[For this year’s
April
Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. Leading up
to a special weekend post on one of the best comedies, and films, from 2019!]
On what the time
travel blockbuster comedy 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 were a
number of pieces
published in the course of that 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
one of the deeper social issues 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 comic 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 comedy
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?
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