Second in an ongoing series of overreaching reflections on TBS rotation flicks. Kindergarten Cop, from Ivan Reitman, the man who molded (and, I would add, obfuscated) the machismo behind Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, gave us this family-friendly Ah-nold vehicle (in which his undercover cop — what?! the man couldn’t be more conspicuously fuzz — ludicrously poses as a kindergarten teacher to locate the fatherless child in danger of being reclaimed by his murderous pop). The film seems to me a vaguely paranoid take on gender-equality, especially in societally regimented institutions of authority (be it top man of the vice squad or the mice squad). Masculinity is portrayed here as in flux and hopelessly volleyed between women’s liberation and men’s latent maternal instincts. Linda Hunt, who won an Oscar for playing a man, plays a hard-nosed school principal who, behind closed doors, relishes the physicality of the beatdown Arnold delivers to an abusive father. Pamela Reed (a durable and unfortunately underused character actor), who eats like lumberjack, is a classic sort-of-Hawksian tough lady, whose cookin’-n-cleanin’ husband is first glimpsed wearing a silky woman’s robe. And the film leaves us with every indication that the villanous and serpentine Crisp developed his criminal proclivities from the sort of ambiguous developmental retardation inevitable when a lone son is held hostage by a vindictive, overbearing, cartoonishly Type A mother. Still, considering this is an Ah-nold moo-vie, it’s interesting to note that most of these confusions are, in the end, resolved in favor of hanging up the piece and taking on the role of Mother Hen.

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I was reading some reviews in various places of this “touchtone ’80s teen flick,” and was struck by how many complacently allow themselves to categorize this as a lite-anarchist joie de vivre jaunt. Sure, Ferris skips school, jumps up on parade floats, drives his friend’s dad’s luxury car… basically acts like he’s enacting that sociology lab experiment kids do when they go out into public breaking one of society’s unspoken mores (dressing in the clothing of the opposite gender or walking backwards, for instance). This is no more evident than in the scene at the Chez Whatever restaurant when Ferris runs rings around the snippy maitre d’. But it’s this scene in particular that encapsulates everything that turns me off about this film in general. Namely this: for all the breaking-rules posturing the film adopts (and reinforces with the grotesque Jeffrey Jones dean of students caricature), there is nothing remotely dangerous or, ultimately, vindicating about a scenario that so faithfully adheres to the supremacy of the American suburb enclave. Ferris can go around all he wants, teaching others like Cameron to open up and live life and acting like he actually deserves to be taken as Abe Froman the Sausage King at the upscale restaurant, but all the while knowing that at the end of the day he can still enjoy his living-room-sized bedroom in his small mansion on a street where the rude life of the city (i.e. the minority valets) he crassly exploits by day is safely twentysometing miles away and where his mother will always be there to tuck him back in and make him soup after she gets herself settled (that she’s a working mother — “get settled” is a phrase that just about induces goose-pimples of recognition to kids that had a few hours after school alone before their parents got back — is undercut in one fell swoop with that line of dialogue). Now, the big city in question is Chicago, and its proximity to my hometown of Minneapolis-St. Paul profers occasional unwanted resonance. Still, I’ll take my mid-’80s-nostalgia-canon pleasures from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which strengthens it’s misfit glorification by being at least a little bit more unsettling and… creepy.

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