Back to the Future

Viewed from a point in time that comfortably outpaces the gap between the past and present in writer-director Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future (co-written with Bob Gale), it seems notable how dilapidated this film's vision of the 1980s is, at least before Michael J Fox's Marty McFly has had an opportunity to meddle with the time-stream. Even more so than the ramshackle burg seen in Amblin Entertainment contemporary Gremlins, Marty's home town, Hill Valley, is a graffitied Pottersville that is packed with crumbling buildings and porno theatres. Barely remarked upon within the piece, this (then) present appears as crushed and aimless as Marty's parents: one a bitter drunk wondering where it all went wrong and the other still a passive target for Thomas F Wilson's oafish (but still enormously entertaining) Biff. This initial 1980s is balanced on a precipice then, ready to tip into the gauche dystopian version seen in Back to the Future Part II, when the bullies rebuild the town in their own image. 

Even Marty is affected by this malaise. Although commonly understood as being unyielding and scrappy, thanks almost entirely to the innate charm that Fox brings to the role, Marty suffers the same dithering lack of confidence as his father. His problems are communicative: he and his band mates don't share the unified image (or, presumably, sound) of his closest, new wave-presenting rivals; and the school board presiding over the talent show seen in the film's first act (which is never revisited) don't want to hear him play anyway. Although he enjoys some level of self-possession, largely as a frustrated reaction to his wet father figure, Marty frets about how has talents will be understood by others. In conversation with his girlfriend, played in this instalment by Claudia Wells, he worries about his creativity being crushed if he is forced to face up to a real, stinging rejection. The breakthrough with his parents - who he had previously looked upon as almost Martian in their dissimilarity to him - is when, having been blasted back in time to the 1950s, he realises that his mother, played by Lea Thompson, was a firecracker and that his browbeaten father, played by Crispin Glover, had his own creative ambitions. 

The instant Marty learns that George McFly is precious about his writing, Marty is both excited to discover this fact and reflective about what that means for his own ambitions. It's natural for Marty to be both friendly and effusive when faced with another person's precious creative endeavors, so why not extend that courtesy to himself? In a film made for and about teenagers, it's an acknowledgement that everybody - even parents - are three-dimensional human beings with their own, closely guarded frailties. In one of Back to the Future's many, superbly arranged climaxes Marty is pressed to play lead guitar for a doo-wop band. Following a rendition of Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode, Marty launches into a long, masturbatory rock solo in which he completely loses his audience. Unlike the Battle of the Bands try out seen much earlier in the film, in which an indifferent reaction prompted soul-searching in this teenager, here Marty has achieved a level of self-mastery that allows him to just shrug off the lack of adulation. His performance spoke for itself, in effect. And if that doesn't satisfy you, a successive sequence in which Christopher Lloyd dangles off a clock tower is so perfectly assembled from images of a speeding sports car and fumbling, cack-handed frustration that even on your fifteenth viewing you worry that Doc Brown might not be able to connect those cables in time.