Back to the future (27.4.86)

It should come as no surprise that there is currently a spate of American films which are based around the idea of going back in time.  After all, the United States is increasingly looking to its past for glories and moralities.  The Purple Rose of Cairo employed it in passing, as does the forthcoming Biggles, which uses the device to sell the idea of a British First World War fighter ace to both the American public and presumably backers - via an anachronistic Yank in the plot.  But nowhere is this tendency better exemplified or the idea more neatly used than in Zemecki's Back to the Future. We might call the philosophy Forward to the Past.

The story is delightfully simple: through a mad professor, a young man goes back thirty years, and narrowly avoids changing his own past before arriving back in the future.  With surprisingly wry humour, the time machine is based on a De Lorean gull-wing, itself a strange dinosaur of a project.  Apart from a watertight plot construction, the whole thing is kept zinging along by the fresh-faced charms of Marty, a lad with many a fine line in repartee, but nary a one on his unshaven face.

The film is expertly confected for its intended audience of young people.  The story reduces to the classic stolen child of royalty theme, the idea we have as children of deserving better parents.  In this film, the hero has the chance to go back in time and help construct the parents he wants.  As a result, when he returns to the present, his wimpy father and frumpish mother have become a budding yuppie's dream of feisty forty-year-olds.  He also turns out to have that black and hunky four by four in the garage, and the Big One lined up with his refined but randy young lady.

More insidiously, the film turns out to be an enactment of the Great American principle of Getting Up and Getting It.  In a paradigmatic way, his cringing down-trodden dad is converted at a stroke into a success, with his ex-bullying boss reduced to a cringing car-cleaner.  His father has become a modest author - a secret dream unrealised in his first attempt at life. We are also left in no doubt that you marry your true love.  His parents did it, and in the closing scenes of the film, with the odd hint from thirty years hence, we gather that the hero does it.

Even more subtly, the contrasted images of 1950s and 1980s weigh heavily in the former's favour.   Where now we have hobos and sex cinemas, then there was civic pride and Ronald Reagan on at the movies.  The world we go back to emerges as very clean and ordered, if rather straight. 

As you might expect from the Spielberg stable, the film is beautifully crafted, with the odd knowing cinematic self-reference.  From the opening tableau of clocks - tens of them - through the special effects and the nail-biting last minutes, the film bespeaks professionalism.  Apart from its rather feeble understanding of the implications of time travel, there is a more worrying, and ultimately ironic, flaw.  The De Lorean is powered by plutonium which had to be borrowed.  Which some terrorists obligingly did before giving it to the mad professor to turn into the odd bomb.  When he cheats them, they turn up and gun him down.  Almost inevitably, they are unshaven, wild-eyed Libyans.  What price prescience? 

(27.4.86)

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