“Risky Business”–another 1980s hit that glorified psychopaths and narcissists.

Posted on July 29, 2015 by luckyotter

A while back, I wrote an article about the 1980s teen hit movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and how its title character–the hero of the movie–was actually a raging (but extremely charming) psychopath who scored high on Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist.

I realized that most of the movie hits marketed to teens in the 1980s also idealize narcissism and psychopathy/sociopathy. One of the must successful movies of that era was a movie starring a then-unknown young actor named Tom Cruise (who I highly suspect of being an extremely malignant narcissist and probably a psychopath himself). I had a huge crush on him; many of my friends did too. But what was it about Joel Goodson (Cruise) that made him so attractive, that set the stage that turned Tom Cruise into a megastar and cultural icon whose fame (or infamy?) is still growing to this day?

I think one of the reasons these films were so popular was because the implications that sociopathy was A-okay came at the perfect time–when material values like wealth and power were beginning to be idealized over the humility and idealistic values of earlier generations. The fact that the movie starred people just entering young adulthood (and was marketed to a teen audience) made sure the next generation of adults would get the not-so-subtle message that psychopathy and narcissism are necessary to be happy and succeed in life.

The now iconic “dancing in underwear” scene.

The protagonist, Joel Goodson, was a studious, vulnerable, somewhat nervous kid, not much unlike Cameron in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” He studied hard, made good grades, and obeyed his parents. He was naive and unassuming and just a little nerdy. But he was nice and seemed fairly popular in the low key kind of way enjoyed by smart, good kids who don’t make waves, especially when they’re as adorably handsome as Cruise was.

But Goodson was being tainted by his charming but sociopathic friend, an unattractive but uber-cool, edgy kid named Miles (Curtis Armstrong). Miles was the Ferris Bueller to Cruise’s Cameron, and his main goal was to “reform” him of his prosocial ways. His main advice (and the most important as it turned out) was his mantra “Sometimes you just have to say what the f*ck” (in this sense meaning not giving a damn and doing what you want).

Goodson’s parents go on vacation, leaving him in charge of their stately suburban Chicago home (why are these movies always taking place in upper middle class Chicago suburbs?) Miles encourages Joel to loosen up and have fun and not worry about consequences. He raids the Goodson’s parents’ liquor cabinet, gets Joel to smoke pot, and cons him to take part in antisocial escapades. He also invites prostitutes and other unwholesome types of people to Joel’s home while his parents are away.

Rebecca DeMornay as Lana.

One of the prostitutes is a gorgeous blonde named Lana (Rebecca DeMornay) who seems to care about Joel in a maternal, nurturing way. Despite her questionable profession, she seems to be the best thing that could happen to Joel. She’s the empathetic mother Joel never had, whose own mother seems almost as cold as the mother in “Ordinary People.” Lana listens to him. He confides in her. She’s using him–but he’s too naive to know it yet.

Joel’s falling helplessly in love, but Lana has her own agenda. She invites (without asking Joel’s permission) some of her other prostitute friends over to Joel’s house, including Vicki, who is Lana’s best friend. They all go out to party along with Miles and a few of Joel’s other friends and get so stoned that they forget the put Joel’s new Porsche in the right gear when parking and it rolls down the hill into a lake. The car is filled with water and must be pumped out. Joel panics–he can’t afford the repairs but his parents will kill him if they find out. What to do?

Lana comes to the rescue. She talks Joel into having a party, in which all her friends will be there and take money for sex with all Joel’s friends and he can earn enough from the proceeds to get his car repaired before his parents come home. Plans are made for it to happen.

Miles advising Joel.

Meanwhile, Lana’s pimp Guido (Joe Pantoliano) is causing more problems for Joel. He’s stalking her for money she owes him and Joel is caught in the fray. Lana doesn’t seem too worried about it though. As a narcissist herself, she doesn’t worry about much of anything. Joel falls more deeply under Lana’s thrall. But she has other plans. Guido keeps stalking Joel and Lana, demanding his money.

Party day arrives, and is more successful (and makes more money) than Joel could have dreamed. The only low point was when an officer from Princeton’s School of Business Administration decided to show up randomly at the door at the party’s high point, with everyone drinking and having sex in every room and bills exchanging fists. The interview ends and the officer appears to leave.

Joel’s in an awkward position, but tries to enjoy the rest of the party. Meanwhile, the Princeton officer has never left. He’s in one of the rooms having sex with one of Lana’s friends.

The “new and improved” Joel Goodson.

After the party, Lana and Joel make love on an empty Chicago “El” train. Moody music plays and their lovemaking is tender and romantic–for the moment it seems like this hardened prostitute could be falling for Joel as much as he’s fallen for her.

When Joel returns home, he finds his parents’ home has been cleaned out, including his mother’s rare and expensive Steuben glass egg. His parents are due home in hours. Panicking, he calls Lana but gets Guido, who informs him the only way he can get the furniture and the egg back is by buying them back. Joel gets his friends together and they all go to Guido’s house where Joel’s parents’ possessions are being held hostage in the back of a van. They manage to get everything back and have it in its proper place just as Joel’s parents return home, to find their house looking as if it’s never been touched–except for one thing: a small crack in the Steuben egg.

In spite of that, Joel’s father tells him he’s proud of him for being so responsible and being accepted into Princeton– it turns out the officer who wound up bedding a whore was impressed with Joel’s enterprising nature and thought Princeton “could use someone like Joel.” He and Lana remain friends, but Joel’s changed. His attitude is a lot more cocky and confident than before. His reticence but also his conscience seem to be gone.

Official Trailer.

Ferris Bueller, Psychopath.

Posted on April 2, 2015 by luckyotter

One of my favorite 1980s movies (which I have probably watched at least 50 times, because it’s always on TV) is John Hughes’ humorous 1986 study of teenage narcissist Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) and his plot to gallivant about Chicagoland with his girlfriend and his nervous, codependent friend Cameron in hopes of getting him to loosen up and live a little.

Ferris Bueller is a likeable character, who certainly doesn’t seem like a psychopath, only because his intentions are generally good (or seem to be), but the way he goes about achieving his goals flirts with lawbreaking and causes a lot of other people an awful lot of trouble. Ferris, for his part, seems too good-hearted to qualify for malignant narcissism or psychopathy, but given that this is a movie that was made in the Reagan era–the beginning of America’s love affair with narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors–its narcissistic hero must be likeable, while its real hero (Principal Rooney) is portrayed as a foolish villain with an extremely unlikeable personality. Then again, many psychopaths have considerable charm, and Ferris can shovel on the charm with the skill of a cult leader or a used car salesman.

Ferris is the most popular kid in school, because he’s just so cool. He’s not afraid of anyone or anything. He’s not a jock, so the geeks and nerds like him. He’s not a great student, so the troublemakers don’t mind him. He’s not enough of a dork or a geek to be disliked by the cheerleaders and football stars, so they like him too. Ferris has no enemies among the student body and offends no one–except the school’s staff, who see the psychopathy and narcissism behind Ferris’ outgoing, friendly, slightly eccentric but cool persona. They know he’s really just a spoiled brat who cares only about his own self-gratification.

Ferris is almost cloyingly nice, lies constantly, cons his friends, and is generally full of shit most of the time, but you can’t help liking him, even with all his over the top narcissism and psychopathic behaviors. He drives all his teachers insane. His principal Edward R. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones) hates Bueller so much that a large part of the movie’s plot involves his quest to “get back at” Ferris for being truant yet again (apparently truancy is a bad habit of Ferris’s), chasing him all over the Chicago suburbs, and of course, failing miserably and looking like a pathetic fool by the film’s end for even trying. Ferris Bueller always wins.

Ferris Bueller, psychopathic hero.

Back at home, Ferris’ family is clearly dysfunctional. His mother (Cindy Pickett) is an ’80s-style malignant narcissist who has chosen Ferris as her Golden Child. In her eyes, Ferris is perfect and can do no wrong, even when the evidence to the contrary is right in her face. Ferris’ sister, Jeannie (Jennifer Grey), always gets the blame for everything that goes wrong and takes the punishment for Ferris’s shenanigans. Their mother obviously hates her guts. These two women are both as evil as they come, and I would bet that’s the reason they can’t stand each other. The mother obviously sees her daughter as competition.

While Jeannie is a nasty piece of work and an envious, spiteful malignant narcissist not much different from her mother, she’s clearly the family scapegoat so you can’t help feeling a little sorry for her in spite of her repellent personality and plot to destroy her brother, who she envies and hates with the white hot heat of ten thousand suns. Mr. Bueller (Lyman Ward) barely has a personality at all. As is typical of these kinds of movies and television sit-coms, Mr. Bueller is a slightly bumbling one-dimensional background character who always submits to his wife’s iron-fisted will. Clearly he’s codependent, but we don’t find out much else about him, except that he holds some sort of high paying white collar job, given the sort of upper-middle class neighborhood the family lives in.

Bueller’s best friend is the highly neurotic, schizoid/avoidant and obsessive-compulsive uber-geek Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck), a kid who’s so tightly wound you’re afraid just watching him might cause him to blow a gasket. Ferris only means well for poor Cameron, and takes on “rehabilitating” his jittery, schizoid friend by convincing him to skip school for a day for a wild joyride through downtown Chicago, in (what else?) Cameron’s psychopathic dad’s brand new red Ferrari. (We know his dad is psychopathic even though he’s never on screen because of Cameron’s visible terror over the prospect of his dad finding out there were additional miles on the Ferrari at the end of the day). One can be pretty certain that Cameron is the scapegoat of his dysfunctional family. In addition to what seems to be severe OCD and schizoid traits, Cameron seems like he may be suffering from severe PTSD as well. The kid just isn’t right in the head.

Cameron, Ferris’ schizoid/avoidant codependent friend.

Ferris’ day begins with an elaborately feigned illness set up so that he doesn’t have to go to school, and of course his adoring mother believes his bullshit and even starts talking baby talk to him. Ferris plays the part of the adored infant, making cute faces and noises for his mother’s benefit as he lies “sick” in bed. This is an adolescent who is still his mother’s “baby.” He never has to grow up or take responsibility for anything.

Ferris sets out to “rehabilitate” his nervous, paranoid friend Cameron, by convincing him to take the day off school and cons him into borrowing his father’s brand new expensive red Ferrari. He arranges for his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) to get out of school too by pretending to be her grandfather, telling the school that she has to attend her grandmother’s funeral.

And off they go. It’s hard to imagine how these three teenagers could get so much accomplished between 8 AM and 3 PM–attending a baseball game at Wrigley Field, dining at an expensive French restaurant (and enraging the snobbish maitre’d in the process), attending the Chicago Art Museum, and finally a huge parade through downtown Chicago, in which Ferris, naturally, steals the show by lip-synching the Beatles while dancing on a float. Like many skilled narcissists, he has irresistible charm and endless charisma. He’s an anti-hero for the Reagan era.

At the museum.

As the day nears its end, the kids lounge by the poolside. Cameron asks Ferris if he checked he miles on the Ferrari, and the bad news is that there’s no way to hide the number of miles they used from Cameron’s psychopathic father. Cameron blows a gasket at the news and enters a catatonic state of terror, while Ferris and Sloane go skinny dipping in the pool.

Feigning concern and empathy for his friend, Ferris talks Cameron out of his catatonic fog (which may have been feigned since he admitted he saw Sloane nude in the pool) and tries to roll back the miles on the Ferrari by running it in reverse. It doesn’t work, and Cameron loses the last shred of composure he may have had and throws a tantrum, ranting about his cold, unloving father and how he only cares about his car and wealth and cares nothing for his son. He begins to kick the Ferrari, which becomes loose from its anchors (it has its own private house), and the kids watch as the car crashes through the plate glass windows, and speeds off the hillside into a ditch below, becoming a smoking, totalled hulk. This is the only part of the movie that’s somewhat serious, and it’s hard watching Cameron realize just how abused and unloved he is. You worry what might happen when his father finds out his car has been totalled, but for Cameron, his rage was cathartic and he assures Ferris and Sloane that “No, it’s good.”

Meanwhile, Principal Rooney is on a quest to find Ferris and make him pay for his truancy and glib lies. Although possibly the only character in the movie with the slightest sense of morality, Rooney is made out to be a bumbling and spiteful fool who himself breaks the law by trespassing on the Buellers’ property and eventually breaking and entering.

Rooney, enraged by Bueller’s continued truancy, leaves the school for the entire day to stalk Ferris, even going to his house, where the Bueller’s dog attacks him. Meanwhile, sister Jeannie is on her own quest for retribution, but upon finding Rooney in their house, screams and runs to the police station to report an intruder. While there, she recruits a stoned juvenile delinquent (Charlie Sheen) to help her in her plot to exact revenge on Ferris. Of course it turns out that Sheen is another one of Ferris’ best buddies.

Mrs. Bueller, finding her daughter at the police station, flies into a rage and drags her home, berating Jeannie the entire time. As hateful as Jeannie is, her mother is more so. When questioned why she wanted to get her brother in trouble, Jeannie’s answer is, “why should HE get away with everything? I would get caught.”

Jeannie Bueller, envious malignant narcissist.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is uproariously funny, but the dark truth is that it’s also a movie glorifying narcissism and psychopathy. It’s a movie about two disturbed boys (one probably psychopathic, the other codependent and probably suffering severe PTSD), and their dysfunctional, abusive families, with a subplot about incompetent school staff who break into students’ homes.

In 2009, Ruthless Reviews wrote an article, “Ferris Bueller, Psychopath,” which describes exactly how Ferris fits the criteria for Dr. Robert Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist. Pretty fascinating stuff here.

Only Rooney recognizes Bueller as a pernicious force that will certainly create great suffering and perhaps death later in life. A lone crusader, Rooney goes well beyond the duties of his job in an attempt to hunt down and destroy a budding monster. He is the Van Helsing to Ferris Bueller’s Dracula, the Dr. Loomis to his Michael Meyers. That’s because Bueller is a textbook psychopath. Let’s use the esteemed criteria of Robert D. Hare, the man who largely fathered the modern diagnosis and study of psychopathy.

Edward R. Rooney, the “villain”: lone crusader against psychopathy.

NOTE: The PCL-R is a clinical rating scale (rated by a psychologist or other professional) of 20 items. Each of the items in the PCL-R is scored on a three-point scale according to specific criteria through file information and a semi-structured interview. A value of 0 is assigned if the item does not apply, 1 if it applies somewhat, and 2 if it fully applies. In addition to lifestyle and criminal behavior the checklist assesses glib and superficial charm, grandiosity, need for stimulation, pathological lying, cunning and manipulating, lack of remorse, callousness, poor behavioral controls, impulsivity, irresponsibility, failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions and so forth. The scores are used to predict risk for criminal re-offence and probability of rehabilitation.

I have copied Ferris’ psychopathy scores here; read the linked article for detailed descriptions of why Ferris fits all these criteria. The articles’s too long to reprint here. It’s a great read.

Factor 1: Personality “Aggressive narcissism”

Glibness/superficial charm: score 2/2

Grandiose sense of self-worth: score 2/2

Pathological lying: score 2/2

Cunning/manipulative: score 2/2

Lack of remorse or guilt: score 2/2

Shallow affect: score 2/2

Callous/lack of empathy: score 2/2

Failure to accept responsibility for own actions: score 2/2

Promiscuous sexual behavior: score 0/2 (This is the only low score in the “aggressive narcissism” factor)

The fact that Bueller scores so highly on the first factor, aggressive narcissism, tells us that he is probably a case of primary psychopathy, meaning psychopathy is his root condition and probably biological, as opposed to being caused by other disorders or a poor environment.

Ferris Bueller, pathological liar.

Factor 2: “Socially deviant lifestyle”

Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom: score 2/2

Parasitic lifestyle: score 1/2

Poor behavioral control: score 2/2

Lack of realistic, long-term goals: score 0/2

Impulsivity: 2/2

Irresponsibility: 2/2

Juvenile delinquency: score 2/2

Early behavior problems: score 1/2

Revocation of conditional release: score 1/2

Traits not correlated with either factor

Many short-term marital relationships: score 1/2

Criminal versatility: 1/2

Total Score (for psychopathy): 31/40

Bueller’s score is impressive. A score of 30 is considered clearly psychopathic and, from what I can gather, is pretty uncommon. Erase the ease and privilege of his environment, and his young age, and he might score even higher in categories like “parasitic lifestyle” and “criminal versatility.” Rooney might be kind of an authoritarian prick himself, but then so was his doppelganger, Dirty Harry. Only Rooney can see the danger Bueller poses, especially as he has established a strong influence over other students. I’ve already mentioned it, but Ferris seems like a natural for politics (especially in Illinois) and the idea of him holding a powerful position is terrifying.

While Bueller cavalierly risks life, limb and jail for his own gratification, Rooney does the same in order to thwart and stifle a young psychopath. He would have succeeded too, if only Bueller’s dingbat sister hadn’t caved in at the end. Now Ferris will continue unimpeded and, by 2014, he will be voting to escalate drone attacks because of campaign contributions from Lockheed Martin. And he won’t lose a wink of sleep over it.