BACK TO THE FUTURE

by Kevin Koehler

I'm tempted to call Back to the Future one of the more subversive films about the Reagan era, but that would imply intent. I honestly don't believe Robert Zemeckis really knew what he was making, so crammed as it is with mixed messages, Oedipal subtext, and nostalgic revery/wish fulfillment. He probably thought he was just making a movie, albeit one where a mother wants sex with her own son. 
 
The year is 1985. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is your average teenager in Hill Valley, California, a suburb in transition; this is to say, transitioning from a nice place to raise your kids to porno shops, homeless people, and graffiti. Marty dreams about owning a black Toyota 4X4 and playing in a band that sounds suspiciously like Huey Lewis and the News; his group, the Pinheads, auditions for a school talent competition, only to be rudely dismissed by a judge (who looks suspiciously like Huey Lewis...wait, it is Huey Lewis!) with the self-congratulatory opprobrium "I'm afraid you're just too darn loud." Marty doesn't need much to give up a dream. 
 
He gets it from his father, George (Crispin Glover), a pathological pushover who dreamed of being an author but instead became coworker Biff Tannen's office bitch. Mom Lorraine (Lea Thompson) is a Puritan and a drunk, his sister can't get a date, and brother works at McDonald's, which is shorthand for failure. Marty seems to be the only one with an active social life, mostly spent with his girlfriend, Jennifer, and eccentric inventor Dr. Emmett L. Brown (Christopher Lloyd). Unbeknownst to Marty, Doc has been putting the finishing touches on a time machine built into a stainless steel DeLorean. It runs on plutonium (why didn't Operation Plowshare think of this?), specifically plutonium stolen from Arab terrorists. When they come looking for payback, Marty is caught in the crossfire; he escapes their bullets via the space-time continuum, all the way back to good old 1955 where coffee costs a nickel, Ronald Reagan is just an actor, and there are no Arab terrorists trying to kill you. 
 
Much of Back to the Future concerns Marty's attempt to play matchmaker after inadvertently fouling up his parents' nascent love connection, a task complicated by Lorraine's infatuation with Marty himself. During one memorable scene, Marty wakes up in her bed sans pants; his future mother ogles him, enamored by his purple underwear. It's a sequence right out of Vertigo (after Scotty saves Judy from San Francisco Bay), gender-reversed but possessing the same awkward sexual charge. An important marker of maturity is when we begin to view our parents as people; it's jarring when Marty discovers Dad is a sex pervert and Mom is sort of a sex pervert as well. It is a testament to Zemeckis' craftsmanship that he's able to pull off such an abstraction without it being as dirty as it should be. 
 
A short aside: USC's big two (Zemeckis & George Lucas) both used incest as a central conceit in their big budget coming out parties. I'm not sure what this means. 
 
Back to Back to the Future; as popcorn escapism, the picture is a masterpiece, but I wonder whether the film is trying to say anything. Case in point: the product placement, which is without question quite obscene. Is this a commentary on Me Generation corporate hegemonic dystopia or, well, just product placement? Likely the latter, though Reagan is name-checked at several points in the picture (as he is in the first sequel). "No wonder your President is an actor," Doc tells Marty at one point. "He has to look good on television." Not especially deep commentary, mind, but it is a political observation (likewise, Doc Brown returns from a future where oil and nuclear power have been replaced by composting). One might take it more seriously if the climactic space-time makeover of the McFly clan wasn't so thoroughly materialistic. It's not the sixties Zemeckis looks back so fondly upon but the fifties, an idealized Garden of Eden brought to an end by free love, feminism, and the civil rights movement. The Eisenhower Era is no party for future Mayor Goldie Wilson, of course, though it's worth noting that he gets his political aspirations from Marty (and administers during a time inferior to the one where he is a busboy). At least black people still have rock n' roll music, but Marty steals that from them as well. 
 
Sly statement about white appropriation of minority culture trends? I'd wager that it isn't, but we say things even when our mouths don't move; Back to the Future is more a product of the times than a comment on them. 
 
Interesting footnote: The atomic bomb figures prominently in earlier drafts of the Back to the Future script, where the DeLorean is replaced by a time-traveling refrigerator; to return Marty to 1985, Doc takes the refrigerator to an atomic bomb testing ground. Zemeckis and producer Spielberg feared children might lock themselves inside refrigerators, so they replaced the device with a car; however, ensuing drafts still had the car being returned to the future by atomic bomb radiation. It wasn't until late in the script's development that Zemeckis and co-writer Gale happened upon lightening as a possible source of the machine's power.

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