Back to the Future (Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, U-Drive Productions, 1984)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Thanksgiving night my husband Charles and I didn’t watch any TV until 7:30 p.m., when I turned on the set, started flipping through channels, and finally lighted on the Bravo cable network, which was showing all three of Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future movies in sequence. Charles had seen the first one when it was relatively new – either in a theatre or on a premium cable channel, he couldn’t remember which. But he’d never seen either of the sequelae and I hadn’t seen any of them, a bit surprisingly given how iconic these movies have become in the history of science-fiction films in general and the films of the 1980’s in particular. Just about everyone knows the central premise of these films by now, but in case you've been living under a rock for the last 38 years, here goes: the central characters are suburban teenager Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and his mad-scientist neighbor, Dr. Everett Brown (Christopher Lloyd), who’s invented a time machine and built it into a DeLorean automobile because, as he explains to Marty, he wanted something stylish rather than a bland-looking car. (The DeLorean had a bizarre history; John DeLorean had been an engineer at General Motors and he had fought the corporate bureaucracy to pursue innovative concepts in automotive design. In 1979 he published a book about his experiences at GM and the following year he started his own car company, which was such a financial failure that in 1982 he got involved with an undercover FBI agent and allegedly participated in a deal to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. to make enough money to bail out his company. His conviction was later reversed on appeal. A second attempt by the U.S. government for allegedly defrauding investors in his company also resulted in acquittal, and he lived until 2005.)

I suspect Robert Zemeckis and his producing and writing partner, Bob Gale, intended the three Back to the Future films from the get-go as a cycle instead of just making one film and hoping it would do well enough to merit a sequel. Not only do the first two films have explicitly “cliff-hanger” endings, the three stories fit neatly together and just seem to have been conceived of as a unit even though the cycle’s name is a bit deceptive. Actually it probably should have been called Forward to the Past instead of Back to the Future, because Marty and Dr. Brown don’t actually go back (or forward) to the future until the first half of the second film, and they spend much more of their time travel in the past than in the future. In the first Back to the Future movie, made in 1984, Marty McFly is a high-school junior in a suburban community with his dad George (Crispin Glover), his mom Lorrainie (played by Lea Thompson in the flashback sequences but I don’t know if she plays the older version of her character or they got someone else), brother Dave (Zemeckis regular Marc McClure) and sister Linda (Wendie Jo Sperber, another Zemeckis regular). There’s also a girlfriend for Marty, Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells), and an unseen Uncle Joey (Lorraine’s brother) who’s in prison, He was expected to be paroled and Lorraine baked a welcome-home cake for him, but he was denied parole so the McFlys will just have to eat it themselves The film begins in the Rube Goldberg-esque home of Dr. Brown, who’s equipped his house with a device that automatically feeds his dog Einstein, though as the film opens he’s been gone for several days and Einstein’s food has piled up uneaten because he took the mutt with him and forgot to turn off the feeder.

Dr. Brown has invented a time machine, but he needs plutonium to power the “flux converter” that makes it work, which he obtains from a gang of Libyan terrorists who want him to build them a nuclear bomb. Of course he double-crosses them and keeps the plutonium for himself, but the terrorists come looking for hom driving a VW minivan and ultimately kill him. To escape, Marty has to go back in time to November 12, 1955, when the clock tower in their town of Hill Valley, California was struck by lightning and froze in place. He interacts with the Dr. Brown of 30 years before and also goes back to the local high school, where the film turns into a weird reworking of Oedipus Rex as Lorraine finds herself attracted to Marty (whose name she thinks is “Calvin Klein” because that was the name on his underwear when she and her parents took him in after he was run down by a hit-and-run driver. She couldn’t be less interested in George, which causes a quandary for Marty because if George and Lorraine don’t get together, they won’t be married and Marty will cease to exist. Drawing on Cyrano de Bergerac as well as The Courtship of Miles Standish, Marty coaches George in how to court Lorraine and get her to go with him to the “Enchantment Under the Sea” school dance, where in Marty’s time line they kissed for the first time and thus fell in love. Meanwhile, George is being bullied in both 1955 and 1985 by the school thug, Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), who in 1955 forces George to do his school papers for him and in 1985 is his boss and forces George to write his reports for him. On the night of the bog dance, Marty hatches a plot to come on to Lorraine and try to attack her, whereupon George will come to her rescue – only the plot gues awry when Lorraine is all too willing to have sex with hot, hunky Marty. Instead Biff cuts in and tries to rape Lorraine, only George steps in and for the first time in his life punches out Biff. This leads to a change in the timeline in which Biff becomes a pathetic figure who makes his living waxing other people’s cars, and George lords it over him, demanding two coats.

There are some genuinely funny gags along the way, including one townsperson who, when Marty says he’s from the future, asks just who is President in 1985, “Ronald Reagan,” Marty says, and the incredulous man asks, “Ronald Reagan, the actor? Does that mean Jane Wyman is First Lady?” (That’s a mistake in the script, since Reagan and Wyman divorced in 1949 and by 1955 he’d already been married to Nancy Davis for three years.) There’s also a sequence in which in order to torment Marty, Biff locks him in the trunk of one of the cars parked outside – which turns out to belong to one of the musicians in an all-Black band. It didn’t seem likely to me that an all-white suburban high school in 1955 would hire a Black band for their dance, but that was needed to set up a clever if somewhat off-putting gag for me in which one of the Blacki musicians, Marvin Berry (Harry waters, Jr.) cuts his hand open trying to get into the trunk. The rest of the band is about to call the gig quits because without a guitar player with a working hand they can’t perform, but Marty agrees to step into the breach and leads the band in a rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” which didn’t exist until 1957. Marty tells the band to just play blues riffs in B behind him, and he goes crazy, playing his guitar behind his head, lying on the floor while playing, and doing other rock-star moves that wouldn’t be seen by a mass music audience for years, or at least that’s what Zemeckis and Gale tell us in their script. They even stick the knife in when they show Marvin putting in a call to his cousin Chuck and saying, “You know that new sound you’ve been looking for? I’ve just heard it.” Though Chuck Berry didn’t write “Johnny B. Goode” until 1957, by late 1955 he was alreadn an established rock ‘n’ roll star with at least two big hits, “Maybelline” and “You Can’t Catch Me,” under his belt, and methinks if a Black musician had seen a white one in 1955 playing his guitar behind his head or on the floor, he’d probably have thought, “Where did that white kid see T-Bone Walker?”

The first Back to the Future has a spectacular ending scene in which Dr. Brown works out a way to get Marty back home to his original time period of 1985 via the lightning from the storm that’s supposed to hit the clock tower, which necessitates rigging the DeLorean with one of those electrical connections like the ones that power old-fashioned trolleys, and when Marty returns toi 1985 his dad is a science-fiction writer who’s just published his first novel and his mom is considerably more slender than she was when he left. Marty also times his return from 1955 to 1985 to make sure he arrives a few minutes before Dr. Brown got killed by the Libyan terrorists, so he can intevene and save the good doctor’s life. If nothing else, the first Back to the Future certainly expresses Roibert Zemeckis’s unusual sensibility (which was evident as early as his first feature, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, a delightful fantasy about four teenage girls on the night of the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show). It’s also a neat reminder of just how sexy Michael J. Fox was before he became the world’s poster child for Parkinson’s disease; he’s got a quite hot ass (which Zemeckis gives us lots of shots of from behind as we see that great bubble butt clad in skin-tight blue jeans), and the close-ups of his face are so hauntingly beautiful it surprises me that no one thought of casting Fox in a biopic of Elvis.