Side effects of the BACK TO THE FUTURE TRILOGY (1985, 1989, 1990) may include frequent deja vu

Posted by Stephen Jannise

On Sunday at the Alamo Ritz, Christopher Lloyd arrived in a DeLorean to kick off a day-long marathon of the Back to the Future trilogy. Like most aging, disinterested guests, Lloyd did not have much to contribute to the experience beyond an interesting anecdote or two, but it was certainly enjoyable for fans of the films like me to see Doc Brown in the flesh. More enlightening was the experience of watching these films one after another, which I had never done before. The most interesting observation I come away with from the back-to-back-to-back screenings of the films concerned the increasingly conflicting balance between the unique temporal possibilities of the films and their narrative ambitions.

The first film, from 1985, is without a doubt the finest of the series. The brief moments of exposition littered throughout the first half of the film continue to pay off again and again during the second half, and the film’s entire achievement cannot be fully comprehended on one viewing, which in my opinion elevates this piece of pop filmmaking to a genuine work of art. Michael J. Fox deservedly emerged as a potential movie star after his pitch-perfect performance as the bewildered young time traveler with whom we are expected to relate, and Lloyd’s manic Doc Brown makes the obligatory sci-fi explanation monologues much more fun than they have a right to be. Beyond these characters, the support work rises to the occasion as well, particularly Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson, who essentially play the same characters with three different personalities, and Thomas F. Wilson, who gifted us with one of the great nasties of the cinema, Biff Tannen.

The icon by which all bullies are measured.

The film proves to be so exhilarating in its narrative inventiveness that, by the end of the film, many find themselves desperate for a continuation of the story. Having seen Marty McFly and the Doc use their time machine to explore the past, audiences naturally want to see them explore the future. Thus, the second film. In addition to the often humorous representation of future Hill Valley, the second film folds the plot of the first film into the characters’ second visit to past Hill Valley, which, among other exciting opportunities, allows Wilson to portray many different variations on Biff. Director/writer Bob Zemeckis proved with the first film that he could handle a narrative built on space/time paradoxes with the kind of panache that prevents such stories from becoming leaden or difficult to follow. With the second film, he may have bitten off more than he can chew, but Part II nevertheless retains much of the freshness of the original film.

The third film, though, was an inexplicable diversion from the time-traveling chaos of the first two films. Arguably, the filmmakers recognized that, by the end of the second film, the story was becoming almost untenable in its constant back-and-forths through time and confrontations between characters and themselves from other time periods, so they decided to slow things down a bit and strand our heroes in a particular moment in history for the duration of the film, the Wild West of the lat 19th century. This decision, as has often been said, turns the film series into what seems to be a pitch for a continuing episodic television show (Chris Lloyd, in his Q & A session, often referred to the films as episodes). “Join Marty McFly and Doc Brown as they hop through time on their way home,” Part III seems to say. The film seems so forcibly separated from the first two that it seems more appropriate to drop the Part III from the title and replace it with some kind of subtitle. Thus, the third film proves to be nothing more than an interesting genre piece, where many of the tropes from the first two films are repeated albeit in the Old West.

It's definitely better than The Wild Wild West.

Those tropes bring me back to my original point about the balance between the narrative structure and the themes of nostalgia that perforate the films. While the films increasingly seem to present themselves as episodic, and the narrative is certainly continuous in that Marty is basically swept away at the beginning of the first film and remains caught in a series of time crises that don’t let up until the end of the third film, the films ultimately do not play well in marathon form. These films love nothing more than to quote themselves. How many times does Marty say “heavy,” or confront Biff in a bar, or wake up in a bed next to someone he thinks is his present-day mother but isn’t? If you watched Part II a couple years after Part I, which likely would have been the case in the late 1980s when they were released, you would see these tropes not as overly repetitive but as warm remembrances of that original film that you fell in love with. Watching Part II ten minutes after Part I, however, makes these recurring elements seem like nothing more than lazy, uninspired screenwriting.

Where have I seen this before?

The Back to the Future trilogy is all about taking trips through vast spaces of time, and revisiting memories from a moviegoing experience that occurred four years ago can, in a sense, instill in the moviegoer similar feelings of journeying into the past. Ten minutes, on the other hand, is just a walk in the space/time park.

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