Comments | dontmentionlove: things i'd write about if i still wrote film papers

dontmentionlove

things i'd write about if i still wrote film papers

Jun 19, 2009 10:28

i know a lot of straight-up dudes who absolutely love Back to the Future, D included. i enjoy elements of the series, and by elements i mean mostly the fact that there is a time-travelling Delorean and the character of Doc Brown because Christopher Lloyd's portrayal is endearing and wacky and wonderful (memo to Andy Dyck: take notes! that is how ( Read more... )

movie chatter

Comments 6

pseudohistorian June 19 2009, 16:37:37 UTC

Well, I would wank it that since Alternate Biff "knows" he's about to kill Marty, having been warned by 2015 Biff that someone might ask about the Sports Almanac eventually, it makes no difference whether he tells him or not--the same way he callously abuses that timeline's Lorraine without fear of consequences. This Biff has unlimited resources at his disposal and has never failed at getting anything he wanted; why would he think this would be any different?

(Besides, he's already essentially created a world close to that of Watchmen, with its own President Nixon still in power in 1985, but without superheroes to mitigate its Biff-as-Ozymandias ( ... )

coco73 June 19 2009, 20:15:07 UTC

This was a great little read! It's been sooooo long since I've thought about BTtF and I had never really given this kind of analysis. I think you should do a weekly film deconstruction. Yes, I do.

aircrash June 19 2009, 21:22:17 UTC

i really love your film analyses. *___*

chavvah June 20 2009, 15:40:15 UTC

It's true that by helping his father to be more "successful," Marty automatically makes them (and by extension himself) filthy rich, a la American Dream. And what this says about his mother makes her seem even more ridiculously shallow: when her husband isn't super wealthy and a rockstar sci-fi author, she resorts to alcoholism and self-loathing? Boo.

I remember the first time I saw BTTF, as a kid, I was kind of horrified by the ending and how badly (I felt) Marty had screwed up his own life. How would he be able to live in a world where the family he knew and (presumably) loved didn't exist anymore? It wasn't until I was older that I realized it was supposed to be super awesome that he was living with a bunch of wildly successful and shallow strangers.

pseudohistorian June 21 2009, 07:50:57 UTC

In the DVD commentaries, Zemeckis & Gale acknowledge that their ending for the first film constituted a very 1980's definition of "success," but only European reviewers really picked up on it at the time...

Looking at the details, though, I'm not sure how "filthy rich" the McFly family is supposed to have become. They still have the same house, and Dave and Linda appear to still live there, even though Marty has the truck now. A Match Made in Space is George's "first novel," so I also don't know how much of a "rock star" he is in the SF world, although the movie suggests that George and Lorraine's yuppiedom is a good thing. Since Marty (and we as viewers) don't have any further contact with this version of the family until a brief scene at the end of Part III, there aren't many clues there.

It's interesting that you mention your horror at the ending of the first movie, since the opposite happened to me when I first saw Part II--I didn't get that Marty's life in the future was supposed to be bad. I mean, he's married to Jennifer ( ... )

thepresidentrix July 8 2009, 06:43:31 UTC

Okay it's totally embarrassing that I semi-stalked you from Fatshionista back to this journal in the first place, but I thought you might enjoy this Totally True Story ( ... )