ABSTRACT
At the very end of John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Ferris comes back on screen to make his final address to the film’s spectators: ‘You’re still here? It’s over. Go home. Go!’ Thus a surprised question and an impatient command-‘Go!’—are used to signal that Ferris is no longer colluding, or playing, with the audience as he has been throughout the film. Suddenly there is a limit-an end, a conclusion-which we, the spectators, in our bid to extend the pleasures of cinema, have failed to recognize. We are-again, suddenly-in the wrong place at the wrong time, guilty of trespass, of staying too long, and so of outstaying our welcome: ‘You’re still here?’
