Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Archetypes

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ous status quo. What this proves is
Hickerson 5
that people in ancient Greece were accustomed and used to basic stories that all follow the same layout. Ferris Bueller's Day Off follows the cycle, but changes a few areas. Of course there is the ordinary world of their Chicago suburb hometown and the special world of the city of Chicago, but those are the two most prominent monomyth cycle areas in the story and there is not a lot else. Most of the changes come in the form of, as I stated earlier, Ferris being many different archetypes; therefore, Ferris cannot receive help from the different archetypes like the mentor, as he is the mentor. During the opening of the movie, Ferris explains to the audience how and why to skip school, …show more content…

It’s a good non-specific symptom. I’m a big believer in it. A lot of people will tell you that a good phony fever is a deadlock, but, uh, you get a nervous mother, you could wind up in a doctor’s office. That’s worse than school… Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.” (Hughes) This scene would typically be the mentor giving the advice to the protagonist, but instead Ferris is talking to the audience. Because Ferris is the mentor, he is not able to receive any advice, which skips a major part of the cycle. The monomyth cycle is also supposed to change the protagonist when he gets back to status quo at the end of the story, but this isn’t the case for Ferris. From the beginning to the end he is a rebellious, sometimes selfish, live in the moment teenager who will dance in a parade in front of thousands and steal a Ferrari. Even after the fall of Cameron becoming mute because of the evidence that they stole his father's Ferrari, Ferris’s personality does not change at all. If we were to look at the story from Cameron's point of view this would be much different, as his development follows the monomyth cycle closely, but we don’t focus on him throughout the …show more content…

Although the movie doesn’t follow the cycle totally, it fails in comparison to Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which by far is the most unique of the three stories plot wise. While throughout the story you will see some aspects of the cycle, this is the life story of Elphaba, from her birth to her death. Because at the beginning of the story she is not alive and at the end of the story she dies, there is no status quo, or ordinary world at the beginning of the story to return to at the end. After the beginning of the story all of Oz is the special world that Elphaba has to explore, and even when Elphaba does return to her birthplace in Munchkinland near the end of the novel it is in no way the way she left it. A woman who lives there has a maid who is falling in love with a woodcutter, and the maid might quit her job to be with him. She comes to Elphaba's sister Nessarose, who is now the highest ranking official in Munchkinland, and asks for help, “‘I can give you two Sheep and a Cow,’ said the woman… ‘I might bewitch his axe and let it slip,’ said Nessarose thoughtfully, ‘just enough perhaps to cut off his arm.’” (Maguire 314) The woman asks her to hurt the woodcutter so severely that the maid will not be attracted to him anymore and she will continue working. Of course a cruel leader like Nessarose would never help a citizen out of

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