Is "Back to the Future" a perfect film? Hmm. Complicated question.
To talk about Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future (1985), let's start with a digression.
Humor me by agreeing for ten or so minutes that a "perfect" movie is one that fully and purely accomplishes what it sets out to do. Under this definition, a movie is perfect if it's perfectly unified all of its technical elements – from tone to cinematography to acting – and, most importantly, if it succeeds at instilling in the viewer exactly the feeling, or experience (because aren't great movies best understood as "experiences"?) that it attempts to. Obviously, this is a limited definition of a perfect movie. One could also argue that a movie is perfect if it agrees with one's moral position, or upholds a pleasing vision of something – society, love, the human predicament – that one finds important. One could, actually, spend an enormous amount of time and energy debating what constitutes a perfect movie, which is why I'm asking you to set all that aside for a bit and consider the idea that a movie is perfect to the degree that it’s successful in doing what it tries to do.
In this way, Back to the Future is pretty darn close to a perfect movie. It tells, in classic Hollywood fashion, a heroic story. Here, the story is of Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a high school kid facing a terrible predicament: his dad and mom, George and Lorraine (Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson) are losers – George is a spineless nerdling who's entirely dominated by his boss Biff (Thomas F. Wilson), Lorraine is a sadsack alcoholic – and Marty is terrified he's going to end up like them.
Marty's friend Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) is a mad scientist, who invents a time machine by installing his greatest invention – the flux capacitor – into a DeLorean. Unfortunately, the flux capacitor runs on plutonium which Doc has stolen from some Libyan terrorists. They show up on the night Doc and Marty try out the time machine and kill Doc; in the process of escaping, Marty leaps into the car and manages to send himself back to 1955.
There, he encounters several problems. First, after he tracks down a younger Doc and convinces him that he (Marty) has come back from the future, he finds out that there is no power source sufficient (plutonium being impossible to come by) to fuel the DeLorean and get him back to 1985. He also realizes that even as a teenager George is a wimp – bullied by the same Biff who will become his boss – and that his mom Lorraine is young and surprisingly sexually aggressive. This wouldn't be a problem except that Marty manages to prevent his parents from meeting, with the result that his mom focuses her amorous attention on him instead of his father.
This all leads to the night of the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, at which Marty must convince his parents to fall in love and then drive the DeLorean down the street at precisely the right moment for Doc to harness a bolt of lightning that will strike the clock tower (a bit of town lore Marty carried back with him from 1985) and use it to send Marty back to his own time. In the course of this, Marty manages to arrange it so that George punches out the bully Biff, thus proving his manhood to Lorraine, who becomes smitten with him.
Marty also, somewhat incidentally, ends up on stage playing guitar for the band performing at the dance. A budding guitarist himself back in 1985, he introduces the band and the teenagers to rock and roll by playing Chuck Berry's "Johhny B. Goode" and – as it turns out that one of the men in the band is Marvin Berry, Chuck's cousin – Marty also manages to introduce the world to rock and roll.
In the end, everything turns out peaches. Marty manages to make it back to 1985, where he finds a surprise waiting for him: he has changed his own life for the better. Because George punched out Biff in 1955, he's been confident for his whole life and has become a successful science fiction writer. He and Lorraine aren't losers anymore – they have a nice house, and Biff is now out front washing George's car. Marty is no longer at threat of becoming another in a line of failures.
So how is this all close to being perfect?
As long as we're still clinging to the above definition, the question requires us to ask what we think the movie's aim is. This seems easy enough, at least on the surface: to entertain its teenage audience. In this, it succeeds magnificently. The plotting is nothing short of magnificent in its humor, surprise, and the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the way each element builds a coherent feeling, first of suspense and then of heroic triumph. The writing is sly and clever – there are numerous memorable lines – and the acting is flawless, as exemplified by Crispin Glover's extraordinary turn as both the young and old George McFly (given the comedic chops he displays in the role, it's remarkable that Glover was only 21 when the film was released).
Beyond this, the film manages to increase its teen-oriented effectiveness through the frisson created by the sexual tension between Marty and his same-aged mom. She is definitely, in the parlance, hot for him and even as a kid in the theater when I first saw the film I was askance at the possibilities, both psychosexual and time-warping, suggested by Lorraine's attraction. This gives the film a suggestion of darkness rare in Zemeckis' work during the '80s, and signally absent from most similar movies produced in that decade. (Steven Spielberg's films providing maybe the best examples.)
All of this is fine...but it would be unfair to stop there. Because in the above formulation, I noted that the movie's aim was to entertain its teenage audience. Given this, it seems natural to ask who that audience actually was, or at least who the filmmaker seems to have conceived his audience to be. The answer seems pretty clearly to be: white teenage boys.
(This is the moment in film criticism where I imagine certain readers rolling their eyes and muttering "Why do you have to ruin the fun?" while other readers sigh in relief, because they sense I'm about to start to dive into a social or historical critique. It's for this reason that I started with what is maybe an unusual definition of a perfect film, and which obviously skirts any normative – Is it "good" or "bad"? Is it "moral" or "immoral"? – questions. It's not that these questions don't interest me. It's just that they seem to me to require so much discussion about groundwork – What do you mean by "good" or "bad" and what are your criteria? What is your idea of what it means to be "moral," and where does this come from? etc. – as to be worked at in tiny chunks, rather than all at once. One of which tiny chunks I'll talk about in a few paragraphs.)
So, an audience of teenage white boys. Why do I say this? (And, incidentally, I am far from the first person to say this.) Well, Michael J. Fox is a teenage white boy, but this doesn't really get us anywhere. Better to think through the way the film serves as a heroic fantasy, and the way that anyone other than a teenage white boy has to move beyond the vision of themselves (say as a woman or a person of color) that the film presents. Put differently, if you are not a teenage white boy, you have to identify with someone who is not like you if you want to find a heroic model in the film.
The male characters in the film have challenges to overcome, and are fully developed. Marty wants to rescue his parents and thereby himself; Doc has his time machine triumph; George goes from nerdy to suave by defeating Biff. The women (and by this, in the film, we mean mostly Lea Thompson's older and younger character of Lorraine) don't really exist in the same way. Lorraine doesn't have any internal conflict. Her story arc involves her being wistful about the lost possibilities of her life in 1985 – in addition to being prudish and having a problem with alcohol – and then turning out to have been sexually precocious in 1955; this sets up the tragedy of her life because we know that she ended up with the pathetic version of George. But it's not her actions or choices that change her situation – it's the actions of the male characters around her. The only way she asserts herself in the story is through her sexual attraction to Marty, and this forcefulness has a negative valence. She's at fault, as it were, for the near brush with incest which allows Marty, and the teenage boys who identify with him, to be blameless while still getting the thrill of the illicit. (Had a director like Hitchcock or De Palma made the film, it seems obvious that it would have been Marty who fell in love with his mom, not the other way around.)
The case of race in the film is equally as stark. There are no substantive black characters – Goldie Wilson (played by Donald Fullilove), who goes from being a soda jerk to the mayor, is less a character than a slogan – which is of course a definitional aspect of long periods of Hollywood history. This is not to minimize that history, but simply to say that in this way the film is ordinary, rather than unique. More interesting in these terms is the notion that it was Marty McFly, not Chuck Berry, who occupied a foundational position in inventing rock and roll. Claims of appropriation aside, notice how this functions to assure a white male teenager that he constitutes the very center of the world: his mom is even more in love with him than she is with his dad, and he’s the reason his parents even met in the first place; he was the one, and not some person who looks different than he does, who invented his favorite music; and he’s ultimately responsible for saving his family from terrible decrepitude.
One final element of the film that's worth mentioning in this regard goes back to the possible aims of its director. It was the film critic Robin Wood, I think, who noted that there’s a strong strain of generational recuperation the movies of the 1980s. According to this line of thought, the social disruptions of the 1960s (the Civil Rights movement, feminism, the gay liberation movement) caused a feeling of a strong generational rift, apparent in many of the films of the late '60s and '70s. In the '80s, more conservative American mainstream film cycles reacted against the radicalism of that earlier moment, in part by trying to reassure their audiences that the generations did not hate each other and could, in fact, share traditions and values. How reassuring, that is, Back to the Future must have been to an adult parent of a 1980s teenager, for whom the message of the picture becomes that if you can raise a son noble enough to overcome life's challenges he might just, in turn, repay the favor by helping you redeem the mistakes you've made along the way. The Graduate this is not.
In all of this, given its aims, I think Back to the Future succeeds beautifully. But what if we take the blinders off and ask if it's a good one or a bad film, an immoral one or a moral one?
There is no short answer to questions like that – valid as they are – and my sense is the danger of attempting short answers is that they often force us into a reductionism which leads at best to a kind of constricting moralizing and at worst to declarations that the only art that should exist is that which agrees with our contemporary beliefs. One problem of this is, of course, that future generations will certainly not share our moral values in their entirety; if we start down the path of reductionism, those generations will declare that since our films do not agree with their values, those films should be vanquished. This certainly seems to put one of the primary functions of art – the transmission of human experience – at threat.
Rather, why not say as a possible first step that a film is valuable to the degree that it moves us. Perhaps this moving is in the sense that it stirs our emotions, perhaps it's in the sense that it stirs us to talk about it, laugh about it with others, or try to dismantle it in argument or art, and perhaps it's the sense that it makes us more aware of the world around us.
A film can be perfect, that is, and still open for dispute; it can be magnificent and immoral, glorious and abrasive; or, like Back to the Future, it can be entertaining and an example of real storytelling accomplishment but at the same time still the product of forces that render it in equal parts troubling and revealing.
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