MosesWrites
“I’ll tell you what, dipsh*t, you don’t like my policies, you can just come on down here and smooch by big old white butt,” Principal Ed Rooney urges, “pucker up, buttercup.”
Never has the undoing of a school leader been more wonderfully portrayed than Ferris Bueller’s takedown of this jealous, resentful, and egotistical administrator.
Ferris couldn’t have had his adventure without the perfect foil, a wrongly righteous Tybalt attempting to thwart a magical day with his striking girlfriend and childhood buddy.
Ed Rooney rules as if the fate of the world depended on honest attendance and orderly education. No matter the students snooze, blow bubble-gum bubbles, listen to monotone, droning faculty attempting to excite with voodoo economics. Hard times, facts!
Even Ferris’ far more strait-laced sister comes around to his antics.
Rooney wants power, he can’t resist posing his authority against anything that smacks of independence.
Sure, Ferris engages in some ethically dubious deception to enact his masterful plan, to feign illness and skip school—yet he does so without any willful intent to harm. In the grand scheme of adolescent hijinks, Ferris’ desire to entertain and to share joy overwhelms as an honesty greater than some computer hacking misdeeds.
Then amongst a day of triumphs, of dodging his parents and assuming various airs of Ferrari-driving importance, Ferris triumphantly captivates the city of Chicago by covering the Beatles’ classic “Twist and Shout.”
Construction workers and corporate suits, black and white, young and old, homely and handsome, the greatest cast of American urban characters twist and shout: a beautiful sunny June day and what else but to sing and dance.
Ferris takes a sedate parade and turns it into a moment of carefree human flourishing. Joy. For what else ought we to strive amongst the crooked timber of humanity? No straight thing was ever made, Ed.
Exactly: twist and shout, in striking contrast to Rooney’s shouting, the entrenched if shallow and self-centered, cling-to-power urgency of his office.
Rooney, ultimately, can’t control his own jealousy. Ferris threatens his fragile masculinity. Ferris has a charisma and conviction he can’t begin to match. So Rooney does everything possible to curtail what he can’t have, only to accelerate his own downfall.
I can empathize. Having had a highly circumscribed, grief-ridden adolescence, I looked on with envy at so many of my carefree peers. I quietly scorned their romance and flirtatious sneaking about, their explorations of self and subversions of authority. While at fourteen I balanced checkbooks and solicited reroofing estimates and retrenched prudence they made out like bandits.
The triumph of the outsider, of one scorned rising to rightful recognition, animates endless great tales, from Rhodopis to the crystalized myth of Cinderella.
You’re insecure, don’t know what for—WMYB—you don’t know you’re beautiful—so many variations, One Direction.
Yet unlike Rooney, those protagonists accept self-doubt as a capacity for improvement, they accept the promise of possibility against disparaging others for having what they haven’t. They needn’t baseless authoritarian anger to supplant their insecurity.
Still, I empathize, too: the frustration of management, the insolence, the entitlement and petty slights. Leading a school, working with children, doesn’t spare one frustration. Mustering generosity of spirit takes tremendous work.
Ultimately, we lead by example, we ought to guide the impetuous into opportunity for greater growth. We can get to work and twist and shout.
Such self-awareness reflects self-control, a trait of character that reveals deliberative capacity. A screaming principal does far worse, ethically, than anything Ferris conjures, on display in front of students in the most inexcusable of ways: a lack of kindness, of forbearance, of the unconditional care that founds any true and meaningful authority.
Would you trust them otherwise, not least with children?
Much gets revealed in such Rooney-like moments.
Alas many Rooney’s endure, yet I’ve found too we can cultivate better ways of leadership through empowering those who can still access vulnerability in honest ways, who will still ask difficult questions. Whatever the hardships of past and present, the faults in our own families, the disappointments and apparently greater accomplishments of others—we needn’t compare. It’s the kaleidoscope of potential in our own twist and shout moments that matters, that allows us to escape the Rooney screams. No one should have to endure otherwise, employees or students, however lowly or exalted.
Ferris inspires us to do better, an enduring lesson for leaders in schools and beyond.