I don’t want to brag. I don’t want to sound like I think that I’m better than everyone else. The last thing that I want to do is encourage jealousy and resentment. No matter what, please remember that I’m just a regular guy who eats his caviar one spoonful at a time like everybody else.
What I’m trying to say is that I’m confident that I would go over big in a Back to the Future trivia competition. I would do very well. I would probably win. We all have something special about us, and this is mine.
It’s possible that I know everything about this movie. All of the ephemera, all of the continuity errors, all of the uncomfortable subtext, all of the angles. I even know about the minor supporting players. Who plays the farmer who shoots at Marty right after his DeLorean lands in 1955? The creepy grandpa from Silent Night, Deadly Night! What’s so special about Red, the town bum? Why, he’s played by George “Buck” Flower, character-actor mainstay in exploitation movies and a favorite of John Carpenter.
The strangest part of all of this though is that I wouldn’t even call myself a Back to the Future mega-fan. It’s not in my top ten movies. Or my top twenty. Or even in my top fifty. It MIGHT make my top 100, but I don’t know. If I had to make a list of my 100 favorites films I would get bored very quickly and start to throw random ones in there just to get it over with. House II: The Second Story at no. 86? Sure. Who gives a shit? Back to the Future at no. 63 or 81 or 97 sounds good to me. My top 100 list cannot be trusted.
This is not to say that I don’t like the movie. I do like it. I like it a lot. I’ve seen it about 52,000 times. This is one that we watched over and over and over again back in “the day” (ie. the 80s). My knowledge of its details comes from osmosis. It passed into my body like an airborne disease. Seventy years later, I still keep around a copy of Back to the Future (upgraded to Blu-ray and everything). It sits in my small movie collection like a box of Honey Nut Cheerios always sits in my kitchen. Comfort food.
You can’t run any hot take on this movie by me that I haven’t already thought about decades earlier.
Man, how sleazy is that that a young Lea Thompson is seeeeriously hot for Michael J. Fox, her future son? Yep, we were talking about that in the 80s. That’s nothing new. (Also, Lea Thompson could well have the GREATEST “I really, really want to fuck this guy” facial expressions and body language in movie history here. I can’t help but cheer her on, even it’s completely wrong.)
And how weird is it that this feelgood comedy throws in an attempted rape scene into its climax? Also, why is the geriatric Christopher Lloyd (only 47 years old here, but he looks 67!) best friends with a 17 year old high school boy? And doesn’t it look like Goldie Wilson turned out to be a pretty lousy mayor?
All of these retroactive questions and eyebrow-raisers though are among the reasons WHY Back to the Future holds up today. It’s a fun and easy movie to dissect for weird meat and hearty laughs. It’s 100% nuts and it makes you go with it.
It’s not a “bad” movie at all. In true over-the-top 80s style, it’s a comedy that also wants to be an action movie at times—and it pulls off both in perfectly liquid transitions. Robert Zemeckis’s direction couldn’t be more breezy. It’s all snap, crackle and pop. Also, you can partly credit Alan Silvestri’s multiplex-shaking orchestral score that plays like a sideways swipe from the Superman and Indiana Jones marches by John Williams. That Silvestri shares audio space with a couple of surefire hits from Huey Lewis and the News only lights up the vintage neon hotter. This film brings all of the soaring loudness and thrills and spills that you can expect from seeing Steven Spielberg credited as one of the executive producers.
And, yet, it’s so weird.
But this is a film that deals in paradox. It’s only expanded on that over time.
Today, Back to the Future is a piece of 1980s nostalgia, but it comes to us by way of Robert Zemeckis’s 1950s nostalgia (Zemeckis was born in 1952). So, we’re all mixed up here.
And if you don’t think that this movie is about paradox, just check out the name of the town: HILL VALLEY.