Anyone who knows me knows my deep affection for the Back To The Future franchise. Memories of my 10 year old self sitting in the back room of my dad’s small office at the corner of Redwood and Henderson in Winnipeg watching my coveted VHS copy while my dad worked. Memories of lining up outside the grand old single screen theater complex that used to adorn downtown Winnipeg waiting to snag tickets to the sequel.
My still ardent and impassioned defence of the third film in the franchise.
I’m the one adorning my “Marty Mcfly” outfit every year for BTTF day. The one who bought the requisite shirt that said “I was there” when the calendar turned to October 21st, 2015. Who endeavored to plan a trip to London solely to see the premier of the stage production (a failed endeavor that ultimately resulted in a mandatory road trip once it hit North America- but the intention counts).
And yes, I was there on release day picking up Fox’s recently released memoir “Future Boy.”
Thus I’m all in on the 40 year anniversary, notably marked by the official IMAX screenings. And yes, I went as Marty Mcfly.
Which is all to say, so many years later and there are still new takeaways and observations. What’s endlessly fascinating to me about this trilogy is how, at any given point, to borrow from the recent filmspotting podcast episode on the film, it can be the artistic “fun” that rises to the surface or the films clear and obvious “philosophical interests.” I would say its the latter that made itself most evident on this recent big screen viewing. Namely its observations on the interplay between human tendencies to romanticize the past and to deify progress by way of the future.
The tendency to romanticize the past is a well trodden and explored human sentiment and practice. Every new era longs to return to a bygone one, imagining (and reimagining) the past as a sanitized and glorified version of what it was. But what struck me was how the film is also making a commentary on how we tend to navigate this world by constantly looking ahead to the future. When the film opens in 1985 we are given plenty of hints that this “present” is less than desirable. We find a family living in what appears to be a less than desirable neighborhood that once held promise, adorned with graffiti and indicating marks of a lower income neighborhood. The downtown bears the familiar markings of a kind of seediness, nodding to the now “porno” theaters, littered streets and drawing a veneer or sheen of disenchantment over the entire cultured landscape.
This is of course contrasted with the enchantment that greets us back in 1955, where downtown is alive with vibrancy and optimism. Where old fashioned ways of doing life beckon with their yet untainted allure, where a visible segregation is marked by a wanted optimism. For all appearances, the pointed contrast is a world that once was but has now gone drastically wrong. If only we can return to the enchantment of that bygone era then all can be made right again regardless of that segregation.
And yet, that’s not the entirety of this picture that is being painted:
- In 1985 we are greeted by “the mayors” promise to remake Hill Valley in the middle of his re-election campaign. When we arrive in 1955 we are greeted by a world promising a future built on the myth of progress.
- In 1985 we find Marty being told he will never amount to anything, something that is paralleled with the clear cynicism he has when he looks at the life of his family- a bunch of nobodies stuck in a low income area having never amounted to anything. As Marty says in response, “I’m going to change history.” In 1955 we find Marty encountering his school aged father battling against the same thing in his own context with the same cycnism regarding his “present.”
- Even the films iconic image of progress (the invention of time travel) is encased in the character of Doc and the final word of the film revealing a future that appears to be recycling the challenges of past and present in Marty’s future kids.
Now, the films fun narrative of time travel antics is also about how what we do in the past has an immediate impact on the future. Marty arrives back in good old 1985 with his “present” being reshaped by the changes in his parents choices and actions back in 1955. For example, the choice to stand up to the bully back then leads to a life of success now (we can overlook the fact that it apparently turns George into the bully by making Biff subservient, because after all, at least in the mind of the film, Biff raped Lorraine back in the new timeline of 1955 and was a grade A jerk in the old one, thus the film imagines it as a relatively innocent sense of justice, however odd it feels to have Biff still having around). But that clean cut portrait brings the necessary nuances with it. And part of the nuance is the films surprising critique of the myth of progress and the trappings of modernism.
If we romanticize the past it is because we find ourselves inevitably caught in the present feeling like we need to try and locate hope through our equal obsession with the future. And yet, it is only in the present that we can be made aware of that which is not right. It is also only in present that we can authentically live.
There is truth to the idea that every present loses what was valued in the past. Every era is a complex and complicated mix of contextualized realities shaped by that past, responding to disatisfactions with a given era by bringing about something new. And yet that new thing that comes about can’t see its own limits and shortcomings until the future critqiues its failures. This seems to be how things work. And where do we often look to reclaim that which we feel is missing or lost? To the very same past that our present has critiqued, albeit a sanitized version.
As a small example, we might look at the myth of progress and see the world of smart phones and social media and technology as the celebrated accomplishement of humankind to this end. We might attach that to the witness of a generation that challenged and dismantled modernism’s allegiance to systems and institutions. And yet at the same time we see the problems now being evidenced by a world shaped by smartphones and social media. What’s the natural reaction? Pining for a past where we used to interact in person, play outside, read more books, talk on the phone, where downtowns were exciting places to be, where we still watched movies together or met up at rental stores to waste away our Friday evenings, where music was good and made in our basements, where teachers were respected, and on and on the list goes. But all of that pining is also similarly blanketed by the continued deification of progress. We can’t be stuck in the past. Progress is seen as the necessary human ambition. The future is what hands us the necessary myth we need to ensure we are still the exceptional species we see ourselves to be.
I came across an interesting article by Greg Dember called Metamodernism: A Response to modernism and postmodernism, that gets at this same point. From modernism to post modernism to metamodernism, all three “isms” refelcting its own commentary on the issues inherent within the broader fameoiwk of “modernity.” And this isn’t just contained to the “isms.” We can also look at this in the broader sense of the larger historical shifts using the same lens. If modernity, defined as it is as the emergence of the Enlightnement era, sits in conversation with that which precedes it, history reveals a process that is always in conversation with both past and future at the same time. Always looking to reclaim what was lost while needing the future to critique the disillusionment we have with the present. All in the service of telling ourselves history is going somewhere better.
Which of course underscores the logic of the here and now: we are, or we become that critique of the past at the same time. We are the future of that which came before, therefore, given the movement of history, we become the past. That’s the tension that the future can never resolve, precisely because it can never truly arrive anywhere that isn’t being embodied by our particiaption in the present.
And that, it would seem, is the sneaky message inherent in BTTF. We can’t change the past, which is precisely why ever generation reacts against the one that came before it. But if we could, we would be doing so from the vantage point of an imagined version of 1955. We would be romanticizing the same past we are reacting against in the present, all while deifying the future. Leaving the 1985 Marty returns to as an illusion. As the sequel will show us, 1985 is now going to become the past for Marty’s future (or his kid’s future). Leaving us with this important observation and, I think, truth: the past didn’t need to change the present for Marty to be free to embody it. 1985 was destined to be romanticizied by the future either way. What is ultimately imporant is the question of what it means to be embody the present. An underrealized lesson of the fanchise indeed.
The Stories of my Life 