It is hard to believe that it has been a quarter-century since Back to the Future roared into theaters in the summer of 1985 and spent 11 of the next 12 weeks atop the box office charts, dethroning that summer’s other paragon of mainstream cinematic fortitude, Rambo: First Blood Part II. It turned Michael J. Fox, at the time a rising young star on the television series Family Ties, into a bona-fide movie star and pin-up teen sensation, and it made good on the promise that director Robert Zemeckis had displayed the previous year in mixing action, comedy, and nostalgia for old genres in Romancing the Stone (1984). Although Back to the Future had been turned down by virtually every studio in Hollywood for four years (despite the constant support of executive producer Steven Spielberg), it went on to become the highest grossing film of that year and a cultural touchstone that will forever define its political and cultural era. It is also an undeniably fun film, one whose clever plotting, memorable characters, and deft balance of both wistful nostalgia and celebration of the here and now deserves comparisons to The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Like the best Hollywood movies, there is something fundamentally timeless about Back to the Future, which is deeply ironic given that the film’s entire raison d'être is firmly rooted in the idea of the incompatibility of different eras in recent American history. In the mid-1980s, the mid-1950s seemed like ancient history with little or no relevance to the present except as nostalgia fodder to be fed through the media. The movie thus intentionally distills history and filters it for maximum impact, giving us a stylized (and sanitized) TV version of the ’50s (not surprisingly, virtually no one working on the film was more than a toddler, if even alive, in 1955). Social and cultural historians will naturally balk at the simplification, but it’s all part of the film’s intrinsic joke and a necessary narrative shortcut designed to play off our own historical short-sightedness.

The story begins in 1985 in the small northern California town of Hill Valley, where we are introduced to Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), who, like Ferris Bueller would the next year, functions as a kind of adolescent extraordinaire--the kind of teenager ever teenager wants to be. He’s a bit of a rebel (always late to class, plays his music too loud, etc.), but is still a fundamentally decent guy; he has a pretty girlfriend (Claudia Wells) who adores him and has a head on her shoulders; he is stylishly attired and has the right amenities (aviator sunglasses, Walkman, skateboard), but he isn’t a pampered rich boy. He comes from a family that is intact, but deeply dysfunctional, and he is embarrassed by his parents, both his spineless über-nerd of a father George (Crispin Glover) and his moralistic (and alcoholic) mother Lorraine (Lea Thompson). In other words, he lives with the contradictions and dilemmas with which most middle-class American youth can readily identify, which turns Marty into an ideal hero of youthful fortitude and--there’s simply no other way to put it--coolness. You get the sense that Marty’s persona is entirely his own, which is testament to the colloquial magnetism of Fox’s performance and evidence of why Eric Stoltz, who was originally cast in the role, was all wrong.

Marty is friends with Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), an eccentric inventor with buggy eyes and a shock of Einstein-ish white hair who calls on Marty to join him in a mall parking lot at one o’clock in the morning to test out his latest invention: a time machine that has been fashioned out of a DeLorean. The machine works perfectly, but Doc is discovered by the Libyan terrorists from whom he stole plutonium to make it run, which results in Marty commandeering the DeLorean for a fast getaway and accidentally propelling himself back to 1955, where he seeks out the much younger Doc of the Eisenhower era to help him get “back to the future.” He also runs into his 17-year-old parents (is that a teen dream or nightmare?) and disrupts the moment that would have led to their first meeting and falling in love, thus putting his own existence in jeopardy. Marty’s dilemma of ensuring his own existence by finding a way to get his parents to fall in love is deeply complicated by the fact that his mother, who is much more daring and lusty than her future self would suggest, develops a crush on him. This willfully (and brilliantly) perverse Oedipal entanglement gives the film’s clever gags and smooth sense of nostalgic comedy a sharp edge that most viewers have to laugh off, lest they get too uncomfortable with the ramifications.

Viewed from our current vantage point, Back to the Future plays primarily as a testament to just how eruptive the ’60s were in dividing the second half of the 20th century. The fact that nearly as much time has passed between now and the movie’s initial release as Marty traverses in the movie itself demonstrates just how monumentally different a three-decade period can be. That is, when Marty sends himself into the year 1955, he is absolutely unequipped to deal with the social and cultural rites of that time period; they are fundamentally alien to him, thus he remains perpetually an outsider even as he attempts to blend it with zoot suits and ducktails.

Imagine now a story about a teenager from 2010 being accidentally sent back in time to 1980. Yes, the clothes and the technologies would be different, but would the general sense of being be all that dissimilar? Would it be terribly hard for a modern day teenager to adapt to and blend into the world of 1980, once he or she figured out that music is not digital and there are no cell phones or Internet? Last year’s raunch comedy Hot Tub Time Machine suggested as much, although it went a bit further in basically inverting the moral dimensions of Back to the Future by suggesting that the past was not a cleaner, nicer time from which we’ve fallen, but rather a hedonistic tumult from which we’ve (maybe) graduated. Watching Back to the Future again, it is impossible not to dwell on the sordid state of Hill Valley in 1985, with its graffiti, empty stores, homeless sleeping on park benches, and run-down porn theater, as if the film is willfully contradicting the political narrative about revival (both economic and moral) that the Reagan administration and the Moral Majority were trying so strenuously to erect.

That’s all academic and socio-political. The fundamental pleasures in Back to the Future are immense, but I think the film ultimately worked (and continues to work, and probably always will work) because it grounds its time-travel concept in recognizable truths about social acceptance, generational divides, and wish fulfillment (as others have noted, there is something decidedly Capraesque about the whole enterprise). Most of the movie’s characters are social outcasts of various stripes; even Marty, who is wracked by pangs of self-doubt passed down by his father, doesn’t seem to have any friends his age and spends all his time hanging out with Doc, who is described as a “real nutcase” by the rigid school principal Mr. Strickland (James Tolkan). The idea of the generation gap, which makes it impossible for Marty and his parents to understand each other, is essentially solved in true wish-fulfillment fashion via Marty’s going back in time and getting to witness firsthand his parents’ younger selves and helping them become better people (the father literally learns from the son how to stand up to bullies). The fact that Marty’s messing with the space-time continuum ultimately plays in his favor, allowing his parents to grow up into much better, more successful adults, which in turn gives him the material amenities of a better life (“there no place like home,” as long as home has nice furniture and a sleek 4x4 in the garage), is the film’s ultimate reward. It is also why it plays so well as a “Morning in America” cultural touchstone, even as it constantly and improbably transcends such labeling.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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