Back to the Future Wonders What, Exactly, Is This Thing We Call “Normal?”

A brief anecdote about a minor incident: A few days ago, I was waiting outside of the DMV for my Uber pick-up (yes, even when you’re not really driving anymore, you still need to renew that driver’s license. Funny ol’ world, innit?). I was standing right by the entrance, and pretty much everybody who was going into the building caught sight of me, paused for a sec, then asked if I was waiting in line. I would explain my situation, thank them, and reassure them that they could “cut” ahead of me with a clear conscience.

It was just a little bit of courtesy, but it struck me in a significant way…

Over the past three years, there’s been a lot of talk about a New Normal, how the lockdown, and social distancing, and telecommuting, and the political striations generated by those who would leverage the pandemic to their own advantage have ruptured something in the social contract. How we’re all angrier now, coarser—crueler, even. Yet here was common consideration in operation. Not a major thing, yet its very insignificance was in its own way profound. For me, it was a little reminder of a flaw in my thinking: That, after three years, what I had come to accept as the way we would be living going forward might, to my relief, not be true.

We have a remarkable capacity for rolling with the prevailing conditions. We might not necessarily like it, but we adjust. And that got me thinking about two specific music cues that pop up not long into Back to the Future (1985). The first comes as teenager Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is skateboarding his way to school. As Huey Lewis and the News’ “The Power of Love” plays on the soundtrack, we get a good tour of the little town of Hill Valley, California. To put it kindly, time has not treated the place well. To be more blunt: The joint is a shithole—graffiti all over, buildings run down, storefronts boarded up when they haven’t been commandeered by bail bondsmen or pawnbrokers. It’s a vision brutally in contrast with sound of the happy, poppy song flowing into our ears. And yet, as McFly wheels his way down the roads and around the town square, we notice that he sees nothing out of the ordinary. The music reflects his attitude: This is his town, municipal decay and all—the way it’s always been, the way it always will be.

Compare that with Marty’s first glimpse of Hill Valley once he takes his inadvertent trip back to 1955 in Doc Brown’s DeLorean time machine. Over a lilting serenade of “Mister Sandman,” we see a paradisiacal portrait of small-town America. A swarm of gas station attendants see to the welfare of a car; a guy mows the lawn of the well-groomed town square; the movie theater, instead of showcasing triple-X porn, is offering up a wholesome Western (well, as wholesome as a gun-totin’ Barbara Stanwyck can be). But note what happens at the end of the sequence: As a confused McFly stumbles across the square, the sweet crooning of the Four Aces recedes into a haze of echo, and composer Alan Silvestri lays in an atonal, ominous drone. Our eyes tell us that the scene before us is lovely, while our ears convey what McFly must be feeling: That this is not a reality he is comfortable with; that this world, in his eyes, is just wrong.

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(Small historical note: both “Mister Sandman” and the Ronald Reagan/Barbara Stanwyck film Cattle Queen of Montana actually debuted in 1954. I can’t figure out a compelling reason why director/writer Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale decided to shift these cultural markers one year late; maybe they just wanted everything to sync up with the “Man from Space” episode of The Honeymooners that Marty recognizes a few scenes later, and which did premiere on November 5^th, 1955.)

As franchises go, the Back to the Future trilogy is a curious specimen. The typical, and unfortunate, studio template when a successful film leads to sequels is to make the subsequent chapters as much of a replication of the original as possible. Zemeckis, bless him, was smarter than that—so when Back to the Future hit big, he was able to engineer the two follow-ups so that they not only played on the beats of the first film, but bent them around in ways that deconstructed McFly’s original adventure. Going further, instead of repeating the same themes from one film to the next, each installment has its own story to tell, and its own lesson to be learned. Enough so that, over this article and the next two, I wanted to look at each film in turn, and divine what we can take away from each one of them.

As for the original Back to the Future, there is, of course, a well-discussed subtext, summed up with the ol’ phrase, “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” Our first introduction to McFly’s parents show them as uptight, ineffectual losers (or “slackers” as Principal Strickland, played by James Tolkan, puts it across the decades) who, in one way or another, are trapped in the past. Dad George (Crispin Glover) is an awkward, socially inept nerd who has never managed to escape his role as the punching bag of former high school bully and present day boss Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson). Mom Lorraine (Lea Thompson) is a judgmental prude forever invoking a wistful reminiscence of how at 17 she came to the rescue of an injured George and found true love. It’s worth noting that Doc Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd)—the outsider, eccentric, and, notably, the only adult with whom Marty has a positive, emotional bond—wants to use his time machine not to revisit the past, but to look forward into the future. His drive is to embrace what’s to come, rather than grieve what has been lost.

Once Marty lands in the Hill Valley of ’55, though, he finds the picture his parents have been painting of their youthful courtship is radically in conflict with the facts. George is not a winsome, wounded puppy dog, but a pathetic perv whose injuries are the result of falling out of a tree while peeping into Lorraine’s bedroom. Lorraine isn’t a paragon of virginal innocence, but a healthy, typical teen who is unabashed about indulging in the customary transgressions of a 1950’s youth on the cusp of adulthood: smoking; drinking; and necking.

The revelation of this is all the more disturbing for the younger McFly since, in rescuing George from the automobile collision that was meant to kindle the romance between Dad and Mom, he immediately supplants George as the object of Lorraine’s passion. (And as an aside, kudos are due Thompson for making Lorraine as sweetly touching a “bad” girl as could ever be possible. She and Fox play wonderfully off each other, making for a delightfully awkward—maybe, considering the implications, “creepy” is the better word—screen couple.)

There’s the simple, straightforward reading of the film’s premise: McFly finds himself negotiating a past that he only knows about via the romanticized recollection of his elders, and it turns out those reminiscences are, if not out-and-out lies, at the very least seriously unreliable. But I think the themes go deeper than that, into an observation of how quick we are to accept a status-quo, and how wrong our presumptions may be.

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Looking through Marty’s eyes, what’s disturbing is not just discovering that your parents haven’t always been the people you’ve known, but that there are things a past society accepts as normal that time will show as anything but. That’s a great set-up for comedy, as McFly alarms an audience weaned on the mellow doo-wop of “Earth Angel” (again from ’54) with a rendition of the raunchy, musical shock-treatment that is “Johnny B. Goode,” while his attempts to convince a younger Doc Brown that time travel is real lead him to admit that 1980s U.S. is being run by a former B-movie actor.

It can also lead to more somber revelations, including how the only African-American representation in the film—outside of the soon-to-be-corrupt mayor Goldie Wilson (Donald Fullilove)—is Marvin Berry (Harry Waters Jr.) and the Starlighters, a band that is certainly welcome to perform at Hill Valley High’s “Enchantment Under the Sea” dance, so long as they adhere to the tacit understanding that their place is up on the stage, not mixing with the all-White student body. From the perspective of the denizens of 1955, for whom the Brown v. Board of Education judgement had only been decided the year before, this all seems perfectly normal. From our viewpoint, watching the bullies flee in terror from that most formidable of adversaries—Black musicians high on reefer—we get a tart reminder that one generation’s concept of “normality” can be pretty freakin’ warped.

As for Child of the Eighties McFly, a 1.21 gigawatt-fueled trip back to his own time doesn’t mean a recovery of his bedraggled but reassuring normal. His brother and sister—once minimum-wage slaves—are now successful professionals. Biff is now an obsequious lackey to George (although it’s unclear what their professional relationship is). George and Lorraine’s previously guttering marriage is now a healthy partnership. Mom is no longer a crushed soul wallowing in memories; and George is celebrating the publication of his first SF novel, which appears to be just slightly longer than The Stand and is ironically a maybe-not-too-fictionalized recounting of how a strange visitor from the planet Vulcan became his matchmaker. Gazing upon the brand-spanking-new Toyota 4×4 that has supplanted his skateboard, Marty looks emotionally devastated—happily so, but still overwhelmed by the radical detour his life has taken. Not even his normal has remained normal.

Robert Zemeckis has always been a more subversive director than is generally perceived. Back to the Future became a blockbuster hit through Michael J. Fox’s beguiling performance, as well as for the comedy gold the film mined from pitting mid-Eighties attitudes against a more complacent Fifties mindset. But tucked into all the raucous yuks was a sly critique of the way we look at our reality and the automatic presumptions we make. There’s an important observation about the dangers of shrugging off the bad, just because we’ve convinced ourselves that’s the way it’s always been. Doc Brown dubs the device that facilitates time travel a “flux capacitor,” and Zemeckis’ use of the term seems to be more than a cool bit of technobabble. The tech that allows Marty to travel through time also reveals the capacity for change. The normal doesn’t stay that way for long; what’s good in the past we can retain and nurture, what’s not we can fix. One doesn’t need a DeLorean time machine to sculpt a New Normal, just the desire to make things better.

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It’s been a good, long while since I’ve watched the Back to the Future trilogy, and I’m eager to go Back in Time (hey!) and explore the themes these films address. I want to see how each prior film informs the next, how each subsequent film deconstructs its predecessor, and what lessons are ultimately conveyed by the franchise as a whole.

How about you? What did you take away from the original BTTF? What do you think about the franchise overall? Whatever your thoughts, please take advantage of the comments section below. Just remember: Keep it friendly, and keep it fun. If you can’t do that, then you can just make like a tree and… ahh, you know.

Dan Persons has been knocking about the genre media beat for, oh, a good handful of years, now. He’s presently house critic for the radio show Hour of the Wolf on WBAI 99.5FM in New York, and previously was editor of Cinefantastique and Animefantastique, as well as producer of news updates for The Monster Channel. He is also founder of Anime Philadelphia, a program to encourage theatrical screenings of Japanese animation. And you should taste his One Alarm Chili! Wow!