Back to the future
Here is a good conventional review/ Analysis of 'Back to The Future.' http://www.widescreenings.com/back-future-analysis-review.html
Here is relatively witty Geeky Slacker video appraisal of 'Back to The Future.' http://youtu.be/2mlh4ijViFQ
"BACK TO THE FUTURE" (1985)
A Deconstruction of Zemeckis Original Film.
[And the Psychology of Baudrillard's Post-Modern, Reagan era America]
What Has Happened? Any change that does not manifest in external commodity is not real or meaningful.
“I ask myself about the theatre- about its mystery and essence. It’s to do with time. The Theatre more tangibly than any other art, presents us with the past. Paintings may show what the past looked like, they are like traces of footprints, they no longer move. With each theatre performance, what once happened is re-enacted…
… The past becomes the present in the only way that is possible for this to happen. And this unique possibility is Theatre.”
John Berger: ‘Why Look at Animals?’ –Ape Theatre [pg. 50]
“Our memories can be very unreliable. We like to think of them as indelible records of our past, but every time we pull out a scene we fiddle with it a little bit before we put it back in.-If we hate our husband now we re-remember the wedding as less joyous, or we say he was never the right one for me anyway; we’re constantly altering our memory so that the past won’t conflict with the present.”
‘IN Treatment’ Season 2, Episode- Gina, week 3; HBO -2011
“No Future, No Future for You.” -Johnny Rotten, Sex Pistols 1976
“The World Has arrived at the end of History.” -Francis Fukuyama 1992.
Title
In my experience much can be deduced from the title of a film (e.g. The Terminator- “A kind of retroactive abortion… killing the mother… before he’s even conceived” The Terminator could be read as a pro-life text.)“Back To The Future” as a sentence is a nonsense a self-devouring oxymoron which negates itself (similarly to the setting name ‘Hill Valley’, Which is it, Hill or Valley?). Doesn’t even make sense with-in the context of the film as there is no The Future, there are multiple futures. The whole thing vanishes in a puff of logic-less-ness
Core Concepts:
The Black and White issues at the heart of this Blog are raised by Crispin Glover."It had to do with money, and what the characters were doing with money ... I said to Robert Zemeckis I thought it was not a good idea for our characters to have a monetary reward, because it basically makes the moral of the film that money equals happiness". Glover argued "the love should be the reward",
Read more: http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/back-to-the-future/26826/why-crispin-glover-never-did-back-to-the-future-part-ii#ixzz32LkBFJRN
I like Glover; He's odd.
Also those raised here;
“In order to secure this “new,” better future, Marty effectively erased the whole of his life and everybody that he knows. He did, in fact, never exist, nor did his family. Sure, there are different versions of these people in the alternate future he’s just created, but these aren’t people that he technically knows - their personalities are going to be totally different, as if they’re strangers.
The old family are dead and gone, unable to exist without the original, unchanged 1955 to back them up. Although this future is certainly more appealing for Marty, there’s something strange about erasing your entire family and replacing them with “better” versions – especially if you have to get to know them from scratch.”
Read more at http://www.whatculture.com/film/10-movie-endings-with-disturbing-implications-you-totally-missed.php/8#ZkLbj1klwcTOWTjx.99
Perhaps the thesis is that the alienation and the money are causally linked.
Narrative Structure:
Let me state, the objective of this piece of writing is not to expose plot holes in the continuity.Heidegger states that arguments should be true or false, however Narratives need not be so defined, it is not important. Make your story, a story repossessing the Dasein from the They. i.e. Narratives are a lie which aid the discovery of an authentic conscious self.
However the narrative tropes of time-travel have exact parallels to psychoanalysis and the construction of narrative, so let me address them first:
Time:
-“No matter where you go there you are.” –Confucius or someone
Introspection: In Film/TV, time travel is used as a device to either aid a characters personal, psychological growth (Scrooge, Donnie Darko, Life on Mars TV Series)
Ripping Yarn: …Or it’s used as a device to send characters on an adventure. (Time Bandits, Bill and Ted)
Outro-spection: Occasionally it is an amalgamation of both i.e. a kind of social engineering (Terminator 2, The Philadelphia Experiment (1984))
Back to the Future does all 3 and yet none. Marty doesn’t alter as a character, all the action is counter-action, and all the engineering –counter engineering.
http://www.totalfilm.com/features/50-best-time-time-travel-movies/back-to-the-future-1985
The Stage:
In films; the time travel “science” itself either follows a determinist model or a multiple parallel universe model. ‘B.T.T.F’ largely uses the later, as things change and the past effects the future which is experiencable via the time machine. However it does have an odd unspoken presumption of a correct way of how things should be.Essentially any piece of writing that uses the multiple universe model especially combined with the ‘Adventure’ objective is ultimately unsatisfactory and lazy writing (every episode of Dr Who, Star Trek Prequels) Groundhog day is an example of the infinite multiple universe model used to aid personal character growth which is very satisfactory, but Groundhog day limits its palette in other ways i.e. the one single day.
The time machine in narrative terms is a Deus ex machina. i.e. a cop out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_space_bats
“Time! I’ve got all the time I want, I’m in a Time Machine.” -Marty McFly
This is the best line of the film and negates much of it and its sequels. It occurs to Marty to give himself 5/10 extra minutes to save doc, but not to prevent himself from traveling back in the first place, probably because that would equate to an horrific, insurmountable, logic crumbling, time - loop.
(I’m doing what I said I wasn’t going to do, re plot holes)
If the parallel world into which the characters are thrown is worthy enough then the magic of future technology used to get them there is forgivable.
Clarke's Three Laws; are three "laws" of prediction formulated by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke. They are:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Because Clarke was a sci-fi writer they are laws, if they were concerning crime fiction they’d be called clichés.
In a sense even a gun may be a Deus ex machine, or a drug or any external object. They are all aids to facilitate the characters actions which lie external to their autonomy.
Imagine if Mr Miyagi simply gave the Karate Kid a magic potion that made him good at fighting instead of spending the entire film teaching him Karate, is a skill any different from magic or a technology?… yes.
The Deus ex Machina world as a Meta-space for play and infinite possibility:
Any parallel world is a Meta narrative it is a place, both real and unreal where the character can go to, and explore, and come back from; having changed in some way. The distinction between adventure and personal growth is not that distinct, especially in film where action is the only way to present realisation or Enlightenment within an individual.
The Meta narrative space is a safe place that will not impinge upon the real world, and yet if it is to have any meaning at all it is required to, paradoxically, have ramifications upon that real world. Think Jack and The Bean Stalk or any film where someone wakes up from a dream, but then realises they have retained some valuable artifact from their adventures. Or indeed any good film you have seen; The film itself remains a fiction but hopefully it has changed you and your understanding in some way.
This type of Play Therapy is what a film like Bridge to Terabithia (2007) portrays very well. Bridge to Terabithia (2007) - IMDb
So; Back To The Future has an archetypal story structure.
Except that Marty Doesn’t change at all… everything else does.
http://www.scifiideas.com/related/writing-advice/four-part-story-structure-explained/
Nostalgia:
So, why is it Time Travel and not some fantasy space (a Matrix or Holo-deck)? This is a teenage film, perhaps the first, in which the Teenager becomes carer to his Parents; he has to have regard for the previous generation, the baby boomers. (Coz they had it tough!) Greater regard than that for himself…In-fact the two are linked, not in an unintelligent/ un-insightful way. There is self-interest at the heart of this film and it is a very conservative one literally concerned with avoiding change. It pays lip service to social responsibility and diversity yet everything is homogenised and marked by branding and desire. Marty’s values are the same as his 1950’s counterparts Cars, Girls and Rock ‘n’ Roll but all filtered through the lens of MTV.
When Marty returns to his improved “Present plus”, it is not the same, it is detached, separate, “Successful” but soulless there is no shared experience beyond the commercial.
“Commodity’s detach and become images, and participants become spectators” -Guy Debord
-Prozac was first introduced to the US market in January 1988. It took two years for Prozac to gain its 'most prescribed' status.
Marty may as well have put his folks on Prozac, the drug and the time machine are both outside technologies of Deus ex Machine status. Baudrillard says reality is that which can be Xeroxed/ copied. This entire world is copied. This is the hyper real, more real than real. The democratisation of technology has led to Marty being able to form his own world. But due to the Deus ex machine, the magic of technology, there is no investment or relatable meaning.
In a world of infinite tweets what is the value of one more tweet/ blog?
Power:
Time travel is comparable to the psychiatrists couch, going back putting right what once went wrong and hoping each time that the next leap might be the leap home...The safe Meta space of which I spoke is comparable to Carl C Rogers empathic model of interpersonal psychotherapy, or a space that would allow for Jürgen Habermas’ undistorted communication, in fact any form of play, or art therapy. All these things share that same model of the internal dynamic which is free of repercussions these lack of repercussions mean there is no vested interest no power dynamic and patterns of behaviour and cognition can be practiced and learnt from over time with supportive guidance.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201401/why-is-narcissism-increasing-among-young-americans
http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital
The criticism of this process would be that it is not real, hence its Meta status, -this is not real this simple playing at Being.
Things need to be done. Biff needs to be biffed! We need to rescue that fair maiden or our dad does. The nuclear family that’s what’s real, it’s our tribe against there tribe…
“There are things worth fighting for” - General Alexander Haig US Secretary of State 1981-1982
Is it?
Freire (1986) said ‘action without reflection is mere activism and reflection without action is mere verbalism’.
Is the mere repetition of existence meaningful? –Sisyphus.
Back To The Future does not, and is not supposed to answer or address any of these issues for someone to look at such a film and expect this, would be more foolish than the person who took it at face value.
So what is going on in it? What’s the context? Answer: A teenage movie. It is worthwhile to compare Fox’s Marty with James Dean in ‘Rebel Without A Cause’, they share some things in common predominantly a need for a strong male role model and a frustration and disappointment in their own fathers.
In-fact this aspect of Marty is a packaging of the 50’s existential discontentment of ‘Rebel’; Marty is the same as the characters in The Breakfast Club which came out the same year (1985). Dean thought he could really change the world his dilemma was a bubbling rage at how he was to shape the world in order to fit his authentic self into it, and how the two things: World and Self, would complement each other. He, like Sartre was an exponent of Isiah Berlin’s Positive liberty.
These 1985 characters do not have a rage, they have an anxiety, they hate their lives and their parents lives and their anxiety is in the despair they face at the small respite they have now between their teenage years and the time they have to get a job and embark on much the same type of existence as their parents. They are victims of the essential stasis inherent in Negative Liberty.
http://www.stevenbenedict.ie/2013/02/the-breakfast-club/
There are things worth fighting for.
“The Trap: Episode 3 We Will Force you to be Free” Adam Curtis
“Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy…” - Maximilien Robespierre (French Revolution bloke)
Put simply the entire trilogy is analogous to the double bind of positive negative liberty as mapped out in Adam Curtis’ The Trap i.e. that the general policy is a forthright activity in order to maintain the status quo.
"The brilliance of Reaganomics was to marry the anti-authoritarian urge of what had once been the counterculture with anti-government bias of free-Market conservatives. In Reagan's persona as well as his politics, the independent, "shoot from the hip" individualism of the Malboro Man became compatible-even synergistic- with the economics and culture of self interest. "
-Douglas Rushkoff; "Life Inc: How The World Became A Corporation, And How To Take It Back." [Bodly Head, 2009]
Marty is kinda mad, but not James Dean mad
Marty wants to smash Biffs face in
Nerd Power:
- Revenge Of The Nerds was released in 1984.
- In 1980 IBM hires Paul Allen and Bill Gates to create an operating system for a new PC. The pair buy the rights to a simple operating system manufactured by Seattle Computer Products and use it as a template. IBM allows the two to keep the marketing rights to the operating system, called DOS.
If I was Andrew Collins or some other talking head in a Channel 4 List Show I would say the 1980’s were the decade of the nerd.
However I am me and I will say the 1980’s were the galvanisation of the commodification of the Nerd.
American Splendor (2003) :
“Harvey Pekar: So what you're saying is, you identify with those nerds.Toby Radloff: Yes. I consider myself a nerd. And this movie has uplifted me. There's this one scene, where a nerd grabs the microphone during a pep rally and announces that he is a nerd and that he is proud of it and stands up for the rights of other nerds.
Harvey Pekar: Right on.
Toby Radloff: Then he asks all the kids at the pep rally who think they are nerds to come forward, so nearly everybody in the place does. That's the way the movie ends.
Harvey Pekar: Uhhmmm, so the nerds won, huh?
Toby Radloff: Yes.
Harvey Pekar: All right. Wow, well you know, you got this movie and I'm getting hitched. We both had a good month, huh?”
-An exchange from American Splendor maps perfectly the dynamic between the de-individuation in commodity V’s existential individuation. It also perfectly maps out the way that dynamic has played out since the 1980’s; we have all stepped forward and claimed we are nerds.
After all what is Harvey’s Comic Strip of his life, if not the first Blog/ the First facebook profile? Perhaps he thinks that the comic strip offers a freedom and subtlety of expression not afforded within the prescribed boxes of social media, the fool!
Harvey Pekar:-
- Look Toby, the guys in that movie are not 28 year-old file clerks who live with their grandmothers in an ethnic ghetto...They didn't get their computers like you did, by trading in a bunch of box tops and $49.50 at the supermarket...Sure, go to the movies and daydream, but Revenge of the Nerds ain't reality. It's just Hollywood bullsh*t.
- Yeah, I know I'm not as interesting as The Little Mermaid and all that magical crap.
The Nerd is not unlike the Artist in there obsession and intrigue in the external artefacts of Things; often unusual things which serve no utilitarian purpose. But in the nerd it is interest for its own sake distraction and externalisation, there is no interpretation or expansion of meaning to encompass human qualities or wider questions, for a nerd to see himself reflected truthfully within his artefact would be horrific and defeat the point of escapism. It is things for the sake of things; commodification.
We are all now Nerds, so what meaning has the term Nerd? Every Billion Dollar Movie franchise has to appeal to anti-social, escapist, lonely, men. The Silicon valley, dot-com industry that boomed in the 1980’s has evolved to mold us all to be a little more nerd like; anti-social Social Media, Fantasy devoid of guiding structural narrative e.g.: Computer games or navigating the Web. All is a System/structure that gives the lie to the poly-amorphous Hyper-Real, where in-fact it is dominated by white male misogyny. Technology is both a product of, and facilitator, to that same solitude and inability to relate. All as a result of that removal /absence of structured, social investment, as embodied in play and empathy, the play space has been commodified to sell product and now instead others are seen as external objects to be manipulated (equivalent to counterinsurgency/ game theory).
Put simply, Technology replaces the subtlety of unspoken feedback and power becomes an abstract, embodied in force rather than autonomy.
“The Tools of work and play have effectively become one.”
-Kevin Duncan ‘How To Tame Technology’
This is the pretence at Baudrillards Hyper Real yet ultimately controlled by the Authoritarian Nerd Power of technology as shown in Back To The Future.
Authenticity:
Novelty, novelty, novelty, in no previous decade would such an array of novelty clocks be available, and in no previous decade would simple novelty be assumed as worthy enough to dominate the opening images of a film. The clock and the TV News this is the Hyper Real, what is happening is what the machine says is happening. It is a world where Pepsi & Nuclear power; and Burger King and Libyan terrorists all exist on equal footing, the only thing that really resonates is cars and girls.
NEWS
Cola and Plutonium both rot your guts.1985 radio announcer:
“October is inventory time, so right now; Statler Toyota is making the best deals of the year on all 1985-model Toyotas. You won't find a better car at a better price with better service anywhere in Hill Valley. That's Statler Toyota in downtown Hill Valley.”
I want to talk about 3 specific scenes which will then branch out to address the main transitions of action.
Ethics: The Un-seen Bribe
The, the, most interesting scene in every respect, framing, character motivation, tone, etc., of the film is the one in which the Doc informs a police officer he is conducting weather experiments and the cop asks if he has a permit. (Docs family used to own Hill Valley as seen in the newspaper clipping on his wall at the beginning with all his fucking clocks, thus he has some kind of status.) The Doc comes down from his ladder and apparently bribes the cop, but this is obscured from shot by Marty putting the letter to Doc into his coat pocket explaining how to not get killed by hippy Libyan terrorists.
This shot where the letter obscures the bribe is the only thing that makes me think that Zemeckis’ might be worthy of anything other than contempt.
Whether he knows it or not he is equating the one with the other they are both bribes, miscarriages of justice. Whether legal ,or cosmic justice, using money or technology to bypass proper judgement. The film is saying that both are fine, as long as you get away with it.
It is Realpolitik, ‘Peace through strength’.
I mean it’s a wonder the doc just donned a bullet proof jacket and didn’t go along packing an AK. Of course he could have just not pissed the Libyans off or had no dealings with them at all.
[Libyans: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/hes_behind_you
“Together the western elites and Gaddafi helped to lead us into a simplistic two-dimensional vision of the world - full of exaggerations and falsehoods. A fake bubble of certainty that has imprisoned us in the west - and is now preventing us from understanding what is really going on in the world outside.”
“Colonel Gaddafi had willingly helped the west turn him into a pantomime villain. That invented character was then very attractive to those in power in the west because it helped in turn make their simplified, and often fictional, version of the world seem real.”
-Adam Curtis]
Chicken
And egg
Reverse Engineering: Doc and the video Camera
Doc sees his own invention, The Flux Capacitor, before he has invented it, there is an inferred time loop, which is that he reverse engineers his own invention.( i.e. takes it apart figures out how it’s made and; how it works so he can build one.)
He spends a week with the time machine in his lab in 1955, seeing as it has come from his very own mind surely this is enough time to get to know how it would work, there’s no translation/ interpretation required. Seeing as none of his other inventions worked this seems a reasonable assumption.
There is also the Video Camera which to the Doc seems just as fantastical as the time machine. (The jokes about buying plutonium in any shop in the future remain quite good as opposed to the jokes about jerry Lewis and Marty’s pepsi based gags which have all fallen to the ravages of time; victims of the very thing they jested at.)
So why didn’t Doc just reverse engineer the camcorder too and become a millionaire. Perhaps this goes against the Docs ethics of not interfering which is a confusing thing considering he invited a fucking Time Machine; this conundrum is revisited over and over in the sequels about interference and maintaining things. Again it is an expression of this positive exertion of negative principles.
Perhaps it is analogous to issues of environmentalism and sustainability. Or responsible use of the nuclear bomb.
But he is happy to avoid his own death at the end of the film and immediately goes into the future and comes back... “It’s your kids Marty…something's gotta be done...” etc. Interfering again, using technology to bribe his way into a preferable existence away from all those fucking clocks.
Christopher Lloyd is good
Probably used that Delorean to smuggle a lot of coke.
Imagine if there had been no problems, and the characters had achieved there better lives with no effort or jeopardy, just used the time machine to cynically get what they want; if the doc just said “hell yeah! I don’t wanna die. Tell me!” They would be entirely unsympathetic, calculating, rational, self-serving consumers.
To me there disregard and desire for stasis makes them not that dissimilar from this self-serving view it is only really Alan Silvestri’s score that saves them most of the time.
In fact the characters resistance is almost worse because they are kidding themselves. Bill And Ted are morons; theirs is a more honest position that unknowingly acknowledges that anything that has happened has happened and similarly what is yet to happen is what's yet to happen.
So to not reverse engineer the video camera is to stick to the lie of non-interference, to not expose the truth of self-preservation and self-interest.
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)
Be Excellent.
Rehearsal and Reality: George Marty and the plan
Whilst (Presumably) in Georges back yard as he hangs the washing out, in an effeminate, disappointing, male role-model, type way. Marty tells George what to do; He hatches the plan of George hitting him in order to impress Lorraine.
This might rightly be the epicentre of the film along with Marty’s initial ‘being run over’ encounter with Lorraine. These are the normal way in which the action of reality unfolds without a time machine, planning and the unforeseen.
But even with the time machine in this film (and its sequels) the same dynamic between planned and unforeseen pretty much exists. But there is a continual attempt at rigging and re-rigging events; this is in affect counter-insurgency. The contrived nature of the plan can be seen as analogous to the time machine, Marty's insight is as a result of it. The plan doesn't unfold as expected. Yet the results are the same.
"You know if you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything."
This is what Marty says to George, or doc says to Marty or something, it is the type of speech that would be found in an authentic supportive relationship. The rest is inauthentic:
George: "Oh... You mean you're gonna go touch her on her..."
Marty: "It's just an act."
The effect is to place the authentic in inverted comas, to pay it lip-service, to rob it of its authenticity. Everything is merely a stand in for itself.
Doc: "No wonder your president is an actor, he has to look good on television."
Marty's exposition is the equivalent to Doc's using his model to explain harnessing the lightning strike. Similarly there are problems/ jeopardy but the outcome is predictable.
The effect of all these types of repetition the way the entire film is constructed, with pieces of evidence scattered around- how Marty’s 4x4 repeats in the radio advert, then when he sees it with Jenifer, then at the end.
The way the incidental becomes significant; this is the way advertising works.
It is unconscious, sprawling, the incidental its spotlighted bit by bit, drip, drip, drip; gradually sedimentary or corrosive. This is the reason the film is successful, it bears repeat viewings, it gives the illusion of being intricately constructed but this is just the way it operates it doesn’t work in any other way, remove the spectacle and there’s nothing else there apart from a playground tail of the nerds overcoming the bullies.
Authentic Power Dilemma
But Wait:Marty is locked in the Trunk!
Marty is absent from George’s 'authentic' grasp of power over biff, so he doesn't engineer anything at all (?).
Marty’s absence is necessary once again to give weight to the idea that George’s geek power is natural and somehow the way things should be and give weight to the lie of the film that the ending is somehow Just and natural; that a cosmic wrong has been righted.
When in fact; it is a lie, it is the use of technology to seize power for the ends of consumerism. With the outcome being that a sense of Community and Self with-in that community, is lost. It is a lie that autonomy relies upon quashing those that are against you when actually autonomy is a mutual and symbiotic process.
We are all time travelers but the idea that any one time is more important than any other is false, if you wish to change simply change, don’t believe the false-hood that your dye was cast a long time ago. But, however, accept that you will never be anyone other than yourself.
"The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth...in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future...Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man [are] only separated by shadows, not through reality...Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence… Was then not all sorrow in time, all self-torment and fear in time? Were not all difficulties and evil in the world conquered as soon as one conquered time, as soon as one dispelled time?"
Herman Hesse Siddhartha; Chapter 9,
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