Back to the MAGA Future

I vaguely remember watching Back to the Future as a child. It didn’t leave much of an impression, but I thought it was fun and charming enough - thankfully, I don’t seem to have picked up on the incest plotline at the time. It wasn't a film I thought of often, though, until I saw a video the other day that seemed to imply that the film was a bit more conservative than I might remember. Given the political climate in the US, I obviously couldn’t resist rewatching it - and unfortunately for my childhood nostalgia, that video might have been kind of right.

If you haven’t seen Back to the Future… what have you been doing for the past 40 years? Just kidding, but it’s considered a classic, so you really should watch it. The film tells the story of Marty McFly, a slightly rebellious but overall typical teenager from 1985. His father is a coward and the rest of the family isn't much better; he gets into trouble at school all the time, and, oh yeah, he’s friends with a mad scientist who’s recently acquired some stolen plutonium for his time machine.

Fair enough, that last one might disqualify him from being “typical”.

It’s pretty easy to predict where the story goes from there : Marty travels back in time, specifically to 1955. The only issue is that he didn’t mean to, and now he has to find a way back without his mad scientist friend. Making the situation worse, he accidentally gets in the way of his parents meet-cute, resulting in his mother falling in love with him (ew) as his entire existence threatens to be erased from history. Hijinks naturally ensue.

I can’t exactly speak to how people viewed the politics Back to the Future back in 1985. I tried to ask my parents, who were in their mid 20s when it came out, but they mainly commented on how the incest was off-putting. (Understandable.) All I can say for sure is that I don’t think the film was meant to promote conservative values - they make fun of conservative then-president Ronald Reagan for being a Hollywood actor (if they only knew…) and the main villain Biff was based on Donald Trump (IF THEY ONLY KNEW…). Add to that a hot-blooded school-skipping teenage protagonist, and it doesn’t seem very conservative at all.

But then you look at it a little deeper. First you notice some obvious cringe moments that even my parents picked up on when the film came out, like Marty (a white boy) turning out to be the real inventor of rock and roll. Hmm... You watch it another time and realise that the future black mayor similarly was inspired to be mayor because of a comment by Marty. Hmm...

Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better from there.

See, at one point in the film Marty accidentally changes the future - his mother is no longer a wino, his siblings actually have promising careers, and best of all, his dad becomes successful and now it's Biff who has to serve him! From a narrative perspective it’s a great ending… but is that really the best message to be putting out there?

First of all, it’s worth considering why economic success is portrayed as the ultimate narrative success. More importantly, it’s worth considering why that economic success seems to inherently require some people to be unsuccessful “losers”. Biff isn’t a great guy, sure, but should we be happy that he’s the one being bullied now? Why is it okay when it happens to him but not Marty’s dad? It’s giving “capitalism is our religion”, and it isn’t cute.

More fundamentally, though, it's hard to make a film about going to the past in order to fix the future without an unsavory implication that the past has to be better than the future. In Back to the Future, for example, the 1985 movie theatre shows naughty movies while the 1955 one has family films; the 1985 school is trashed and graffitied while the 1955 one is clean and wholesome. Life used to be so great, right? You know, when there were no civil rights and the feminists knew to keep their mouths shut - the good old days, when America knew what it was doing! If only we could go back to how things were, maybe then we could fix our mistakes of, uh, giving people rights and make America great again.

Looking at the world (and worse, future) I'm faced with now, I don't quite know how to feel about Back to the Future. I still feel nostalgic for it, but I also feel a bit terrified at how easily people romanticise a world where so many people were disenfranchised just because we've forgotten how awful it was. Ironic as it is given my nostalgia for it, I think it's a good example of how misguided nostalgia makes us long for the past, even when it's terrible. So let me be clear : we can't go back to the past, and even if we could, that's not where greatness lies. So let's not try to make things great again, let's just try to make them better than yesterday.