Ferris Bueller's Mission Creep

Ferris Bueller just wants to skip school and have a little fun.

At least, that’s how things begin. After faking his own illness with his parents, Ferris enlists his best friend, Cameron, to help get his girlfriend out of class for the day. He impersonates her father and insists that there has been a family emergency, so Sloane is dismissed for the day.

At first, you might say: mission accomplished. After all, Ferris got his girlfriend out of class for the day, and now all three of them are hanging out instead of being stuck in school.

Instead, the trio head into Chicago for the day, stealing Cameron’s father’s expensive sportscar. In order to evade capture and detection, they run con after con as their day becomes increasingly more complex. They visit a museum, a fancy restaurant, and even a pro baseball game. At one point, the crew end up in the middle of a parade, with Ferris performing to a huge crowd—not exactly keeping it low key.

It looks like the crew will get away with everything, but Cameron realizes that the mileage on his dad’s Ferrari is way too high, so he and Ferris concoct a harebrained scheme to rewind the odometer by running the car’s wheels backwards. That’s not how this works.

In a fit of rage and panic, Cameron starts kicking the car. He realizes that his dad wouldn’t even be fooled by the odometer trick even if it worked, since he pays so much attention to that car. Cameron projects all of his feelings about his dad onto the car, and as his anger leads to the car rolling out of the garage and crashing, making the situation vastly worse.

Cameron has a realization that he needs to stand up to his dad and not live in fear for the rest of his life, and there are probably some other pretty thick metaphors for convenient cinematic takeaways.

I’m here to talk about that mission creep, though.

That’s what we see on full display in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but there’s a ready-made example from recent history.

When a smallish conflict in Vietnam began, the US’s stated goal was to train and advise South Vietnamese forces so that they could defend against the encroaching North Vietnamese army, backed by communist ideology that frankly terrified the west during the Cold War.

During the 1960s, as the conflict grew, public sentiment was divided among anti-war protesters and those who wanted to support the military’s actions in Vietnam. It seemed anti-patriotic to protest the war to many Americans, at least at first.

This sentiment tilted in favor of anti-war protest when the Pentagon Papers leaked in 1971, showing how the US military made secret, behind-the-scenes decisions to slowly expand the conflict. A phrase began to circulate among journalists and commentators who were covering this story. They came up with the very clear and obvious phrase mission creep.

Mission creep happens any time you find yourself biting off way more than you can chew, doing more than you originally intended with a project. In your mind, you’re thinking you’ll have a nice little cakewalk, but that turns into a ten mile march.

Here, with Ferris, he almost certainly didn’t set out to conclude the day with a powerful and emotional coming-of-age moment for his friend, which is really the culmination of the film. That’s the thing about mission creep: you don’t have to do any of it intentionally. Instead, it creeps right into your mission.

Mission creep is a really cool phrase, but it only came into common parlance over the last 50 years or so, and only because it described Vietnam so well. I’ve seen this happen in my own life too, with relatively small business expansions suddenly taking over my whole life. I’ll write about those experiences soon, but that’s it for today.

Some turns of phrase have really short stories like this one, but if you’re interested in some longer and deeper etymological rabbit holes, I’ve got ‘em here!