Back to the Future

The first time I watched Back to the Future, I wanted the DeLorean.

That was the entire intellectual effect of the film on me. A car with doors that opened upward could already have occupied my imagination for weeks; a car that also travelled through time seemed almost unfair to every other machine ever built.

I saw it on television during a summer holiday. The afternoon was too hot to go outside, the curtains were half closed, and I lay on the floor because that was the coolest part of the room. I remember the blue light from the television and the pleasure of Doc Brown explaining something impossible with the confidence of a man discussing a household repair.

Years later, when I watched the film again, the car was still wonderful. But it was no longer the strangest idea in the story.

Meeting your parents before they became your parents was.

Children enter their parents’ lives halfway through. We know them after important choices have already been made, after friendships have come and gone, after ambitions have been modified, after disappointments have been absorbed into personality. A parent arrives in a child’s consciousness as if fully formed, carrying rules and habits that seem to have existed forever.

Marty receives the impossible privilege of seeing the drafts.

His father is not yet the timid man he knows. His mother is not yet the mother who tells stories about how people behaved properly in her youth. They are young, uncertain, vain, frightened, impulsive, and entirely unaware that one day another human being will treat them as the source of authority.

That idea changed something for me. I began asking my parents questions I had never thought to ask: What music did you listen to? Who were your friends? What did you want to become? What did you buy with your first salary? The answers were rarely dramatic. That was precisely why I liked them. They turned parents back into people.

Time-travel stories make another ordinary truth visible: enormous consequences may begin in moments too small to be recognized at the time. Someone misses a bus. A teacher encourages a student. Two people happen to attend the same event. A family moves to another city. A person accepts one job and rejects another. Years later, entire lives hang from those decisions.

We cannot return to test the alternatives, which is probably why the phrase what if has such power. Fiction gives the question machinery. Build a device, enter a date, go back, and discover what the other branch of the decision tree contains.

Real life is less cooperative. We receive memory instead, and memory has no experimental control group.

Doc Brown’s enthusiasm also looks different to me now. He builds something absurd before asking whether it is useful. There is something wonderfully pure in that curiosity. Many technical projects begin with a similarly irresponsible question: can this be done? Practicality arrives later carrying forms.

When I was young, I thought Back to the Future was about escaping the limitations of time.

Now I think it is partly about discovering that the past was once as open and uncertain as the present feels to us.

The film stays the same. The viewer moves.

As a child, I wanted the car.

Later, I wanted an afternoon with my parents before they knew who I was.