How to celebrate the good ol' Etats Unis? A 10,000 word post on Roland Emmerich's Independence Day, complete with multiple digressions linking Emmerich's German-ness with Leni Riefenstahl's, complete with sub-digressions about Miroslav Klose's heroic two-goal performance against Paraguay? Nah. That kind of thing—even to someone as long-winded as me—is better written about than actually written.
We are, however, obligated to deconstruct the very idea of America through the prism of cinema, since it is the 4th of July, and there is a whole lot of insight into America to be gained through its movies. One thing you notice after watching a couple dozen (or hundred, or thousand) American movies is our (neurotic?) need to rewrite the past. Whether this is because, quantitatively, we don't have much of one, or qualitatively that what we have had has involved a whole lot of blowing shit up and killing brown people for specious moral reasons, is up for debate. What is certain is that we sure do it a lot, in part because we have, as yet, not invented a time machine with which to go back and actually change the inconvenient parts of the past. Which brings us to Back to the Future (momentarily, before that leads to a cynical digression, sorry about the ADD), released 25 years ago today.
Robert Zemeckis is one of the vanguards of the post-Spielberg cinematic look back to simpler structures and themes, and more complex special effects. In conceiving Back to the Future, his intent, at least in part, was to play with the idea of the 1950s as a more innocent time than the present, which has been a meme since the 60s, when the kids all started growing their hair long and smoking marijuana cigarettes. Clearly, before all the children went insane, they must have been sane. Right? American Graffiti was one of the first pictures to posit this; American Graffiti is a terrible movie but appealed to a middle-brow conservative sensibility that looked at long hair, drugs, and every Beatles album from Rubber Soul onward as a sign that the world was coming to an end. From there forth, an awful lot of movies romanticizing the 50s came along, and people went to see them and sighed about the good old days.
We must clear the air here. The “good old days” is a trick of memory. There are no good old days. The good old days sucked. People have been people since they hunted mastodons and painted on caves. Our vocabularies might be bigger (debatable, from some of the subway conversations I've overheard since my fucking iPod died) and we may have cooler gadgets, (again, debatable . . . stupid excessively mortal iPods), but we're still people. Old people always think young people are the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and young people always think old people are boring, despotic retards. Thus has it ever been, thus it ever shall be. There was never any magical epoch when it was else. Nostalgia is a lie.
What makes Back to the Future so cool (among other things) is that it plays with nostalgia but has enough perspective to equivocate. The 50s are portrayed as kind of cool, but imperfect (which I'm sure was the case if you were a middle-class white teenager in California), and the 80s are laid bare as kind of fucking ridiculous but all in all not that bad (a little more charitable than my first-hand assessment, but Zemeckis is less cerebral and cranky than me). And its verdict on teenagers is that they've always been impetuous, horny shitheads, which is spot on.
The two sequels deal, respectively, with the future and the Old West, two other important time periods for those who would take America's pulse. Between the 50s, the future, and the Old West, you have the trinity of Americans trying to feel better about themselves. While only the fantasia of the Western and the outright lie of 50's nostalgia are provable bullshit, people like Robert Heinlein imagined a future where can-do capitalists, benevolent corporations, and an omnipotent military would extend manifest destiny not just to North America but to the universe (which given our dearth of people who actually know how to make things and a military that could really use a nap, seems unlikely).
Bob Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale play with these ideas too. While their satire on futurism is weakened by one lame “the Japanese are buying our country” joke that manages to avoid total lameness by not being that mean-spirited, they make a couple funny observations about bullies in the future being artificially enhanced, sodas costing $100, the utter absurdity of being nostalgic about the 80s (less ridiculous in the movie than it is in real life—nice work, Bobs), and the goddamn clock tower STILL not being fixed. The crowning achievement is in the third movie, though, where they take on the most mythologized period in American history and points out that the epic characters of the myths were really a bunch of illiterate, unhygenic psychopaths (Billy the Kid, for instance, was a bland Irish guy who killed a couple people and was catapulted to fame because Pat Garrett cashed in by writing a heavily-embellished book; ya think the crazed desire for celebrity started with reality shows? Dream on, blind man). Thomas F. Wilson's dumb bully character, repeated in each epoch as a different iteration in the same family tree, was the Old West outlaw. Hey, I love John Wayne too, all's I'm saying is, if John Wayne was really around in the Old West, he wouldn't have needed a gun, he could have kept order by smacking the bad guys with his cock.
However on point los Bobs might have been with their observations about nostalgia, they were brief. The main focus, in all three movies, was the tightly constructed narrative, wherein Michael J. Fox tries not to rupture the space-time continuum in whatever time period he found himself in. That he does so mostly in a DeLorean is just fucking awesome. Look at this:
It's too bad John DeLorean got framed by the government and his car company went tits up, because holy shit that thing is cool. Between him and Preston Tucker . . . why, it's as if the American automotive industry has a sinister tendency to fuck over anyone who threatens their incompetent, corrupt hegemony!
Anyhow. The movies:
Back to the Future (1985)
Amiable Everydork Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is your average kid: he likes loud electric guitars, his cute girlfriend, and big fuckin' trucks. His family is a mess: his mom's a drunk, his dad is Crispin Glover, and his siblings are doughy and trashy. Out of dorkiness, societal alienation, narrative expediency, or all of the above, he pals around with straight up mad scientist Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd), who on the fateful night of October 26th, 1985 (my 7th birthday! Thanks, Bob and Bob!), summons his teenage sidekick to the mall parking lot in the middle of the night. To test his new toy:
Marty: Wait a minute, wait a minute, Doc, are you telling me you made a time machine . . . out of a DeLorean?And that's why Doc Brown is awesome. If you're going to break the laws of physics (which takes balls: when you break the laws of physics, the alien cops are the LAPD and you're Rodney King, and they don't use nightsticks, dude, they use space shit) do it in a really cool way.
Doc: The way I see it, if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?
Doc explains how the time machine works: to travel in time, you need a lot of power. 1.21 jigawatts worth, in point of fact (the awesome fictional measurement “jigawatt” was the result of Christopher Lloyd mispronouncing “gigawatt”), and the only way to generate 1.21 jigawatts is with plutonium. Marty is a little nonplussed at this, and alarmed by the fact that Doc stole this plutonium from a bunch of Libyan terrorists who wanted him to make them a nuke. Lo and behold, the terrorists show up and gun Doc down, leaving Marty to drive away in the DeLorean. However, Marty forgets that the “flux capacitor” is turned on, and when the speedometer hits 88 mph, a whole bunch of flashing lights happen and Marty's running over a pine tree. A whole bunch of confusing shit happens, including a kid thinking Marty's an alien and the kid's dad chasing Marty with a shotgun, before Marty realizes . . . I'm in the 50s.
He bumbles around trying to make sense of things, but in so doing Marty inadvertently interferes with his parents meeting for the first time. This leads to Marty's mom (Lea Thompson) falling for Marty instead of Marty's dad. (Ed. Note: the Bobs get much respect for throwing an Oedipal complex subplot in the middle of an 80s teen movie) Marty tries to track down the 50s-vintage Doc Brown for help. Although Doc is initially skeptical—
Doc Brown: Tell me, Future Boy, who's President of the United States in 1985?—he eventually realizes Marty's telling the truth. This is why mad scientists are more useful than civilians.
Marty: Ronald Reagan.
Doc Brown: Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who's vice-president, Jerry Lewis? I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady? And Jack Benny is Secretary of the Treasury!
Doc Brown explains a lot of bullshit time-travel science to Marty (bullshit because it's based on the premise that time is linear, which it's not, although linear time travel is the only kind of time travel that works for narrative, because it's the only kind of time travel that has any kind of dramatic stakes, and the Bobs care more about making the movie work than they do about science anyway), the upshot of which is that Marty has to somehow make his mom fall in love with his dad, otherwise Marty will vanish from existence in a time-travel paradox (just turn off the part of your brain that passed science class and you'll be fine). This is why the Bobs are awesome, they know how to keep the end simple (boy has to meet girl) and the means complicated (Marty has to invent skateboarding and rock 'n' roll to bring his parents together).
On top of having to insure his ongoing existence, Marty also has to try to get back to the 80s, which involves leadfooting the DeLorean through downtown at the exact moment a bolt of lightning destroys the town clock, and save Doc from being killed by the Libyans. With this hectic to-do list, Marty has quite a time of it, and Bob Zemeckis does the best job of anyone not named Spielberg (who, as executive producer/sifu, must have smiled and told Zemeckis “you have done well, grasshopper”) of keeping the pace white-knuckle/edge of the seat while still keeping the visual compositions and narrative coherent (Ed. Note: gratuitous swipe at Michael Bay and Joel Schumacher redacted for length), making the third act of Back to the Future one of the most masterfully suspenseful and enjoyable ever committed to film. Of course everything works out okay, but that's the Hollywood sleight-of-hand: managing to make you genuinely wonder whether the inevitable is actually going to happen. And, to repeat, just about the only cat better than Zemeckis at that trick is Spielberg, and Spielberg is a fucking god at that.
When Marty arrives back home in the 80s, he discovers that not only did he manage to set things right, he set things more right than they were before: his dad, instead of a spineless homo/Martian nerd, is a successful, tennis-playing SF author. Mom's no longer a fatalistic lush, she's the picture of the healthy, happy, upper middle class housewife. The siblings are go-getters. The truck that Marty couldn't afford is in the garage. And bully Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) is now the cringing subordinate who waxes the McFly automobiles. And all it took was that awesome scene when Crispin Glover, having taken to heart some of Michael J. Fox's “man up and grow some balls” bluster, punches Biff out.
However, right when Marty is about to take his cute girlfriend for a spin in his new truck, a flamboyantly dressed Doc Brown (who Marty does manage to save) shows up, empties the contents of the McFly garbage cans into the flux capacitor—having come up with a more practical and funny power source than plutonium—and tells Marty that they have to go to the future! Marty goes along with it, but:
Marty: Better back up, Doc, I don't think we have enough road to get up to 88.And the DeLorean levitates into the fucking air and FLIES AWAY. Game, set, match: Zemeckis. Blatant entree to the sequel? Sure, but man that fuckin car looked dope flying into the camera in that last flash of light.
Doc: Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.
Back to the Future II (1989)
Picks up right where the first one left off, except Marty's girlfriend suddenly looks a lot more like Elisabeth Shue (due to Elisabeth Shue having been cast as a replacement). They have to head to the future to keep something fucked up from happening with Marty's kids. Forget the illogic of treating something in the future as though it's already happened (we shut off the science class part of the brain in the first movie, remember?) we gotta fly that DeLorean into 2015 and set shit straight!
Among some not-half-bad jokey-jokes like the Cubs winning the World Series—a feat even more implausible than time travel—and Steven Spielberg's kid directing Jaws 19, Marty finds time to save his son from being bullied into being a patsy for a bank robbery by Biff's cybernetically enhanced psycho grandson, explore the joys of hoverboarding in Nikes with power laces (seriously, our nerds have five fucking years left to deliver on the cybernetic enhancements, hoverboards, and power laces; step it up, motherfuckers) and come up with a plot to buy a sports almanac, use the DeLorean to drive to a bookie, and profit. Doc is appalled by this plan and has Marty throw the book out.
Only superannuated Biff finds the book and steals the DeLorean, so when Doc drops Marty off back in 1985, it's a 1985 where Nixon is in his 5th term as president (h/t to Watchmen), violence, pollution, fascism AND anarchy (all dystopia stops are pulled out) reign, and Biff is the most powerful man in America. And he's married to Marty's mom. And Marty's dad is dead. Fuck.
Marty bluffs his way into Biff's confidence, discovering that the sports almanac is the cornerstone of Biff's fortune and resultant power, and while not able to steal it, figures out that he and Doc can steal the almanac back in the 50s.
So now Marty's gotta skulk around and not be seen by anyone, least of all his former self, lest one of Doc's hilariously wordy doom scenarios involving the very fabric of space-time being torn asunder and the universe turning inside out and ceasing to exist occur. Everything gets very convoluted, and there are a few too many suspense cocktease moments, making Back to the Future II not quite as good as the first (for one, it's way too fuckin' dark; yes, the guy who considers Fight Club, Sid and Nancy, and A Clockwork Orange comedies is calling a Bob Zemeckis picture too dark, deal with the irony) but not without merit. As connective tissue between Parts I and III, it's invaluable, and the future sequence and 50s sequence are both well-done, but man, that alternate reality 1985 is a fuckin misfire.
Back to the Future III (1990)
Since Doc time-warped into the 1880s at the end of II, and Marty finds out that Doc gets shot in the back by Biff ancestor Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen, Marty has to enlist 50s Doc to get him back to the past. Hilariously, 50s Doc dresses Marty in 50s “Western” clothes (all the meta-pop-cultural UR DOIN IT RONG moments in the trilogy are great, but this one is the best) that, upon his arrival in the 1880s, have everybody laughing their asses off and firing live ammunition at him.
Of course, Marty runs into his own ancestors, who like his future kids in II, are all played by him, and here in III they give him the opportunity to do one seriously fucking funny Irish accent. The McFlys help outfit Marty in slightly more era-appopriate clothing, and, adopting the alias “Clint Eastwood” (the fact that Marty's favorite Westerns are spaghetti Westerns is a beautiful touch) he sets out to find Doc.
Doc has been busy establishing himself as a local eccentric (aggregate effort expended in so doing: nil) and building machines the size of a room that produce one brown ice cube. He and Marty rescue Mary Steenburgen from a legendary fate as “that schoolteacher who was killed in a stagecoach accident,” and Doc instantly falls ass-over-teakettle in love. This creates the dilemma: Doc doesn't want to go back home, he just wants to be with Mary Steenburgen (naturally), but if Marty's learned anything in his travels through time, it's that two weirdos from the future hanging out too long in the 1880s are gonna get lit the fuck up by some anti-intellectual element at some point or other, be they Tannen or no. That, and the fact that Elisabeth Shue is still waiting for him in the future (and they probably still haven't shtupped yet, since that was what Marty wanted the truck for in the first movie back before she was even Elisabeth Shue, and he hasn't had a moment alone with her since) gives Marty the urge for going. Doc resists (naturally, Mary Steenburgen is quite the catch; on top of everything else she's as big a nerd as Doc is) for a while but eventually comes to the grim realization that he's a man out of time and must go. But first he goes down to the bar.
Doc (holding a shot of whiskey): In the future, we don't need horses. We have motorized carriages called automobiles.In one of the picture's best jokes, it turns out Doc's just been sitting there holding the first shot the bartender poured him, he hasn't even drunk anything yet. Marty arrives and Doc slams the shot, immediately passing the fuck out. Mad Dog Tannen is on his way to get into a gunfight with Marty, and Marty wants to get Doc the hell out of the 1880s before this happens, only Doc takes a while to wake up, even with the bartender's spectacularly disgusting hangover cure, so Marty has to get into a gunfight with Mad Dog, which he wins, and then hauls ass with Doc.
(Everybody in the place laughs their ass off)
Random 1880s dude: If everybody's got one of these auto-whats-its, does anybody walk or run anymore?
Doc: Of course we run, but for recreation. (At the crowd's confusion at the big word) For fun.
Random 1880s dude: Run for fun? What the hell kinda fun is that?
(Ed. Note: the random 1880s dude has a solid fucking point)
Now, Mary Steenburgen got pretty pissed when Doc told her he was from the future, assuming that he was telling her a whopper to avoid having to break up with her on the level (part of what makes Mary Steenburgen so appealing in this is that she's smart, and what the fuck would you say if someone told you they were from the future?) But goddammit she loves the crazy bastard, so she chases the train Marty and Doc have jerry-rigged to push the DeLorean up to 88 mph to go back home. There's a thrilling, edge-of-the-seat chase sequence, and Doc ends up “stuck” in 1885 with Mary Steenburgen, and Marty arrives back in 1985 alone, and without a DeLorean, which gets fucking destroyed by a train two seconds after he gets back.
Resigned to the fact that he's never going to see Doc again, Marty heads home, gets made fun of by his brother for his 1880s clothes, shrugs it off, and goes for that long-awaited truck ride with Elisabeth Shue. En route, he gets challenged to the drag race (by an asshole played by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea) that ends up wrecking his life in the 2nd movie, only he says, “fuck it” and lets the challenge go. Marty's learned something in his travels through time!
Although it's kind of cool, and it's nice to see Doc again, it is a little stupid when he and Mary Steenburgen and their kids Jules and Verne arrive in our dimension in a time-machine locomotive, and a lot stupid when the locomotive levitates and flies away after Marty and Doc have a brief word. But hey, it's always hard to say goodbye, which is why so many end-of-trilogy or end-of-series scenes are stupid (the prosecution presents the Ewok love-in at the end of Jedi and the last ten minutes of Lost for your review, and rests its case) and enough goodwill was built up over the course of the series that one dumb last scene (that isn't even that dumb) isn't the end of the world.
The Back to the Future series is a weird place to look for incisive commentary on the American character, but it's all there, done by someone (Bob Zemeckis) who is not a deep, brooding, intellectual, and who minus the millions of dollars and geeky fascination with audiovisual technology is probably a pretty normal, regular guy. The story of the Americans and who they are needs to be told by an American, which in a way really means a non-deep, non-brooding, non-intellectual Normal Regular Guy. The way someone like Bob Zemeckis points out things like “Hey, you know, people in the 50s were excessively weirded out by black people” and “Gosh, a warped perception of the past formed to too great an extent by pop culture leads inexorably to forgetting that certain universal truths about the human condition are constant . . . gee whiz” is different from (and more effective than) the excessively windy and didactic way someone like me would do it. Although armed with different rhetorical and critical devices, I can still respect the guy for being concise and on-point with his observations, all within the context of a (mostly) wildly entertaining movie trilogy.
Happy 4th, my friends!
No comments:
Post a Comment