Back to the Back to the Back to the Back to the Future
The family and I watched Back to the Future the other night. I hadn’t seen it in a long time—definitely not since I heard an interview with Crispin Glover, in which he said he suspected the reason they didn’t put him in the sequels was that he told Robert Zemeckis he thought the movie was fascist propaganda. He said something like that, anyway. I know he used the word “fascist,” when describing his objections to the material.
Fascist, I think, it most certainly is. I mean, the premise is that the protagonist’s dad is a pathetic loser for his entire life because he failed to stand up to a bully in high school and commit an act of violence against him. George McFly is trapped in a state of endless subservience to Biff Tannen, because when he had his chance to punch him in the face he didn’t do it. And so the solution is for Marty, George’s son, to go back in time and provoke George into committing that act of violence. He punches Biff, and as a result he and his children prosper. In the new reality his act of violence makes possible, it’s Biff who is the subservient one. He spends the rest of his life waxing George’s beautiful car.
The way the story plays out indicates a truly bizarre way of conceiving of how people’s lives come together, and what makes them the people they are. The strong dominate the weak, and whole life trajectories are decided by isolated acts that cannot be reversed once they are committed, or once we miss the fleeting opportunity to commit them.
That’s not to say it’s a bad movie. It’s a lot of fun to watch, mostly because of Christopher Lloyd.
I noticed something, this time, that I never did before. It’s in the scene where Marty has traveled to 1955 and sought out Doc Brown, whom he is friends with in 1985 but has never met in 1955:
The first thing Doc Brown does is attach to Marty’s head a mind-reading device that he’s wearing. It looks ridiculous, and he tries telling Marty what the device is picking up, what it tells him Marty is thinking. He says something about Marty having traveled a great distance to get there. He says Marty wants to sell him a subscription to The Saturday Evening Post. He says Marty wants him to donate to a Coast Guard organization.
Marty tells him he’s wrong, and Doc concludes that the device doesn’t work. It’s another failed invention. But as I realized, as I watched it, and as others have pointed out, Doc’s invention actually kind of does work. Marty did travel a great distance—through time—to reach him. He’s not raising money for the Coast Guard, but a couple of scenes earlier he told someone, who asked him why he was wearing a bright orange vest, which resembles a life preserver, that he was with the Coast Guard. And I’m not sure about the Saturday Evening Post thing—maybe Marty looks at one of those prior to that scene. But I wonder if it’s a kind of meta-reference to the fact that songs in the movie are written and performed by Huey Lewis and the News (the Saturday Evening Post being, after all, a newspaper). There is another moment when they break the fourth wall, sort of; when Doc says they have to get Marty “back to the future,” he points at the camera for a second. And Huey Lewis himself appears in one of the first scenes, so surely they knew when they were filming the movie that they would be using his songs in it.
Anyway, I had this idea, for a spinoff film, in which, in 1955, Doc Brown has another friend like Marty, another teenager who is native to that time—except, unlike Marty, he is actually interested in science. If he had been there for the demonstration of the mind-reading machine, he would have understood that it works, just not as well as it could. But he doesn’t get to test it, because he arrives at Doc’s house just after Marty does. He sees Marty being led inside and thinks he’s been replaced.
Maybe he fishes the mind reader out of Doc’s trash and perfects it. He uses it to get some kind of revenge.
Surely this fan fiction has been written before. If not, alas, I haven't the time to do it myself.
Lest it seem like overstating the case, to say that Back to the Future is a fascist film, consider that the story it tells is an awful lot like the story many Germans told themselves and each other about the state of things in the 1930s. I mean, there are other, more unfortunate stories they told, but one was that in World War One they were betrayed by their weaker elements, and if only they had fought harder things would have turned out differently. So they ought to try again, and get it right this time. They said, “Let’s do World War Two. We’ll invade Russia even harder the second time around.”
A movie made in 1985, of course, in the United States, would have referred more directly to the war in Vietnam. The film came out nine years after our military withdrew from there in defeat. Back to the Future emerged to lick the country’s wounds, to reassure everyone that we are strong, despite recent events. It’s not interested in questioning the utility of violence, and it doesn’t ask what it does to someone when they resort to it.
In the beginning, Marty McFly tells his girlfriend he wishes he could have the beautiful, black Toyota he sees out on the street. He’s enamored with that car, and he wants it. And he does not, in the course of the film, learn to value things that matter more than material goods. He doesn’t learn that there are things more important than cars. At the end, rather, when his father has proven his physical strength, and become a real man, Marty comes home to find that the Toyota is in his garage. The beautiful car belongs to him! He has won.
This material previously appeared in a recent installment of the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand.
