[A couple years
ago, I spent a
fun week AmericanStudying summer blockbusters—this year, it’s time for the sequel!
Add your thoughts, on these or other blockbusters, for a weekend post that’s sure
to set box office records!]
On what the time
travel blockbuster gets wrong, and what it gets right.
Since the future
moment to which Doc, Marty McFly, and Jennifer travel at the end of Back to the Future (1985)—and in
which most of Back to the Future Part II
(1989) is set—is 2015, there have been a number of pieces published this year
assessing what the film series got right about the future that’s now and what
it didn’t. It’s a fun premise, and one that can certainly help us think about
how we’ve perceived the future at different moments in our past (although the
truth, as revealed by 2001:
A Space Odyssey [1968], Ray Bradbury’s The
Martian Chronicles [1950], and many
other cultural texts, is that we’re almost always wrong when we imagine
specific future moments). But since the first Back to the Future is set instead in the past—1955,
to be exact—it offers a different and equally valuable lesson: how a
mid-80s blockbuster film imagined American history.
I generally agree
with the piece hyperlinked at “1955, to be exact”: filmmaker Robert Zemeckis
and his crew got a good deal about 1955 right, from the music and teenage life and
community to the clothes and settings. But when it comes to the one deeper social
issue with which the film (briefly) attempts to engage, race, I’d argue that it
gets things very wrong. In two different, seemingly throwaway moments, young
white Marty McFly is shown contributing to—if not, indeed, directly causing—sweeping
social changes for African Americans: he launches the town’s Civil Rights
revolution by convincing
a young African American janitor that he could run for mayor someday (which
we know from the film’s 1985 opening that he later did); and he kicks off the
rock and roll revolution as well, when an African American musician
calls his friend Chuck Berry to share McFly’s futuristic guitar stylings. Both
moments are intended as gags, of course—but the nature of summer blockbusters is
that their jokes and other entertainment-driven choices can and do connect to
and influence more serious conversations, and the film’s portrayal of 1950s era
racial progress and change is frustratingly wrong.
Fortunately, we now
have other cinematic options if we want a more accurate portrayal of race,
America, and the Civil Rights movement. And in a different way—and one
admittedly much more central to its story—Back
to the Future gets something very right about our relationship to the past,
and more exactly to our parents’ pasts. Granted, it does so through a
pseudo-incestuous storyline that requires a definite suspension of
disbelief (if not of ethics, morality, or squeamishness). But nonetheless, I
think Back to the Future captures a
profound truth: the difficulty, but also the importance, of trying to connect
to our parents not just as our parents (although of course we can never escape
that relationship entirely, nor in most cases would we want to), but as the
individual people they are, with lives and histories and stories all their own.
Most of us (well, all of us) will never have the opportunity that Marty McFly
does, to go back in time and meet our parents as young people, just starting to
figure out who they are and where they’re headed. But it’s pretty important
that we try to imagine them there, for their own sake and because (as Marty
learns) it has a great deal to tell us about our own identities and lives as
well.
Next blockbuster
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other summer blockbusters you’d analyze?
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