The Back to the Future series is one of my favorite trilogies of all time. Though the quality of the films decreases from beginning to end, as trilogies are wont to do, the series overall is surprisingly easy to watch over and over and over again, to the point where you become obsessed with the minute details of the movies. Which is exactly what I have done.
The Back to the Future series is an interesting beast. It is very easy to cast it into the pile of stereotypical goofy 80s movies, because when it is all said and done, it is a story about the 4’8" Michael J. Fox traveling through time in a flying DeLorean. However, the people involved with these movies managed to write a shockingly complex story in spite of the mandatory goofiness of the 1980s.
The complexity of this story shows itself in two different ways. First, there isn’t anything heroic about either Marty McFly or Doc Brown. Marty is a high school kid with an overly developed Napoleon complex, and we know that, had it gone unchecked, his temper would have a constant negative impact on his life — 1985 Marty would have gotten into a major car accident and 2015 Marty would have lost his low-level corporate job if he hadn’t learned to turn the other cheek, a lesson he had to have repeatedly drilled into his head. Most people would love to get a second chance on life, and Marty McFly receives several such opportunities and abuses them. What’s to like? Meanwhile, Doc Brown spent thirty years of his life and presumably his entire family fortune developing impractical inventions, none of which brought him any sort of fame or fortune. Any surviving Browns have apparently disowned him, he isn’t reliable enough to secure even an adjunct teaching position at Hill Valley Community College, and the only person he can convince to work with him in any capacity is a high school kid whose interest is music, not science. If ever there was someone whose career could be described as an abject failure, it’s Doc Brown’s. There is nothing heroic about either of them, and this is something established within the first twenty minutes or so of the first movie.
Okay, so it’s a couple of anti-heroes traveling through time to find redemption and save the world from themselves? Maybe, but let’s dig deeper. At the end of the first movie, Marty gives 1955 Doc a letter explaining what is going to happen to attempt to save him from the terrorists in 1985 with instructions not to read the letter until 1985. Okay, that’s fine. 1955 Doc tears it up on the spot, though, because no one should know too much about their own future. Is that really an issue at this point? He’s already learned that he’s going to build a working TIME MACHINE and develop an unhealthy friendship with a boy some 45 years his junior. His life has already changed dramatically. Why hedge your bets at this point? And think about this: Doc had to go about his business and meet Marty, however that happened, and then bite his tongue and lead his only friend blindly into a situation where he might get shot by terrorists knowing full well that he’s going to escape to 1955. Put yourself in that situation, would you do the same thing? Of course not! It doesn’t make any sense to! So Marty has to go through this dangerous adventure that will likely cripple him with PTSD in adulthood, but Doc gets to wear a bullet proof vest. Way to be a responsible adult and loyal friend. No wonder you got turned down for tenure.
That’s fine, nobody’s perfect, and let’s face it, a story featuring clearly flawed heroes finding redemption in the face of overwhelming odds is always refreshing. Wait, did I say redemption? Maybe that’s not the idea we’re looking for here. In the end, though Marty has met his relatives in 1885 and 1955 and got to see the world of 2015, all he learns is that he shouldn’t lose his temper so much. And Doc Brown? The man who was obsessed with doing everything possible to avoid altering the structure of time has decided that it is okay to go through time collecting various forms of currency (did he steal it? Is he working part time jobs all throughout time?), which has obvious economic implications for the people who were supposed to receive those monies, and his once noble quest to travel through time to learn the secrets of humanity has been reduced to gallivanting through time in some jacked up locomotive with a woman who was supposed to die and their two children who were never supposed to exist. Does that sound like redemption to you? Or does it sound like a psychotic old man terrorizing era upon era with his corpse bride and demon children? Not only is that not a hero’s end, it actually seems like he became a worse person in the end than he was in the beginning.
Which brings me to the Tannen family.
Both the Tannens and McFlys migrated to Southern California during the gold rush of the 1850s, the McFly’s coming from Scotland or Ireland, the Tannen’s climbing out of the sludge that was used to create the Orcs for Sarumon’s army. For over a century, their lives are inexorably linked, as the diminutive McFly men found themselves at the mercy of the thuggish Tannen clan. Seamus McFly has Mad Dog Tannen, George and Marty have Biff, and Marty Jr has Griff. And yet no one seems to do anything about it this rivalry, so instead of moving away from the family that has terrorized them for generations or even getting a temporary restraining order to protect them from these murderous rapists, the hapless McFly’s stay in Hill Valley, apparently content with their lot in life. Don’t get me wrong, the Tannens are completely dislikable — Alternate 1985 Biff murders George and basically forces Lorraine into prostitution — but it’s Marty’s attempts at protecting his family’s honor and undoing all of the damage that bothers me. He’s seen these people go out of their way over the years to make his family’s lives miserable, but instead of going on some violent crusade to eradicate them from history or a much more passive campaign of promoting literacy and abstinence within the Tannen clan, the most Marty can muster is a few decent punches that directly or indirectly cause that era’s Tannen to crash their car/cart/hoverboard into something, usually another vehicle carrying manure around. And this singular event somehow rights the course, Providence be damned, and the once hyperaggressive Tannens are reduced to bumbling auto detailers. I just don’t get it.
Obviously, there are a lot of ways to pick this movie apart, especially once you get into the whole thing with the timeline and how none of that makes any sense at all. That’s a column for another day. The point is, how many goofy 80s movies created their own universe that can be dissected like this? Not very many.
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