The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 126 Days to go: 87
Movie #314: Back to the Future
Back to the Future is in this really weird place, culturally. It’s one of those movies I consider timeless and entertaining, and yet it’s becoming more and more laughably outdated with every passing year (and that’s without taking into consideration its two sequels). (Take, for instance, the sort of hilarity inherent in Huey Lewis appearing as a band judge who declares the music of our young Marty McFly — Michael J. Fox at his most adorable — as “too darn loud.” It’s supposed to be funny — was originally intended as funny, in fact — because Huey Lewis is in a rock band playing rock music and we’re all jamming out to it on the soundtrack as Marty skateboard-skis his way around town, holding onto the bumpers of various cars. But it’s become funny — a different kind of funny — because we’re talking freaking Huey Lewis and the News, here, not, like, real rock, so Marty’s music really IS too darn loud. It’s hilarious!) In this way, it’s like a perfect snapshot of 1985 — evocative, nostalgic and outdated. But it’s also a great, fun film. My son has no connection to 1985, other than knowing the Bowling for Soup song, so to him the movie is strictly a work of fiction — none of these worlds are recognizable to him — and that works. He LOVES Back to the Future. He’s invested in the characters, really gets into the story, and cackles like crazy when Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) drives his car into a manure truck. I figure that means I’m raising him right.
It’s an infinitely enjoyable film, after all, and it holds up well in that regard. Marty’s pre-DeLorean 1985 world is so clearly drawn. His father George (Crispin Glover) is an awkward, distracted, greasy-haired doormat, constantly under the thumb of his coworker Biff. His mom Lorraine (Lea Thompson) is a puffy, prudish alcoholic. His brother and sister are total losers. They live in a slightly run-down subdivision, have only one car, and nothing they own is very nice. Marty is the only remotely cool one of the bunch, what with his hot girlfriend Jennifer (Claudia Wells) and being in a band and doing that skateboard thing. He even likes sweet black trucks who look like Ironhide. (That’s a Transformer. I wouldn’t know that without my husband.) (Also, the truck looks like Ironhide in the movie. I have no idea what Ironhide looked like in the cartoon.)
The post-DeLorean 1985 is also drawn pretty clearly, pivoting almost all of those details to account for the drastic change in George and Lorraine’s meeting, courtship and formative years at the hands of Marty’s involvement, even if the details themselves don’t make much sense anymore. Like, why, if the family is so successful now, do Marty’s siblings still live at home? Why are they still living in this home, even? Does Marty’s insertion into the world of 1955 somehow prevent Lyon Estates from deteriorating in the ’80s? How does that work? And why does Marty now own the sweet ass Ironhide truck of his dreams? These are all important questions, and they are made possible by virtue of the time travel paradox.
Back to the Future is the first movie I remember seeing about time travel, but, more importantly, it’s the first time travel story I remember dealing directly with the problem of the time travel paradox — how once you travel into the past, the future is inextricably altered. Things were never going to be just as they were, because things in the past are no longer how they were. It’s like dominoes, everything is connected. Every little piece of our world is balanced precariously on the precise outcome of something else, and the tiniest change cascades a billion different subsequent things until nothing’s the same anymore and it can’t be put back. I love thinking about that. It’s an ongoing theme in my life, contemplating miniscule changes that make all the difference, and I love that Back to the Future shares that interest.
Of course, it also raises the question, if you think about it too long, of whether or not Marty was always there in the past, because he always traveled there from the future. The majority of the plot doesn’t bend in that direction, of course, but one of the clocks Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) owns at the beginning of the film (pre-Marty’s time travel) is an exact replica of him hanging off the town’s clock tower when the lightning struck (post-Marty’s time travel). It’s a tiny detail, and it’s never explored in the film, but it makes my mind do cartwheels, imagining the significance of such a piece in Doc’s collection.
There are things, too, that don’t add up. Like, in what world is ten minutes a significant amount of time to save someone from Libyan terrorists? Or how do you collect the pieces of a note that you’ve torn to bits and scattered to the wind moments before a huge storm? Or why in the world are these people still in contact with Biff? But I’m willing to overlook all of those for the simple fact that I love Back to the Future, I love Rube Goldberg alarm clocks, I love Jennifer’s floral print jeans, I love that Doc says gigawatt with a soft g, and I love that, in this movie at least, the promise of the sequel actually depended on something having to be done about their kids, before the next one went and ruined that completely.
“Now why don’t you make like a tree, and get out of here?”
Viable Option 