"BACK TO THE FUTURE IS NOW ALL BACK AND NO FUTURE" ... (excerpt)
What strikes me about this trilogy now, during the final week of the final year of the saga's Hill Valley narrative, is the way the individual movies, unlike their characters and town, have improbably escaped the ravages of time.
Once we got about twenty years out from the first film, their 1985 scenes became "period," too, like the 1955 scenes. I showed the trilogy to my son and daughter not too long ago, and they laughed as hard at Marty's once-hip ski vest and feathered hair as audiences during my era laughed at the 1950s signifiers. My daughter, who is a lot older than my son and is studying film history and sociology in college now, was intrigued to see how a trilogy conceived and filmed in the '80s viewed life in the '50s, and what it said about 1980s life without meaning to.
The sense of cultural superiority seemed more palpable to me when I watched the series with my kids than when I watched it during its original run, or when I revisited it in the '90s as a college film student. I was 16 when the original "Future" came out. The eighties were my adolescent decade. Few teenagers have the self-awareness and humility to recognize that the time they live in is not, in fact, the most technologically and culturally advanced time that the human race will ever experience, and that snickering at the past (as depicted in movies or history texts) makes the laughing person seem clueless and arrogant; I was no exception. I'm humbler about that sort of thing now because I'm in my forties and seen a few decades turn over. When I watch the "Future" films today, I am not just watching the films, I am watching myself—or I should say, I am thinking about who I was when the films came out, and cringing a little bit at how much I thought I knew, and how much I didn't know that I didn't know. When I was in high school, I laughed during the diner scene (along with everyone else in the theater) because Marty ordered a Pepsi Free and the counterman thought he was demanding a Pepsi for free. Now I laugh because the Pepsi Free name was discontinued in 1987, two years after the first "Future" came out. The joke is not about the obliviousness of the '50s adult, it's about the arrogance of the '80s teenager.
8 comments:
I have never watched any of the BTTF movies. Not one. am I missing out?
I saw the first one. I don't find much memorable about it. I think the younger you are the more a movie will make an impact on you.
In the mid 80's the next President of the U.S. did this:
"New York City had a plan to build the Javits Convention Center on property for which Trump held a right-to-buy option. Trump estimated his company could have completed the project for $110 million[34] but the city rejected his offer and Trump received a broker's fee on the sale of the property instead. Repairs on The Wollman Rink in Central Park (built in 1955) were started in 1980 with an expected 2½-year construction schedule but were nowhere near completion by 1986. Trump took over the management of the project, at no cost to the city, and completed it in three months for $1.95 million, which was $750,000 less than the initial budget." ~ Wikipedia
Five years later he was in bankruptcy, but that Convention center save was impressive.
Could anyone imagine a future Donald Trump President back in the 80's?
Sure. It was rumored at the time. But when the Marla Mapes thing blew up nobody thought that an immoral cheating scumbag could get elected President.
Then Bill Clinton was elected.
Trump doesn't so outrageous anymore.
I remember seeing them on video cassette. Not as memorable as if i had seen them in a theater.
I saw the original on t.v. but was not looking at any of those things, not laughing at anything in the past, not comparing, no feeling of anything remote to feelings and values described. He's talking about somebody else's experience with the films, their points of references.
The rest of us were looking at the car.
Looking at the time-related irony of dating one's own mother and how weird that would be, looking at how time became distorted by people disappearing and critically so by fading photographs.
We looked at the rock and roll concert at the gym.
And how things changed to role-reversal personality types. How all the little things changed, the way his dad laughs at the t.v. is particularly noteworthy. We looked at the twists and turns. How the bully becomes the factotum that needs constant checking and correction and how the protagonist ends up with an ace jeep or some type of hyper masculine vehicle, all the while giving little to no notice of any sense of "this is the latest most hip date in history' arrogance.
The generations of decades preceding the generations under discussion 40 years and less, have their own "date in the future" literary fixation with the novel 1984, a lot more profound than these observations and accompanying discussion and all that literary excellence worth talking about came and went before these upstart whippersnappers who only now start thinking of such things and do so only because of a movie.
Interesting to me he mentioned the parka. I have two such dated parkas. Had. They're is nothing wrong with them except they are old design. They're very good shape but ridiculous to wear now. Plus I'm not a kid anymore. They're for kids.
And then I see present day adults wearing the exact same parkas. Both of them. In Europe. In the Middle East of all places, imagine a parka designed specifically for the slopes being worn by Middle East Arabs.
Shirt patterns too. Especially the bright color ones with patterns that stick out, the type that I liked, I see those all over the place now. As if my Goodwill donations have made it all across the world. Repeated patterns you notice when you wore them so much, they become your patterns, then abandoned and decades later see them again, and the parkas are particularly odd because parka designs changed so much since then. It really is like re-living 1984 to see old patterns on new peoples' backs.
(I notice the tailoring is slack, if you can call the shirt assembly tailoring. Plaids with bright color lines and dark black lines need to match at the panels and the new fitting is careless. Just cut pieces off old plaid patterns and sew them together without matching them up so the line composition is jarring.)
"The joke is not about the obliviousness of the '50s adult, it's about the arrogance of the '80s teenager."
The joke never WAS about the obliviousness of the '50s adult. How can he be oblivious about something that hasn't happened yet?
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