Luke Skywalker Can't Read
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If there’s a higher purpose to science fiction, other than to entertain, one aim is usually to understand the human experience through hyperbolic stories. Science fiction has always been highly equipped to handle far-out problems by viewing culture and individuals through the lens of technology or fantastical concepts. Explaining life as we know it, or might one day live it, is certainly the task of all good science fiction. Similarly, the stories and enduring character of Sherlock Holmes provide a lens through which the human experience can be occasionally deduced or explained. In an unreasonable world, the greatest science fiction can frequently comfort us, while at the same time forcing us to confront our greatest fears. And the ultimate impact of Sherlock Holmes is the same: even when he doesn’t exist, the ghost of Sherlock Holmes is still stubbornly, and improbably, real.
All You McFlys: A Back to the Future Theory of Everything
I’m living in 2015 and everyone I know is complaining that they don’t have their own hoverboard yet. Because 2015 is the year Marty and Doc travel to in Back to the Future Part II, it has permanently become a version of the future everyone loves to fetishize. There are flying cars, flying skateboards, and guys wearing two ties instead of one. Yet Back to the Future’s “future” was originally “the present.” Not only did Back to the Future create a permanent future with 2015, it also created a permanent past (the 1950s) and present (1980s). This is partly because the entire Back to the Future trilogy encompasses every single genre imaginable.
Think about it. It’s an adventure. It’s a mystery. It’s a comedy. It’s a romance. It’s a romantic comedy. It’s obviously science fiction. Somehow it’s a fucking western. This isn’t to say the whole Back to the Future thing is perfect or even objectively “good.” It’s just that if we needed to shoot something into space that represented what American pop culture was interested in from the late twentieth century until now, all three Back to the Future films would explain us—positively and negatively—better than pretty much anything else. I don’t have the chalkboard Doc uses in the second movie, so instead, I’ll attempt to break down everything you need to know about Back to the Future into easy (hard) to understand sections. So, we need first to understand why we love it so much in order to understand what we still don’t understand about it.
Let’s Talk About Fake Nostalgia
In the first movie, Marty McFly creates a better future for his family by subtly altering their past. In the second film, Marty attempts to rescue his own negative future, while repairing an alternate present. Finally, part three sees Marty and his time-traveling friend Doc simultaneously embrace and mock the values of the most cliché part of America’s past: the Old West. As much as Marty and Doc rip apart the meaning of cause and effect throughout all their time traveling, their values don’t actually change one iota throughout the films, and despite all the conflicts they endure, both exert maximum control over their lives. The obvious irony here is that for a series of films supposedly about pivotal moments of choice in life, the stories aren’t really contemplative about these choices because the main characters experience only temporary consequences. In Back to the Future, if your life didn’t turn out the way you wanted, that can be fixed.
Like the audience, Marty retains the memories of each of his various contradictory timelines, meaning he can constantly pat himself on the back for how great he is at avoiding catastrophe. The reason why we adore Marty McFly and Doc isn’t just because Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd are crazy charming in these movies (they obviously are), but because their adventures combine the two things Americans love: getting our way and fake nostalgia.
In the final scene of Back to the Future Part III, Doc Brown—leaning over his sweet-ass steampunk hover train—enthusiastically tells Jennifer: “Your future hasn’t been written yet! No one’s has! Your future is whatever you make it!”
It’s all pretty inspirational and I cried quite a lot as a child when Doc said that stuff.* However, if Doc was being honest about his “real” life, and not winking at the camera for our benefit, he might have said this: “Also, your past isn’t written either, Jennifer. Marty and I changed the past like six different times!”
Like so many important geeky phenomena, it’s hard to talk about the cultural importance of Back to the Future without getting into the nerdy specifics of its plot holes. But unlike something like Star Wars, where certain problems can be explained with in-universe analysis, Back to the Future can only be discussed with ourselves (the audience) firmly in the conversation, and that’s because everything about these movies is so obviously unrealistic. Am I saying I find the galaxy-spanning illiterate culture of Star Wars, a place where full-on magic is commonplace, a more realistic world than Back to the Future? Yes, and understanding this is the first step to understanding the Ouroboros of this film series.
Hill Valley as the American every-city is an easy place to start. It’s located in California, but exactly where isn’t clear. We never see the ocean, nor does it seem like anybody ever talks about cities outside of Hill Valley. In the alternate “present,” in Back to the Future Part II, Biff makes a mention of “Switzerland,” suggesting a world outside of Hill Valley, which is an uncommon move for the series. You might wonder why Biff decided to build his big empire in Hill Valley and not move to Vegas, but that would ignore a bigger question as to why so many generations of these characters’ families stay in the same town. Like Biff, Marty McFly is similarly Hill Valley–centric, because even though he possesses all the other realistic qualities of a teenager,* Marty has no desire to get out of this small town and head somewhere else. In fact, Marty McFly’s “big dreams” in the first film are simply to have a fancy pickup truck and to maybe someday live in a housing community like Hilldale with Jennifer. (Here, Marty is the anti–Luke Skywalker.)
Marty McFly and his girlfriend, Jennifer Parker, have endlessly suburban values, with aspirations that are humble and 100 percent relatable to most people. This is why everyone loves these movies: nothing happens outside of Hill Valley, because the American experience (in the mind of all Americans) is exactly the same way. If you grew up in the suburbs of America, you know there are people who don’t think of anything outside of their town. It’s really easy to imagine George Saunders or Steven Millhauser writing about Marty and Jennifer.
The creation of Back to the Future’s fake nostalgia begins with the way Hill Valley looks: exactly like every town you’ve ever seen on American television. It feels familiar, because television and giant films make things really familiar, really quickly. So, when we journey into Hill Valley’s past in the first movie, you feel doubly nostalgic, because even though you’ve just seen this fake town, you feel like you already know it, and now you’re getting misty about seeing what it was like in 1955. There’s also nothing jarring about the transition between the 1985 music and the 1955 music in Back to the Future because Huey Lewis and the News is also a band made of pure fake nostalgia.
We think of the 1980s as being represented by a lot of different types of music—the Clash, Blondie, Bowie, Michael Jackson—but Huey Lewis and the News specifically represents a music thing in the ’80s: that of being soft and retro on purpose, and not in a way that is remotely cool. This isn’t to say Huey Lewis and the News isn’t “good,” simply that I feel like Kenny Loggins could kick Huey’s ass. Huey Lewis and the News is the safest of the safe ’80s music, to put it another way, the American version of Coldplay in 1985.* These days, nostalgia for Huey Lewis and the News has only grown and that’s because there’s a near invisible line between pop art being “timeless” and benefiting from fake nostalgia. Because everyone alive today is obsessed with pop art that came out after World War II, the 1950s will always look good in films, and Back to the Future takes advantage of this by creating wacky anachronisms. For example, seeing Marty’s purple Calvin Klein underwear shock Lorraine’s 1955 sensibilities is a funny joke to audiences in 1985 and only gets funnier as this version
of 1955 and its anachronisms both continue to recede farther and farther into the past. Not only does Marty have the Calvin Klein underwear, but he calls himself “Calvin Klein.” In Back to the Future Part III, hanging out in 1885, Marty calls himself “Clint Eastwood,” which is funny even if you’ve never seen The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Add to this the fact that alternate-universe Biff is watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on TV in Back to the Future Part II, proving that both the reference and the reference-heavy joke (“Clint Eastwood”) are self-contained in these movies. Which is one way to build a fake nostalgia machine: layer your cultural references inside of your anachronistic jokes.
In the context of thinking of this as a science fiction movie, you could say that it’s not that super weird that everything takes place in Hill Valley. Even Doc mentions that there seems to be some universal significance to the date November 12, 1955, the day when the clock tower is struck by lightning, Marty and Doc first “meet,” and Marty’s parents go to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. This temporal location becomes the destination (and occasionally the origin) for the entire Back to the Future universe. So, it follows that the physical location of Hill Valley itself is also super important, the journey to Mecca that is also itself Mecca. This works from a literary angle if we think of Back to the Future as intentionally nonrealistic in its metaphoric tone. There’s not a world outside of Hill Valley at all, because just as in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, you can walk away from “the other house,” but the farther you get away, the sooner you’ll find yourself walking back toward it. If José Saramago had decided to write a novel about paradoxes, he would have probably manufactured a place similar to Hill Valley.
Reoccurring tendencies throughout the history of Hill Valley also help to construct the fake nostalgia of these films while cementing the surrealist nature of everyone’s biographies. Doc and Marty’s friendship is the most echoing, and not just because they’re time travelers. Essentially their relationship is more like father and son than best buddies, which means there are effectively two nerdy dads, Doc and George McFly. Even though Marty clearly prefers his fake dad (Doc) to his real dad (George). Still, fake dad or not, Marty and Doc are already hanging out in the original Back to the Future, and it’s never clear from Marty’s perspective how they first met. Without thinking about it too hard, you could just say that various time-travel paradoxes have “always” happened, meaning they were always friends even if they don’t know when and where they first met. Here, we’ve arrived at the best part of any discussion about time-travel stories: what’s the deal with the paradoxes and just how many of them are we juggling in these movies?
Let’s Talk About Paradoxes
Why Marty and Doc are even friends at all represents something of an ontological or “bootstraps” paradox, where cause and effect become utterly unclear. We don’t know if Marty and Doc “met” in 1955 or sometime in the 1980s prior to the start of the first film. Because we see Marty meet Doc in 1955, we’re forced to infer that some kind of information paradox is at work. But since we aren’t given enough information about what Marty believed their relationship was before going back in time in 1985, we’re not sure. This isn’t a mistake or anything, at all, because again, the fact that Doc and Marty were “already” friends at the start of the first movie means that cause and effect are being subverted before the actual time travel is even fucking introduced, which is totally brilliant. Listen, Back to the Future created fake nostalgia and a paradox just by having you believe this teenager and this mad scientist were already friends FOR NO GOOD REASON AT ALL. At the very start, Doc is good old Doc, somebody with whom Marty has always hung out and who we love and trust implicitly.
Now, consider the simple fact that a contemporary blockbuster movie made in America would never ever attempt this now. These days, big genre films always start with a very detailed origin story of the hero, and the relationships with all the heroes’ friends are firmly established before the movie wraps up its generic plot. In fact, that is the entire plot to J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek in 2009: let’s get to know everybody! Back to the Future is so slick that it gets away with us believing these character relationships exist right away, even though the relationships seem totally unrealistic. The relationship between Kirk and Spock in the Abrams Star Trek is way more realistic than the relationship between Marty and Doc, but we like Marty and Doc more because their relationship works off of fake nostalgia, whereas Kirk and Spock in the Abrams Star Trek are actually fueled by the real nostalgia for old Star Trek.* This isn’t to say that a possible remake of Back to the Future would be successful, but its character dynamics might be presented in a way that is more realistic. Most important: I’ve seen Christopher Lloyd field the question as to who should play Doc in a Back to the Future remake and he always says “me.” I’d say that means he’s probably a real time traveler.
The Biff Tannen Family Tree Paradox
Throughout the trilogy, the Tannen family terrorizes the McFly family in five separate time periods: 1885, 1955, 1985, 2015, and an alternate version of 1985 in which Biff Tannen rules Hill Valley from his hot tub. But who the fuck are Biff’s parents? And where did all the Tannens come from anyway? In the original Back to the Future, Thomas F. Wilson brilliantly plays a fortysomething Biff Tannen in 1985, and a teenage Biff in 1955, both providing nice McFly nemesis parallels. In 1985, Biff is George McFly’s biggest problem, but in 1955, Biff becomes Marty’s problem, and thanks to time travel Biff and Marty are “the same age.” Similarly, when Marty travels forward in time to 2015 in Back to the Future Part II, he’s confronted with Griff Tannen, a teenager about Marty’s age who is Biff’s grandson. In a flip from the first film—where Marty’s father George is Biff’s age—Marty’s son, Marty Jr.,* is exactly Griff’s age. Oddly, there is no member of the Tannen family who is Marty’s age. Or, at least not one we see. In 1985—the temporal location where all this “starts”—Biff appears to be unmarried, and yet in 2015, it’s confirmed that Griff in 2015 is the grandchild of Biff, thanks to Old Biff’s quip “Whatdya think, Griff calls me gramps for his health?”
Yet, we have no idea who Griff’s parents are. Presumably, one of Griff’s parents should be Marty’s age in 1985 and hanging around with people Marty knows in high school. Could there be a member of the Tannen family in Marty’s band, the Pinheads? Could Jennifer Parker actually be friends with Biff’s daughter? Early script ideas for Back to the Future Part II did include a “Tiff Tannen,” who would probably have existed in 1985 and served as the Tannen foil for Marty’s generation, but as it stands, we never got to see her.
Weirder still is the fact that in Back to the Future Part II we see that 1955 teenage Biff lives with his grandmother, and like his descendant, Griff, has no parents to speak of. Griff’s immediate progenitor maybe just didn’t get screentime, so therefore might still exist. But dialogue from Back to the Future Part II tells us the house where Biff lives with his grandmother belongs to “the only Tannen in the [phone] book,” leading us to believe the only Tannens who actually live in Hill Valley in 1955 are Biff and his grandmother, making Biff’s origin, at that point in the story, even more unclear than Griff’s. I suppose we have to assume Biff and Griff have parents, but that’s no fun.
In Back to the Future Part III, we meet Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen (though we did hear him mentioned in an alternate version of 1985 in BTTFII) in the Old West of 1885. Mad Dog, we’re told, is Biff’s great-grandfather and this highlights another conspicuous missing branch in the Tannen family tree. If this is Biff’s great-grandfather, that means he might be the father of Biff’s grandmother in 1955. However, maybe not. Biff’s grandmother—the only Tannen in the book, remember—may have married into that name. If we journey outside the canon of the films, this supposedly gets explained, since the Back to the Future video game “reveals” Biff’s father was a mobster named “Kid” Tannen, who we’re supposed to infer was Mad Dog’s son. The only problem with this is that you’re
pretty sure that Mad Dog will be hanged after Marty and Doc split 1885 in BTTFIII, and even though we don’t know if Mad Dog had a family, wife, or something, we certainly don’t see them. Biff and Griff’s only male ancestor probably dies in 1885 and from that point on, the Tannen family seems to only have a representative alive from every other generation, at any given time.
The conspicuous absence of various branches of Biff’s family tree can mean only one thing: Biff is both his own “father” and his own “son.” In BTTFII Old Biff from 2015 steals the DeLorean and travels to 1955 to give young Biff the sport’s almanac that will make him all sorts of money in the “future.” Now, just because we don’t see Old Biff time traveling elsewhere doesn’t mean that he doesn’t. I know, I know. Conspiracy theories always tend to work better when there’s less evidence, and this one is a great conspiracy theory. But I think the best solution to this is that Biff figures out that he’s the product of a paradox and, as a result, has to ensure his own existence by becoming his own ancestor and descendant. This means the missing parts of Biff’s family tree are just him, time traveling. Genetically, I’ve been told this is actually impossible, as you’ll never create a perfect genetic replica of yourself. Still, that quintessential Robert A. Heinlein time-travel short story “All You Zombies—” features a character who is his own father and mother and also gives birth to him/herself. If you can’t do these things in science fiction, I ask, what is the point of science fiction?