It’s a film that deserves to be endlessly rewound. Shot for shot, line for line, Back to the Future is the modern era’s zippiest comedy about the collapse of the American dream.
And I’m not even talking about the sequel where the bullying mogul Biff Tannen turns downtown Hill Valley into a hellish Pleasure Paradise Casino & Hotel. All of the franchise’s social satire is right there in the 1985 original, which is marking its 40th anniversary. Back to the Future just might be Hollywood’s richest, cleverest blockbuster — and its attention to detail deserves to be re-celebrated.
Director Robert Zemeckis, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bob Gale, must have been as much of a madman savant as Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown to compress so much plot into every frame. Back to the Future opens with a travelling shot of Doc’s garage apartment that tells the inventor’s entire riches-to-rags life story, from the incineration of the Brown family mansion to his decision to sell off his 435-acre inheritance to developers who behaved only a bit better than Biff, before the camera circles down to his humble twin bed littered with past due bills and garbage from the Burger King next door, serving Whoppers on what was once his front lawn.
Squint and you’ll spot even more narrative setup, including photos of Doc’s personal heroes, which pointedly include Benjamin Franklin, the harnesser of lightning. Then a radio clicks on, blaring a commercial for a downtown Toyota dealership that we’ll soon see once sold the American-made Studebaker. Then a TV news update about lost plutonium that concludes with the anchor parroting a fib from officials that the nuclear material wasn’t stolen by terrorists, but was simply an internal clerical error — a lie that gets exposed a minute later when Marty McFly’s skateboard rolls into its radioactive box.
Plus, of course, we see the clocks. I couldn’t tell you how many. Four dozen? Six dozen? And half of them allude to the character beats ahead. There are cheap tickers jumbled with antiques that must have survived the house fire. Barometric pressure timepieces able to foresee an electrical storm. Decorative animatronic clocks like the one in which a ceramic wino swigs booze, just as Marty’s mother Lorraine (Lea Thompson) will chug in her sexy teen years and keep chugging until she’s a depressive, 40-something alcoholic. A miniature Harold Lloyd dangles from a pair of watch hands just as Doc will at the climax.
And that’s merely Back to the Future’s first shot — a staggering pan with no cuts other than a quick close-up of Einstein’s food bowl right after the credits announce the name of the cinematographer, Dean Cundey, who was also responsible for one of the other signature single-take sequences of the late 20th century, the around-the-house, through-the-kitchen, up-the-stairs-and-back-down-to-the-yard Steadicam tracking shot of 6-year-old Michael Myers murdering his sister at the beginning of John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween.
Interestingly, Zemeckis and Gale hadn’t yet brainstormed that brilliant introduction when they began shooting Back to the Future with its original star, Eric Stoltz, playing the time-travelling teenager Marty McFly. The Doc Brown garage sequence doesn’t appear in the script until a draft dated February 1985, a month into reshooting the movie with Michael J. Fox. Those improvements testify to the true mark of genius: the drive to hone something good until you’ve engineered something great.
However, improvement isn’t linear or inevitable. Sometimes, as Back to the Future cynically implies, it backslides or gets stuck. Hill Valley Mayor Red Thomas blares the same verbatim re-election slogan in 1955 as Mayor Goldie Wilson does in 1985 — "Progress is his middle name" — yet the town is in visible decline.
Marty comes of age in the Hill Valley of 1985, where vandals have shellacked the high school with so much graffiti that the janitors seem to have given up. The town square is in tatters: the store awnings are torn, the windows boarded up and the park paved over into a parking lot. What remains is a wasteland of pawn shops, porn shops, adult theatres, biker bars and, yes, that Toyota dealership, a pointed inclusion during the ’80s auto import war. Plus, the clock atop the courthouse hasn’t worked since that thunderstorm three decades ago.
Not everything is the government’s fault. Mayor Goldie, having worked his way up the ladder from busboy to civic leader, is trying to fix that clock so his citizens can use it. I must have watched Back to the Future a dozen times before I realised that the gray-haired preservationist bugging Marty to save the clock tower from its Black mayor is advocating to keep it broken for the sake of Hill Valley’s "history and heritage".
Marty McFly doesn’t cross-examine his town’s decay but like an actual teenager, he is so obliviously preoccupied by his quest to get back to his pretty girlfriend that he makes it all the way to the end of the film without commenting on how bad he and the rest of his Pepsi Light generation have it.
The film obliges Marty’s myopia, rarely zooming in on the ’80s rot, or for that matter, lingering on the benefits of the Eisenhower era when the middle class was booming and income inequality was shrinking.
Humming along under the surface are smaller signs of community breakdown, like when Lorraine’s father, Sam, rolls out a brand new TV set while the family eats dinner, thus curtailing chit-chat forever. A moment later, Sam scoffs incredulously at the idea that any household would ever be rich or bored enough to need two television sets. Zemeckis lets that line land like the punchline it is. But it’s also a test. Will Marty — will we — key into the bigger story underneath this adventure, the one in which the whole town, maybe the whole country, is going downhill faster than a speeding DeLorean?
Zemeckis hopes the audience will ask the follow-ups that Marty ignores.
What happened to the four salaried employees manning the Texaco service station and why are his parents’ childhood homes nicer than his own? What would after-school dates with his girlfriend be like if, instead of awkwardly perching on a footpath bench, they could relax at a cheap and cheerful diner or a first-run movie house? Why shouldn’t their town square prioritise strolling couples and amateur oil painters and children tossing softballs over parking meters and hatchbacks?
Yet, when Marty zips back to 1985 to see a police helicopter circling overhead and the Essex marquee promoting the fictional porno "Orgy, American Style XXX," the first thing he says is, "Everything looks great!".
Actually, that’s not true. The very first thing he says is, "Fred, you look great!" to a homeless man napping under a pile of newspapers. Happy endings never felt so bleak.
Back to the Future’s astonishing production design is by Lawrence G. Paull, who was 17 himself in 1955 — the same age as George McFly. Unlike Zemeckis (who was a toddler), Paull lived the exact arc of the film, coming to the project with a background in architecture that trained him to think holistically about fictional cities. Paull’s neo-futuristic visions of a 2019 Los Angeles had recently earned him an Oscar nomination for Blade Runner, justly applauded as a dystopian masterpiece. But I’d argue his subtler work on Back to the Future is as incisive and cutting, since it acknowledges that the dystopia is already here.
Of course, Doc Brown never planned for anyone to go back to the past. He’d planned to zoom away to explore the 21st century.
"I’ve always dreamed of seeing the future," Doc says with glee, "Looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind."
Nobody spoil what comes next. — TCA
