12/1/2023 0 Comments Ferris bueller sears tower![]() The primary divide in this universe remains present in today’s Chicago: that between the comfortable upper middle class (Ferris’s family) and the genuinely wealthy (Cameron’s family). The film’s suburban milieu is almost entirely white and upscale. Still, The Blues Brothers accurately depicts a Chicago that was essentially biracial.īy contrast, Ferris Bueller presages gentrification, ethnic change, and the decline of black influence in Chicago. ![]() The early 1980s were a time of political gridlock that would become known as the Council Wars era, as a white-controlled city council refused to do business with Mayor Washington. The city was then, and remains today, hyper-segregated and racially polarized. This vision of an integrated Chicago, however, was true only in the movies. Only the Nazis and the country-western band, the Good Ole Boys, are exclusively white. As if to underline this, the police duo out to get Jake and Elwood are a pair of state troopers-one black, one white-who might as well be twins. The movie’s working-class and marginalized whites and blacks lead similar lives in the city and are socially integrated. The key problem in the city remained that of the color line, but The Blues Brothers offers a fundamentally optimistic take on race relations in Chicago. Chicago was then only 14 percent Hispanic, and about half of that population had just recently arrived. ![]() The city was then 40 percent black in 1983, it would elect its first black mayor, Harold Washington. Black-centric institutions such as a South Side church and the legendary Maxwell Street Market feature prominently and reflect a rising Chicago black community that in 1980 was nearing the apex of its influence. The Blues Brothers are an R&B band, and the movie boasts cameos from black musical icons such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Cab Calloway. The postwar industrial urban metropolis showcased in The Blues Brothers is a working-class, biracial city, but the world that the film portrays is fundamentally that of black culture. This different emphasis carries through to nearly every element in these films, illuminating several key shifts in the life of Chicago and other cities: from an industrial economy to a knowledge-based one from a working-class city, in which blacks held serious political and cultural power, to a gentrified, multiracial city, in which, paradoxically, whites regained hegemony and from a city focused on the aspirations of adults, primarily through work and opportunity, to one that caters to the aspirations of upscale young people, primarily through entertainment and creature comforts. The later film’s Chicago is a postindustrial metropolis of the intangible economy, scrubbed free of the grit of a vanishing era. The first shot of the city is its gleaming skyline. Ferris Bueller, by contrast, opens in a pristine, leafy suburb. This Chicago is still a City of Big Shoulders, a place that makes things. It’s an industrial hellscape, with fire and smoke belching into the sky. The Blues Brothers begins with an aerial view of Chicago’s historic industrial complex of oil refineries and steel mills. All the while, they’re stalked by dean of students Ed Rooney, determined to punish Ferris for playing hooky and hold him back for another year of school.īoth films celebrate Chicago, but their visions of the city are as different as their opening shots. Ferris’s friend Cameron “borrows” his father’s Ferrari, and along with Ferris’s girlfriend Sloane, they feast on a five-star lunch, visit the Sears Tower observatory and Art Institute, and take in a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. In John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), charming high school senior Ferris (Matthew Broderick) and a pair of friends skip class and spend an enjoyable day in downtown Chicago. A successful benefit concert ends with an epic car chase to the county assessor’s office to pay off the tax bill in the nick of time. Jake hits on the idea of putting their old band back together, and a series of adventures ensue, including run-ins with the state police, a group of neo-Nazis, and a country-western band. In The Blues Brothers (1980), directed by John Landis, Jake (John Belushi) and Elwood Blues (Dan Akroyd) need to come up with $5,000 to pay a delinquent property-tax bill and save the orphanage that they grew up in from closing. Made just six years apart, they present strikingly different visions of Chicago.īoth films’ plots are farcical. ![]() T he Blues Brothers and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, two seminal 1980s comedies, both set in Chicago, foreshadow the profound changes that would soon sweep over some of America’s big cities.
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