Back to the Future. Written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Universal Pictures.
Reviewed by Richard Alleva
Conservatives are often defined—or maligned as people who resist change. According to that definition, the most conservative creature on the face of the planet is the pre-college teenager. It’s not that teenagers actively resist change in the external world (to the contrary, high school students often demonstrate for changes in their school policies); rather, they cannot conceive of themselves spiritually changing. That they often do change, swinging their spiritual allegiance from one cause to another, is a different matter. They may convert often, but to each new set of values they feel absolutely devoted. And, because they have trouble dealing with emotions that are new to them, that threaten their current attitudes, they often jeer at the emotions expressed by other people or by characters in novels or films.
In this sense only, adolescents may be thought of as conservatives, or, to put it more rudely, emotionally stingy. Preoccupied with themselves, they would like to hang onto their selves. Pestered by their teachers to learn new things (some valuable, some truly worthless), they would prefer to believe that they already know everything. Around and about them, younger kids race and clamor. How ob-nox-shi-ous! Around and about them, the adults debate, doubt and scold. How positively spaz!
At present, the 13-18 year age group is the one being catered to most obsequiously by Hollywood, as witness the flood of youth films now on the market. And films that appeal to an emotionally conservative audience tend to be emotionally conservative.
The makers of Back to the Future had this particular audience in mind and are reaping the financial rewards of their calculation: their film was the second most successful one of the summer (the first being Rambo). It’s a comic book of a movie, a comic book in excelsis. Photographed in bright NBC color, without nuances of lighting or composition—characters sometimes march right down into close-up and jab their fingers at the camera to emphasize a point—and populated by dramatis personae who can be entirely understood when they utter their first lines of dialogue (or even before that, with a glance at their clothes or hairdo), Future has a neatly knit plot in which everything that’s set up in the first reel is accounted for in the last. Obviously, these glib virtues needn’t be lost on adults. I enjoyed the movie, too. But when you compare the emotions that its story could evoke with the ones it is actually getting, it’s clear that there’s a certain calculated heartlessness in Back to the Future that is supposed to appeal to teenagers, and almost certainly does.
Marty, a California valley boy, played by Michael J. Fox (accurately described by Pauline Kael as a performer who approaches acting as if it were aerobics), has a hopeless family: Mom’s on the bottle, Dad lives in a state of continuous apology, Brother and Sis bicker endlessly. (The former works at McDonald’s and—gross me out!—wears his uniform at home). But Marty also knows a brilliant and benevolently wacky inventor, enacted by Christopher Lloyd, who has constructed a time machine on the chassis of a DeLorean. Marty gets accidentally zapped back to 1955, when his parents were teenagers. Because his mother gets a crush on her son-to-be (whom she identifies as “Calvin Klein” because of the label on his jeans), our hero must work hard to make sure that Lorraine transfers her affections from him to his future Dad, so that Marty and his siblings may some day be born.
This plot has the capacity for farce, social observation and satire, science-fiction thrills, nervous sex comedy, and darkly powerful emotion. To some degree, the filmmakers achieve all these elements except the last. It’s this single failure that’s the most striking thing about the movie.
Some of the farce is okay, or even more than okay: adequate Jerry Lewis stuff about trouncing school bullies with champion skateboarding techniques.
Most of the social satire is wonderful, and provides the movie’s most obvious pleasures. The adjustments Marty must make to the Fifties and the hind-sight advantages he takes are well done, as in the climatic celebration when Marty gets single-handedly to invent rock n’ roll at the school dance, then proceeds to New Wave with less happy results. (“Your children will love it!” he tells the stupefied kids in their Fifties gowns and spotless white jackets.)
The not-quite-incestuous sex comedy is the riskiest thing director Zemeckis and his script writer, Bob Gale, have dreamed up, and the most successful. Lorraine is played by a talented actress, Lea Thompson, who makes her character a fascinating mixture of generosity and swoony voluptuousness. With her off-the-shoulder gown, permanent wave, nylon stockings and bobby socks, transfixed pauses followed by nervous skittering, and her Eisenhowerian vocabulary and possessions (the ubiquitous “hope chest”), she shows how sexy sex is when it seeks expression in a smotheringly wholesome environment. (Remember those cheesecake shots in the old Life magazine? Playboy was hopelessly outclassed.) “I don’t mind if we park, Marty,” she coos to her embarrassed son after he drives her to the dance. “I’ve parked a lot.” The situation of a sixteen year old Jocasta slapping the make on her seventeen-year-old Oedipus is too fantastic to be prurient, but there is just enough discomfort in the scene—Marty gulping at the ivory shoulders and plunging decolletage of this lovely creature whose sexuality scares him to death even as it promises him future life—to make it creepily funny. I don’t know if I laughed out of the right or the wrong side of my mouth, but laugh I did. It’s an innocently smutty scene: Boccaccio in bobby socks.
But Back to the Future also has the potential to achieve powerful emotional effects without sacrificing any laughs whatsoever. In fact, the story even seems to cry out for these effects. Have you ever looked at a photograph of your father taken when he was younger than you? Didn’t you have the urge to say something to the younger man who was to help bring you into the world? But what was that something you longed to say? In looking at a photograph of his father as a young military cadet, the poet Rilke could only feel that the image lay “curtained in itself/and so withdrawn, I cannot understand/my father as he bleaches on this page—/Oh quickly disappearing photograph/in my more slowly disappearing hand!” This evokes the “tears of things,” but the relationship can be expressed comically, too. You get a taste of this when Marty discovers his father up a tree, spying through binoculars on Lorraine in her bedroom. “My father’s a peeping torn!” Marty groans, and the audience laughs not just at pain and perplexity but sharing a little of it as well.
But how little of this comic poignancy is conveyed to the viewer by Future! Consider the hero at the beginning of the film. A drunk for a mother, a nebbish for a father, creepy siblings, and yet Marty’s character is untouched by it all. I’m sure we can all point to the fortunate products of unfortunate homes, but Marty hasn’t triumphed over his surroundings; he just has nothing to do with them. He’s a TV valley boy to the very quick. He can plug in his electric guitar, his skateboard is well oiled, and his girlfriend is ready to go. Family relationships are expendable.
Until he gets time-warped. Then Marty realizes that family relationship is literally the sine qua non. For this reason, Back to the Future has been compared favorably with the 1949 Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life, which is about a man who, contemplating suicide, gets to see what his environment, friends and family would have been like if he had never existed. When the hero realizes the misery his removal might cause, he gives up his plan of self-destruction and runs back to his family, embracing them in a frenzy of renewed love and will. James Stewart, who plays the hero, is an actor who not only can cry on cue but make the audience cry along with him. He pulls out all the stops in that last scene. He makes you see that the man isn’t just clutching his loved ones but has hold of the very fabric of his existence, that fabric he himself came so close to tearing apart.
What is the scene in Back to the Future that would be comparable? It’s the scene in which Marty clutches at the seventeen-year-old emotional cripple who is his father and begs him to become a man so that Marty himself may become a better human being when his day arrives.
But no such scene exists in Back to the Future. And why should it? Marty is already a perfect kid even with his wretched parents at the beginning of the movie. How can such a paragon empathize with the less sturdy? No way. Trying to guide his father towards Lorraine, the best he can offer his mother (who has already started to drink) is to tell her not to indulge so much, which has all the dramatic weight of a TV public-service announcement.
Finally, when the father sees the school bully trying to rape Lorraine, he gets mad enough to make a fist and hit the fellow with the strength of a thousand bullocks. Magic Punch leads to Magic Kiss which leads to romance, and when Marty gets back to 1985, he discovers that his parents have become the ideal Yuppie couple, lean and trim, nonaddicted, tennis playing, upwardly mobile. All because of the Magic Kiss and the Magic Punch, neither of which resulted from any direct action from Marty (though, to be fair, he did get his father to be in the right place at the right time). Well, that McDonald employee now wears a business suit and works in an office and the sister looks as if she had stepped out of the perfect preppie poster that was making the college bookstore rounds a few years age. But the two are still bickering. What about Marty? He’s as freckled and as bouncy and as musical as he was at the beginning of the movie. He hasn’t changed at all. What need to perfect perfection? No wonder kids love this movie. It says that their being has little or nothing to do with the being of their parents. They might as well be born in test tubes. The appeal to adolescent would-be self-sufficiency is complete.
Last month, in reviewing Rambo, I noted that the new militarism that is supposedly abroad in the land found expression in the Stallone movie only in a hero who fights best alone. This month, in a country where the last presidential election saw both political parties trumpeting the virtues of the family, we have the latest box office bonanza, Back to the Future.
Bug off, army. I can fight better alone.
Bug off, parents, I am a world unto myself.
Americans, at least on screen, are lonely people.