by Ryan Britt
The George McFly Writing Career Pseudo-Paradox
We know George McFly is the density—err—destiny of Lorraine Banes, but his initial timeline did not have him becoming a celebrated science fiction author. When Marty visits the 1955 version of his father in the first Back to the Future, George has all the traditional traits of a total dork: bad haircut, lame clothes, no confidence, and, of course, an interest in science fiction. Famously, Marty uses science fiction to convince George he is an alien with a special message: Marty impersonates a faux alien with his low-budget version of a Star Trek/Star Wars mash-up. Without this one event, Marty would not have been able to put the timeline back on course, meaning science fiction inside of science fiction saves the day in Back to the Future. But, it gets better, because in the new timeline Marty has accidentally caused his father to become a science fiction writer and, judging by the state of the McFly household, a reasonably successful one, too!
Some naysayers may point out that A Match Made in Space is only George McFly’s first novel, which wouldn’t account for the comfortable living environment. It has been asserted that it shouldn’t have taken him this long to get the novel done and published. However, it’s possible that George McFly, after his encounter with Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan, went on to become a hot short-story writer like Harlan Ellison or Kurt Vonnegut. Hell, George McFly may have been selling scripts to The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone, assuming such things exist in the Back to the Future world, which they probably do, because we saw an episode of The Honeymooners in the first movie. This era in George McFly’s science fiction writing would certainly fit the post-1955 time frame, and the fact that the McFlys live in California, near the TV world action, makes it all the more plausible. You could even say that in Marty’s reality, George McFly sued both George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry over the use of his original concepts “Darth Vader” (Star Wars) and the planet “Vulcan” (Star Trek). This would explain why George McFly has a ton of money before his first novel comes out. And if Marty McFly, through his father, actually created both Star Trek and Star Wars via paradox, Back to the Future becomes a work of fake nonfiction and übermetafiction simultaneously.
The Jennifer Parker Paradox
The actress who plays Jennifer Parker in Back to the Future is different from the actress who plays her in Back to the Future Parts II and III. In the first movie she’s played by Claudia Wells, who’s replaced by Elisabeth Shue in the sequels. Most fans would probably consider Elisabeth Shue to be the “real” Jennifer the same way people consider Maggie Gyllenhaal to be the “real” Rachel in the Batman movies and not Katie Holmes. The explanation for this is confusing: writer Bob Gale and director Robert Zemeckis supposedly couldn’t get Claudia Wells back, but who really knows. The craziest thing about this Jennifer switcheroo is that you’d never notice it if you’d only seen these films once as a little kid. Back to the Future succeeds at creating the ultimate fake nostalgia by totally reshooting the ending sequence of the first film almost five years after the fact with a totally new actress. Still, Claudia Wells did the voice of Jennifer in 2010/2011’s Back to the Future: The Game, in which she reclaims some of her canonical Jennifer status. This more than anything, I think, is proof that the alternate universe in these movies directly blends over into what we pretend to call the real world.
More troubling than the Jennifer switch, though, is the fact that the character of Jennifer herself is almost worse than tertiary to the plots of any of the films. In the original BTTF, she’s nothing more than Marty’s trophy girlfriend. In the second film, she’s literally unconscious for most of the action, and she only appears at the very end of the third film. Marty is never unfaithful to Jennifer, but she is something of a sleeping Penelope throughout these movies, unwittingly waiting for Marty to come home from his Odyssey. This is obliviously and totally sexist in the worst way, but in a film series that plays with oedipal themes from the very beginning (Marty’s mom wants to screw him), progressive roles for women are unsurprisingly scarce. Not all fake nostalgia is good, and in fact, when it comes to gender and race, Back to the Future represents our past pop tendencies all too accurately.
The Past and the Future: Not Quite Perfect
Marty McFly is a person who is clearly like thirty years old and pretending to be in high school. In fairness, all big movies set in “high school” have this problem; everyone in Grease looks like an actor pretending to be in a fake high school, which in Grease is sort of the point. But we already know that Back to the Future has a more surreal approach to all of this, and the most surreal thing about it is the almost total absence of black people.
To say that Back to the Future is a racist movie since it only has a few black characters isn’t exactly fair. The white people in Back to the Future (nearly everyone) are almost as badly stereotyped as the few black characters. I think imaginary Back to the Future black characters got lucky dodging being in this bizarre representation of whiteness. Because it’s here where Back to the Future’s fake nostalgia gets sad, but is totally accurate in terms of how pop culture often hews. Anyone who’s read any history is aware that America in 1955 was worse for blacks than it was in 1985, but the 1955 Marty McFly travels to in the first and second movies is super-rosy. There are black guys in the 1955 backing band, and we’re told that Goldie Wilson, a black guy sweeping the floors in the diner, will soon be the mayor of Hill Valley. We also learn one of the guys in the band is Chuck Berry’s “cousin” Marvin Berry, and that the authorship of “Johnny B. Goode” is actually the result of a time-travel paradox. Obviously, in real life, Chuck Berry didn’t write “Johnny B. Goode” thanks to some time-traveling white guy, but shit, it sounds pretty racist to think Back to the Future asserts that very fact. Marty and Doc and literally everyone else in this movie are allowed to just casually “exist” and even make their lives better through their wacky technology and funny adventures. Meanwhile, Marvin Berry and Goldie Wilson are required to “dream big,” rather than actually live big. Back to the Future is accidentally trying to achieve paradoxical revisionism that makes white people feel better about the past. This is fake nostalgia for something the (white) target audience didn’t experience—in the case of racial equity, because it didn’t exist.
Back to the Future isn’t a bad movie series at all, though, and if you can’t tell, I totally love it. But, if there’s one thing I feel is important about love, it is understanding the deeply flawed characteristics of things you love, so you can better understand yourself, and how best to enjoy yourself. There’s a great episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that helped me see this and think about how a progressive, forward-thinking person can make sense of the occasionally scary side of fake nostalgia. In Star Trek, they’ve got the holodeck: a souped-up virtual reality place where endless fantasies can happen. And in an episode of Deep Space Nine called “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang,” there’s a holographic (fake) 1962 nightclub called Vic’s that a bunch of the Star Trek people like hanging out in. The main character of Deep Space Nine—if you’re unaware—is Star Trek’s only black lead, Avery Brooks as Ben Sisko, the guy who runs the space station, plus a spaceship, both full-time, while also being a single dad.* In this episode he argues with his girlfriend, Kasidy Yates (Penny Johnson), about the morality of enjoying the fake 1962 nightclub, as such enjoyment essentially requires pretending racism didn’t exist back then. Sisko takes the stance I think most of us would take now: historical entertainment that eschews or avoids the unpleasant racial truths of the past is bullshit. However, Yates gives Sisko a counterargument: enjoying this form of entertainment can be empowering, as long as no one forgets what the real truth was.
I think for a certain class of Americans born at a certain time (regardless of race) Back to the Future is a beloved film series because of its endless charm. It’s also a tricky series of films that insinuated itself into our consciousness through sly manipulation of nostalgia that seemed so real it must have been created by
a time paradox. Today, I hear there’s a hoverboard prototype being tested, as if matching our current technology is just fulfilling Back to the Future and not our real future. Which is missing the point really, because I think all this fake nostalgia was more of a series of jokes than anything else, since these movies were comedies above all. The flying-car future was a joke, more of a reference to the 1950s science fiction “golden age” idea of what the future would be like than any sort of “real” future.
Our 2015 is scarily real, while the 2015 of Back to the Future was never intended to be any more real than its “past” or “present.” Instead, everything that works (and doesn’t work) about this pop stalwart does so thanks to fake nostalgia, which really is no different from Doc sticking garbage into the DeLorean to make it fly.
Imagine There’s No Frodo (I Wonder If You Can)
When I was three or so, my parents used to drop me off with a nice Mormon couple who named their daughter “Galadriel,” in honor of the beautiful Elf person from The Lord of the Rings who we now know looks exactly like Cate Blanchett. In the early ’80s, I didn’t know what a Mormon was, or who Cate Blanchett was, but I’d like to think that I just inherently understood Elves. Beyond her name, there’s not much today that my mother can recall about my Galadriel or her family. They lived close enough to us in Mesa, Arizona, to function as a great place to plop me when my parents both needed to go to the grocery store, mind the fish store they owned together, or, possibly, get high and have sex. Beyond that, nothing has been retained of this friendship other than one Polaroid of the two of us; and I’m clutching the hand of the three-year-old version of the Lady of Lothlorien.
Pronouncing the names of all the characters in The Lord of the Rings is tricky enough, but if you’re a three-year-old, it’s totally impossible. The only thing my mom does remember about little Galadriel turns out to be the best thing: I could not pronounce her name at all. Instead of saying “Galadriel,” tiny-me apparently shortened it into a portmanteau word: “Deedle,” which rhymes with “needle.” This means that I’m the only Tolkien fan to invent my own canonical nickname for one of the major characters, though there are exactly zero references to a “Deedle” in any of the appendices in The Return of the King. Can you imagine Ian McKellan’s Gandalf saying the word “Deedle”? Do it now, please.
Despite how uncommon this name is, I’ve been unable to track down my old playmate. Dreamingly, I believe there’s an alternate universe where Deedle and I grew up and became great friends and I learned from her—a real-life Galadriel—how to pronounce “Galadriel.” As it stands, in this reality, our families drifted apart and Deedle is out there somewhere, a riddle in the dark of my childhood, which is only mildly interesting because I didn’t have any other childhood friends with names like Spock or Gizmo. So, I had to learn how to pronounce this name like the rest of you who have read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings trilogy: I invented a pronunciation in my head and then was shocked how wrong I was when the Peter Jackson movies came out in 2001.
In all seriousness, though, I think my toddler-self’s apprehension over learning the real pronunciation of “Galadriel” was a prescient metaphor for how afraid I am of real Tolkien fans. They’re not a vicious bunch at all, but hard-core Tolkien scholars are patient with information in ways that I am not. They can accept the fact that a whole relationship/marriage can exist as a footnote. They can believe that Tolkien merely “translated” these works from other languages. They can endlessly ponder if the Hobbits are very gay or actually metaphors for Christian values or, possibly, both. Going down the hobbit-hole of Tolkien scholarship is really, really difficult because J. R. R. Tolkien himself was like a built-in scholar/fan of his own work. If Neil deGrasse Tyson were to write science fiction novels, and those novels became immensely popular, I feel like he would become the Tolkien of sci-fi, the inventor of a new genre who is nearly beyond reproach in terms of the logistics of how his fictional world actually functions. In stark opposition to George Lucas—who is clearly unaware of how his fictional world functions—Tolkien is such an expert on his own material that jumping from the frying pan of casual fan to the fire of serious discussion of his work is scary for any serious writer or critic.
Luckily, I’m more of a Bilbo and I’m not serious. I’m a fool. So here we go.
There are numerous ways of thinking about Tolkien’s intentions, and a lot of facts and interviews to sort through, but I think even the most hard-core Tolkien scholars will agree with me when I say that The Lord of the Rings trilogy only exists because Tolkien’s original publisher asked him to write a sequel to The Hobbit. In The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, there’s tons of evidence to indicate the author originally had no intention of writing a sequel to The Hobbit at all. Specifically, in a 1937 letter to his publisher Stanley Unwin (of Allen & Unwin) Tolkien says, “I am a little perturbed. I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits.” This is funny because Tolkien obviously believes it at the time, but the ten-year process of coming around to think the exact opposite is one of the most important retcons in geek history. If Tolkien had continued to respond to letters from fans and his publisher with a similar “no thanks” sentiment, I can’t imagine the “fantasy” half of science fiction and fantasy existing in a way that is recognizable at all. The eventual decision Tolkien made to seriously write a “sequel” to The Hobbit is the big bang of fantasy, a revolutionary turning point that makes an alternate reality without The Lord of the Rings almost impossible to fathom in retrospect, even though it’s fascinatingly bizarre that in our universe, any of this happened at all.
John Lennon famously thought “Help!” should be a slow song, which puts him in the genius company of J. R. R. Tolkien, who also didn’t initially understand the commercial value of his own work. What I mean is, Tolkien wanted the super-boring tome called The Silmarillion to come out before The Hobbit, and later, as part of The Lord of the Rings, though his publisher wouldn’t allow it. The Silmarillion is also symptomatic of something I like to call the Magician’s Nephew Bullshit, insofar as the effect it has on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is similar to what C. S. Lewis did with the Narnia books. The Silmarillion “explains” why the fantasy world of Middle-Earth exists the same way Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew explains how Narnia became Narnia. Magician’s Nephew Bullshit values accuracy over narrative fun. As Laura Miller explains in The Magician’s Book, “Some lines in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe don’t make much sense if you presume that its readers are already familiar with The Magician’s Nephew.” This is why there’s literally no good reason to read The Chronicles of Narnia in anything other than the publication order, and possibly (and controversially) why you never need to read The Silmarillion. Magician’s Nephew Bullshit totally applies to Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, but you already knew that.
Like George Lucas, Tolkien is an insane historical revisionist of his own work, though—totally unlike Lucas—a wildly successful one. He revised his original 1937 novel The Hobbit or There and Back Again, and this revision appeared in 1951.* It differs radically enough from the original to allow The Lord of the Rings to exist at all. Specifically, Gollum goes from being a curious creature with funny opinions about things to a straight-up murderous psychopath. Furthermore, the original version of The Hobbit doesn’t indicate at all that the Ring was bad news. However, try getting your hands on an original 1937 version of The Hobbit these days. It’s not a conspiracy exactly, but a totally successful retcon. Because Tolkien revised that version of The Hobbit to make it compatible with The Lord of the Rings after the fact, he’s totally guilty of Magician’s Nephew Bullshit, even though he’s one of the only people who ever made it work insofar as it is completely accepted by the fans.
But we need to back up. If The Hobbit is the on-accident prequel to The Lord of the Rings, what’s the big deal? He wrote The Hobbit, people liked it, so he wrote a cool series of novels as a follow-up. Why would anyone care or t
hink that’s profound? Well, if Tolkien hadn’t come around to turning his Hobbit sequel into The Lord of the Rings, fantasy as we know it wouldn’t exist because LOTR is to fantasy what the Beatles are to rock and roll.
Try to imagine a world without the Beatles. Really, really try. I think there’s a very real chance that such a world is a ravaged, burned-out cinder that has a culture not dissimilar to the creepy-melting-faces people who live underneath the Earth in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. I can’t prove this of course, because there’s not a direct correlation between nuclear war being averted and the Beatles releasing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” but still. It’s nearly incomprehensible to imagine a contemporary world of pop/rock music without the Beatles, which is partly attributed to Ringo Starr joining the group in 1962. Their original drummer—Pete Best—was infamously unceremoniously fired from the group just prior to the Fabs signing with Brian Epstein and truly becoming a universal phenomenon. If the Beatles didn’t chuck Pete Best, they might not have been managed by Brian Epstein, and suddenly, your parents didn’t have the right music to listen to and you’re not born at all or able to read this book. So, follow this closely: Bilbo is Pete Best and Frodo is Ringo Starr.
Because Bilbo’s journey totally concludes arguably even before the end of The Hobbit, you couldn’t possibly make him the star of The Hobbit Part 2, and that’s because Bilbo isn’t a character who is “part 2” material. You might think Ringo is the everyman of the Beatles, but that’s because he’s the everyman who went on the adventure and stayed on the adventure. Bilbo’s the guy who went on the journey and came back again and stayed home, like Pete Best. Bilbo is an intentionally and aggressively unremarkable everyman whose hero’s journey is so anticonformist punk rock that he actually doesn’t do much traditional heroic stuff in the last section of The Hobbit. In a 1975 essay called “The Psychological Journey of Bilbo Baggins,” Dorothy Matthews asserts: “It stands to reason that Tolkien does not have Bilbo kill the dragon because that would be more the deed of a savior or culture hero, such as St. George, or the Red Cross Knight, or Beowulf. The significance of this tale lies in the very obvious anti-heroic manner in which Tolkien chooses to bring Bilbo’s adventures to a conclusion.”