Back to the Future

For my 14th birthday, my parents took my cousin Dan and I to Winona for dinner and a PG-rated movie to celebrate the big day. I chose Back to the Future on that night and nearly twenty-five years later I was again in a theatre viewing the big screen showing of Michael J. Fox's step into movie stardom after having already conquered the small screen with his character Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties.

I couldn't help feeling a bit nostalgic on Saturday night while Marianella and I watched Marty McFly valiantly attempt to return to 1985. The nostalgia existed for a time when I relied on my parents to take me to movies (which in retrospect was a time of pretty limited celluloid options-my Dad, who could exercise a pretty colorful vocabulary working around the farm, was conversely a critic who judged a movie's worth upon the amount of profanities that were included in the film; even Back to the Future couldn't escape his scorn with the profane utterances in the movie that you can count on one hand).

Nostalgia was also present as I viewed a film whose premise was built on the vast disconnect for Marty returning to the time of his parent's youth of 1955. Twenty-five years after this movie debuted, there was a similar disconnect from the mid-'80s for us. We were struck by the stonewashed jeans favored by Marty, his "hip" lingo (evidently 'heavy' was an adjective popular among teens in '85), and a time when JC Penney's was still considered an anchor store for large shopping malls.

Analyzing BTTF a bit closer than when I was fourteen, I was also struck by the choice of Fox as the lead character of Marty McFly. The character was written as a bit of a smart ass, anti-authority figure who caught the scorn of the high school dean and local townspeople as he maneuvered around town by stealing rides from the rear bumpers of various vehicles on his skateboard. But really, has there ever been a more wholesome teen idol than Fox? Nothing about him was anti-authority; I mean, he was just finishing his run as Alex P. Keaton, the ultimate square (to steal from Marty's mother in 1955). You also can't look at the era and say that all of the teen characters were still wholesome as Wonder Bread; in the same year, Judd Nelson was starring as the ultimate anti-authority teen in The Breakfast Club. Viewing Fox as a electric guitar playing rebel was. . .quaint. When you consider the director of BTTF (Robert Zemeckis) would also direct Forrest Gump in the next decade, you can definitely see Zemeckis was most comfortable in family-friendly, non-threatening fare.

All this being said, Back to the Future is one of those classic popcorn movie experiences-a movie enjoyable at age fourteen and again at thirty-eight. We left the theatre smiling and recounting the cleverness of the movie's dialogue. We laughed over our favorite scene, when Marty is being chased by Biff and his gang around the main square, eluding them before they smash into a manure truck. And while Fox was the star of the film, the considerable talents of Christopher Lloyd as Marty's mentor, Doc Brown stole the show. His elastic expressions and frantic nature provided the perfect foil to Marty. Lloyd certainly has made a career of stealing laughs however, as this clip below will attest (if you don't have five minutes, I strongly suggest tuning in at the 4 minute mark):