Remember the times when a summer blockbuster could just be unashamed fun? In 1985 we got just that with the release of Robert Zemickis’s time-travelling masterpiece, Back To The Future. It’s about fate, destiny, love, bravery, rock ‘n’ roll, the past, present, and future, and all the philosophical conundrums the latter entails. Heavy on action, comedy and a myriad classic memorable scenes, the film delivers great sci-fi, adventure, romance, and sublime humour, all rolled into one. You all know it, unless you’re from another planet (and even then, having lived under a rock): Michael J Fox’s Marty McFly is catapulted thirty years back to 1955, thanks to Christopher Lloyd’s Emmett “Doc” Brown’s time-travelling DeLorean car retrofitted with a flux capacitor, and, well you know the rest…
The novelist L P Hartley (not to be confused with J R Hartley the amateur fly-fisherman) once said: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. And indeed in Back To The Future, the numerous and fundamental ways in which the 1950s differed from the 1980s are explored to wonderfully comic and chaotic effect when Marty embarks on his great adventure.
A big part of the fun of watching Back to the Future is how much the first act of the movie informs the second. Practically every line of dialogue and character interaction from the 1980s has its 1950s counterpart, and usually as the set-up for a smart joke. Zemickis and his writing partner Bob Gale also have fun in subverting any rose-tinted view of the past we might have had. Their fifties may have looked like Happy Days but it’s far from being depicted as a golden age.
Marty’s mother Lorraine tells her daughter: “I think it’s terrible! Girls chasing boys. When I was your age I never chased a boy or called a boy or sat in a parked car with a boy.” Of course, as the movie progresses we come to realise that this is all fiction and the teenage (and boy-crazy) Lorraine is clearly up for all those things and more: she is neither Doris Day nor Joanie Cunningham. And as for the boys, well, Biff and his sociopathic friends are hardly beacons of respectability, are they? No wonder Lorraine falls for Marty and his before-his-time, un-toxic masculinity.
Anyway, here’s the trailer that must have whetted many an appetite (despite the naff voiceover) when it came out and makes me want to watch the film again now!
