back to the past’s future

If Back to the Future were made today, Marty would have travelled back in time to 1980.

Jason Kottke mentioned this on his blog the other day. What’s fascinating about it is that it might not be true. Which is to say: if someone were making that movie today, would they really send Marty back to 1980? If they did, would anyone care?

I ask because the Marty of the film travels back to 1955 — and in American culture, this is a time that casts a very long shadow. Our national perception tends to be that this era was a marker. Some look at it as some sort of glorious, innocent, halcyon American Eden, from which we’ve fallen into eternal confusion and turmoil. Some would dispute that it was particularly rosy, but would still claim it was the last era of some kind of certainty — some cultural consensus about values and roles that have been scattered and vexed ever since. This is our national myth: that the 50s represented some certainty and conformity of values, that the 60s began the process of exploding them, and that we have lived ever since in different world. Some people are very much for that (e.g., many women, anyone who’s not white, anyone who’s gay, anyone who’s sane) and some are still against it, but the assumption — the framework — is understood by all of us.

The fifties cast such a long shadow, in fact, they were still sorta sending Marty back to 1995, even as time passed. In 1998 it was Pleasantville, in which two teenagers found themselves sucked into the world of a cheery 1950s sitcom. In 1999 it was Blast from the Past, in which Brendan Fraser stumbled out of a bomb shelter that had kept that old mentality preserved. In 2010, the most-discussed piece of period television is Mad Men, which began at the start of the 60s — setting itself up to chart the disintegration of whatever “certainty” or “consensus” unraveled from that point on. Films that look to the 1970s often seem to be doing so to borrow some feeling of grit, as if what they’re really after is the style of 1970s films. The 80s still somehow occupy the realm of jokes about weird things people used to do with their hair, with the 90s just recently joining them. A couple TV shows leaping back to look at the 70s (Life on Mars, Swingtown) have failed. Two more successful comedies were based around that period — That Seventies Show in the late 70s, critics’ darling Freaks & Geeks in 1980 — but both seem based on the notion that the experience of their characters is practically interchangeable with that of teenagers today.

Which is, to be fair, maybe true of Back to the Future; I don’t recall the movie being especially insistent on the idea that the time Marty traveled back to was pointedly different from the present. Still, I think our nation has an ongoing habit of counting forward from the 1950s, counting forward from our “expulsion” from some kind of charmed national unity we were alleged to have then. For decades and decades afterward, we all felt like we were trying to get out from under (or, for some, get back to) that era. Most people don’t seem to feel that very strongly about 1980 — not yet, anyway. It’s hard to identify these things if you’re actually living through them, but I always wonder: what’s the next era that’ll capture people’s imaginations in that way, as a point of change, a shadow looming over what comes after, the image still burned in our culture’s retinas?

NOTE: That list of film/TV references is very, very surely missing something major and important — wanna let me know what stuff I’m forgetting?

Tags: back to the future 1950s conformity film tv pleasantville blast from the past mad men freaks and geeks 12 notes | | Jan 21, 2010
  1. hardcorefornerds answered: the original UK version of Life on Mars wasn’t a failure, and the 1980s follow-up Ashes to Ashes was pretty good too. just sayin’
  2. hatethefuture answered: so much of david lynch (blue velvet & twin peaks especially) loves the troubling glaze of 50s style/grease/convention/music
  3. batteryinyourleg answered: That 80s Show was a dimsal failure. So maybe that ties into your theory somehow?
  4. pacifictheater answered: Happy Days, perhaps?
  5. piercethenight answered: well that new comedy Hot Tub Time Machine involves traveling to the mid-80s..
  6. agrammar posted this