I've never seen ... Back to the Future
It’s a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Back to the Future was released in 1985, four years before I was born, and my early film education consisted of Disney, then Harry Potter, and then any and every romantic comedy. It wasn’t until my final years at school and my decision to study French at university that my cinematic horizons expanded. Following my teacher’s encouragement, I watched Truffaut’s Jules et Jim and The 400 Blows, the Three Colours trilogy, Amélie and Delicatessen. I even branched out into Spanish (Y Tu Mamá También, Volver, Amores Perros) and a touch of German (The Lives of Others). Unless it was set in Hogwarts or Middle Earth, any type of adventure, sci-fi or fantasy film just didn’t appeal to me.
But what better time to rectify that than during a nationwide lockdown? I think I’ll enjoy Back to the Future. After all, I know a few things about it already. I know that a young Michael J Fox gets involved in time travel with an eccentric scientist and things, as you’d imagine, start to go wrong. I’m aware that there’s also something about hoverboards, because every once in a while people complain that we were promised we’d have them by now. And I know that Fox’s character, Marty McFly, inspired the naming of a noughties pop band – but thankfully, I’ve never seen them, either.
As it turns out, I do enjoy Back to the Future. I really, really enjoy it. I chuckle all the way through. I’m entertained, enraptured and squawk gleefully when that famous final line is delivered: “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” So that’swhere that saying comes from, I shriek.
For me, the joy of Back to the Future is the almost Shakespearean absurdity that forced my brain to keep up with the constant misunderstandings, to process the chicken-and-egg scenarios, and complete the many pop culture references that fail to land in 1950s Hill Valley. There’s also the untold repercussions to reckon with: what if Marty can’t deflect his mother’s advances on to his father, thus ensuring he has a future to go back to? The metamania is mind-bending.
I loved Doc’s reaction to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and thought that if I could travel back to 2003 and tell anyone that the host of the US Apprentice is now the leader of the free world, they’d likely respond in exactly the same way. I also adored the briefest of moments where, in the 1955 school canteen, Marty is finally able to relate to his father about the insecurities they both feel about their creativity – even if it’s not completely reciprocated.
But there is one element of the film that doesn’t sit well – that Marty, essentially, is ashamed of his family; his timid father, his alcoholic mother, lazy brother and whiny sister. Only by accidentally travelling into the past and altering the start of his parents’ relationship is his family happy and successful, and does Marty get the home life he feels he deserves.
To really drill down into this, it’s somewhat heartbreaking that in neither reality do his parents fall in love simply by knowing each other. There has to be some sort of catalytic event to force the two together, whether that’s by the father being hit by a car and cared for by the mother or – as in the second reality where they end up happier, richer and more in love – by the father saving the mother from an horrific and traumatic sexual assault. It’s a strange message for a family film.
In the end, Back to the Future leaves me with many unanswered questions – not about plot holes, exactly, but about the infinite loop created when you mess about with the time-space continuum. When did Doc and McFly actually first meet? What happens to Einstein the dog? When did Doc actually invent time travel? If time travel ever really catches on, will we still be in control of our own thoughts and actions, or will they be dictated by future versions of ourselves who have gone back to the past? Could time travel eradicate our free will?
Forgive me, I’ve been inside for a long time. But one question has been answered by my partner, a lifelong BTTF BFF, I’ll have to watch Back to the Future 2 for those hoverboards.