that kind of thing but there was always a clear winner in my mind. So what if I didn’t really get the whole boyfriend-girlfriend-love-hate-sex thing? I knew who I’d rather, and haven’t wavered from that choice since. I thought I’d run down my comparison of the two characters, and see if I can find out what, exactly, draws me to one over the other.
Let’s start with Ferris.
How much fun is Ferris Bueller to be around? The guy’s got a whole gamut of tricks up his sleeve to make adolescence super-fun, like pre-recorded doorbell greetings and the ability to convince the school principal that he was your dad and get you out of a boring class so you can spend the day cavorting around the windy city. He’s audacious, cunning, persuasive, and spontaneous. He has the wherewithal to not only coax his best friend off his death bed to join you, but also (albeit apprehensively) to coerce him into taking his father’s precious Porsche for a joyride. He’ll show you the best time of your life. He’ll shock you with his ability to upstage the headliner of a major parade, take you to a museum, to a fancy restaurant, to the top of the tallest building in town, all the while maintaining enough composure to steer clear of the powers that be that may just ruin your great time. He’ll make you think that all of this deviancy is okay simply because “look how much fun you’re having!” And you’ll believe him. He’s shameless, brazen, loud, hysterical, proud, impulsive, lighthearted, entertaining, creative, clever, and flattering. He’s more fun than any 17 year old ever to walk the earth. And you love him.
He’s also embarrassing, crass, loud, cunning, sly, self-centered, lazy, arrogant, bold, spoiled, and overbearing. He gets whatever he wants, whenever he wants. I suppose some people would be envious, like Cameron. And girls like Sloane love to be with him because they are the female equivalents. See, the problem with Ferris is he’ll make you think he’s loyal, and he very well may be. For now. All it takes is a couple of bikini clad women sunbathing and Ferris stops in his tracks like the Road Runner. He’ll make you think he’s serious about you, that he wants to marry you and have little Ferrises, but deep down you know he’s not really serious. He doesn’t really have any ambition to do anything except party like it’s 1999. (In 1986 this was still a big hit.) Hell, he probably won’t even graduate if he doesn’t stop skipping school all the time.
Enter Lloyd Dobler.
You probably don’t even know who Lloyd Dobler is and how amazing he thinks you are. Lloyd admires from afar for a long time before he musters the guts to give you a call. This call only comes after he sat 5 tables away from you in the mall cafeteria and told all his friends that you had a “date”. Mind you, Lloyd is the guy who has lots of girl-friends, none of whom are, or ever will be, anything more than friends. You won’t know it, but he’ll be pacing around the bathroom while he talks to you, and he’ll talk so much that he’ll convince you to go out with him, even though you are convinced that you’ll never have a good time, but you think what the hell. He’ll be polite to your father, and to him, every detail of the evening will be a big deal. He’ll be generous, sacrificing his own inebriation for the sake of the safety of the entire party. He’ll check on you every so often to make sure you are having a good time, but not in a creepy, suspicious way. In a caring, respectable, and attentive way. You’ll start to find him quite charming and not at all how you initially judged him. He’ll open doors for you, kick glass out of your way, visit your dad in jail for you, drop everything and move to Europe for you. He’s a family guy. He’s ambitious. And when you push him away, like you know you will, he’ll wake you up at the crack of dawn and blast that oh-so-romantic song that you first made love to.
Some might say, “Hey, he also might be the guy that can’t do anything without you. He might be the kind of guy that gets upset when it’s “girls night out”. If you’re in the bathroom too long he might come in and ask “what’re you doing?” He might read your email over your shoulder and be jealous of everything you do without him and whoever you talk to. Maybe he’ll ask you to throw out all of your old photos and memorabilia.
Lloyd Dobler? Naahh. Well, at least I hope not.
The thing is, if I look at Ferris and I look at Lloyd, and I try to picture each of them in 20 or 30 years from where the end of their flicks left off, it’s really tough for me to picture Ferris as a man with a wife and kids. Lloyd, on the other hand, well, I imagine him and Diane living in some duplex in London, sipping tea and watching the little ones play hopscotch or some shit.
Question is, what do you think?
You’re still here? It’s over. Go home. Go!
