Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (24 page)

It is, arguably, a bit of a fudge to describe
Back to the Future
as a teen film, at least according to those who made it. ‘
Teen Wolf
was a teen film, but I always thought of
Back to the Future
more as a time-travelling adventure comedy sci-fi love story,’ says its star, Michael J. Fox.

‘By the time I was cast in
Back to the Future
, I’d done a lot of eighties teen movies, like
The Wild Life
,
^fn2
Red Dawn
^fn3
and
All the Right Moves
,
^fn4
and this didn’t feel like that to me,’ says Lea Thompson. ‘This felt more like a science-fiction blockbuster.’

But despite what those who made it thought, people who watched it at the time very much saw it as a teen film. By the time it was released in 1985, the teen film craze was well in swing and audiences were now very used to increasingly ridiculous genre movies structured around teenagers. Teenagers could now be karate aces (
The Karate Kid
, of course), fighters of communism (the aforementioned
Red Dawn
) or even detectives at Eton College (the completely brilliant
Young Sherlock Holmes
). So the idea of a time-travelling teenager seemed par for the teen genre course – as, in fact, it would soon become. The following year, Francis Ford Coppola’s underrated
Peggy Sue Got Married
, also set in the fifties,
^fn5
was released. Four years later the utterly delightful
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
arrived to cause parents of teenagers untold torment with its catchphrases and dudespeak.

‘Teenage tastes now dominate mainstream moviemaking, and that’s where Gale and Zemeckis are working. Marty is … a teen idol …
Back to the Future
makes you feel like you’re at a kiddies’ matinee,’ Pauline Kael wrote somewhat sniffily in her review of
Back to the Future
in the
New Yorker
. (She also wrote: ‘I’m not crazy about movies with kids as the heroes,’ which must have made reviewing films in the eighties a bit of a drag for her.)

But Kael was right about one thing: Michael J. Fox, she wrote, was ‘exactly what the moviemakers wanted’ for their star. After Gale pitched the film idea to an excited Zemeckis, it took years for the two of them to get the film made, and it wasn’t until Zemeckis finally had a hit with
Romancing the Stone
that they got the go-ahead.
^fn6
Zemeckis knew from the start that he wanted Fox to play Marty as Fox has the kind of boyish energy that the character needs to carry the film. Unfortunately, the actor was busy starring in the hugely popular sitcom
Family Ties
and the producers wouldn’t release him for the movie. So, a little warily, Zemeckis cast Eric Stoltz. You can still find photos on the web of Stoltz shooting
Back to the Future
, standing with Doc Brown in the Twin Pines shopping mall parking lot, wearing that now iconic sleeveless puffa – and it just looks wrong. Stoltz is many things – ginger, soulful, eccentric – but he is neither energetic nor funny.

‘Eric was more of an internal actor and he simply didn’t have the extroverted comedic “thing” that we wanted in the character,’ Gale recalls. And so, after six weeks on set, Zemeckis fired him. He then went back to the
Family Ties
producers to beg them to let him use their star.

‘Bob Zemeckis pointed out to Gary [Goldberg,
Family Ties
’ producer] that a lot of the scenes in the movie take place at night, so we could shoot the movie then and the TV show during the day, if I was up for it,’ Michael J. Fox remembers. ‘And I was.’ Goldberg reluctantly agreed and Fox agreed ‘with a big grin’.

With his naturally energetic comedy style, heightened by his manic exhaustion from filming both the show and film simultaneously, Fox holds the disparate timelines and characters of
Back to the Future
together, bouncing in his hi-tops. But he does more than that: he creates the illusion that Marty is an interesting character, one worthy of the audience’s emotional investment, which, in truth, he isn’t. He’s barely a character at all. He doesn’t have any defined personality traits besides wishing he owned a car and wanting to be back in good ol’ 1985. His only role is to move the plot along and explain things to the characters and the audience.

‘Marty takes the role of what’s known in story theory as “the mysterious stranger”. He comes out of nowhere and helps the characters sort out their lives. It’s a construct that’s been used in countless Westerns,’ says Gale.

Which is fine, but mysterious strangers tend not to have much in the way of personality, and therefore don’t make for good protagonists. But the reason the role was so under-written is not because the script failed – because it definitely didn’t – but because
Back to the Future
is not about Marty at all: it’s about his parents.

Gale was inspired to write this, the most successful of all eighties teen films, when he was looking at his dad’s yearbook. So it makes sense that, he says, ‘the pivotal character in the film is actually George McFly – he’s the one who grows.’ To emphasise this, he and Zemeckis cast one of the weirdest and most scene-stealing actors of all time as George: Crispin Glover. ‘When we auditioned him, we recognised that he had an unusual quality that we thought would make the character particularly memorable. He made the part so much his own that I can’t even recall what we were thinking when we wrote him, other than having some endearing awkwardness and charm like a young Jimmy Stewart,’ remembers Gale.

But Crispin Hellion Glover, to give him his full name, is a far stranger proposition than good ol’ boy Jimmy Stewart ever was.

All the performances in
Back to the Future
are great, but they are great teen movie performances. Glover, by contrast, seems to be method acting in his own very different, very funny movie. When we first meet middle-aged George at the beginning of the movie, cackling like a cricket chirping at Jackie Gleason on TV, his family stare at him as though he’s from another planet, and it’s an understandable reaction from those other actors.

‘Crispin’s always been interested in being an iconoclast, whereas I’m way more mainstream,’ says Lea Thompson. ‘He worked so hard on
Back to the Future
and he approached it really differently from me, more like something out of the seventies, like De Niro and Pacino and all that kind of character work.’

Only Glover (and possibly Nicolas Cage
^fn7
) would ever think of method acting in an eighties teen film. These days, Glover devotes himself to veganism and making films ‘that reflect my psychological interests’ in a chateau he bought in the Czech Republic. Not even Gale and Zemeckis envisioned a future that bizarre for George McFly in their movie’s sequel.

Back to the Future
is extremely funny and sweet, but the real jokes come, not from the culture clashes between 1955 and 1985, but the way the lies George and Lorraine spun in 1985 about their teenage years are unspooled when their son travels back to 1955. At the beginning of the film Lorraine insists that, as a teenager, she would ‘never call a boy on the phone’, but in fact as a teenager she throws herself at Marty, drinks alcohol and enthusiastically ‘goes parking’ with him, whatever that means. The reason George gets hit by Lorraine’s father’s car – which then leads to the two of them meeting one another – is because he fell out of the tree outside her house while spying on her putting on her bra. When Marty takes his leave of his parents in 1955, his parting message is resoundingly aimed more at the parents in the audience than the kids. Instead of telling George and Lorraine to give their third child a car, as a more teenager-focused film might (and as
Ferris Bueller
definitely would), he says, ‘If you guys ever have kids and one of them when he’s eight years old accidentally sets fire to the living room rug, go easy on him.’

‘Bob Z and I concluded that there’s probably one horrific punishment seared into every child’s memory that he – or she – can never forget. Besides, Marty would have seemed like a jerk if he asked his parents for a car, especially knowing that – in his timeline – they couldn’t afford it,’ says Gale.

But when did looking like a jerk ever stop a teenager – at least in a teen film – grousing about how car-deprived they were? Here, more clearly than anywhere else in the film, Gale and Zemeckis were talking at least as much to the parents in the audience as the kids.
^fn8

This also explains the film’s attitude to sex. With the exception of John Hughes’s films, eighties teen films were remarkably open-minded about teen sexuality. But it’s difficult to think of a film not directed by David Cronenberg that works as hard at making sex seem as unappealingly perverse as
Back to the Future
. The only vaguely sexual scenes in this film are when Lorraine unwittingly tries to seduce her own son in the car followed by Biff attempting to rape her in the same cursed vehicle. Zemeckis has said how nervous he was while writing and rewriting the script with Gale in the early eighties because at that time the nation’s youth was besotted with the
Porky’s
franchise: ‘Gosh, we’re in a high school in this movie and we never went into the girls’ shower!’ Whereas in
Porky’s
sex is the only ambition, in
Back to the Future
, sex is something to be fearfully avoided, which makes sense as the film is about parents, not teenagers, and if there’s anything more horrifying than a parent’s suspicion that their teenage child might be having sex, it’s a teenager’s realisation that their parents ever had sex. And yet, the film tricks teenage audiences into hoping desperately that the parents get together, because without the parents getting it on, there is no teenager. When George beats up Biff, and then when he and Lorraine finally kiss in the dance – those are the romantic points of the film, the emotional lodestars.

Actually, there is one thing more horrifying to teenagers and parents alike and that’s the idea of a mother ‘having the hots’, as Marty puts it, for her son.

‘The average teen films in the eighties were drinking, drugging sex comedies, and these were the films that made a lot of money. So the studios all thought our film was too soft, except for Disney who thought that because of the relationship between the son and the mother it was too dirty,’ Zemeckis said.

And to be honest, Disney had a point. This plot could easily have sunk the movie into gross-out freakiness, and would have done so without Lea Thompson’s sweetness: ‘I remember Bob Zemeckis was so freaked out when we shot the scene when I kiss Marty because the whole movie had to change in that. The whole plot had to twist on that,’ says Thompson.

Of course, the real problem with this plotline, never mind the incest, is, come 1985, George would surely have been a bit worried by his youngest child’s strong resemblance to that guy his wife had a crush on in high school, especially as she names their son after him. But complaining about credibility issues in a movie about time travel is surely the definition of carping, particularly a film about time travel in which a DeLorean works at all, never mind at 1.21 gigawatts.

The most popular image of parents in an eighties teen film is that of the blithe couple walking through the living room door in the final scene of the film just as their son replaces the last piece of furniture that was moved out of place during his shenanigans while they were away (see:
Weird Science
,
Risky Business
,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
and, more recently and less filmically, Yellow Pages adverts for French polishers). This was certainly part of their purpose. But the real role for parents in eighties teen movies is to be fixed by their kids.

In
Sixteen Candles
, Sam has to teach her father how to be a good dad again after he forgets her birthday; in
Pretty in Pink
, Andie gets her father out of his depression after his wife leaves him; in
Say Anything
, Diane Court and Lloyd Dobler teach Mr Court about good morals; in
Dirty Dancing
, Baby teaches her father about good values; in
Footloose
, Ariel teaches her father not to be a deranged religious wingnut; in
Some Kind of Wonderful
, Keith teaches his father that teen romance is more important than going to college (not all these lessons exactly stand up to analysis by anyone over the age of eighteen). These kids are parents to their parents. Sometimes there is nothing to teach the parents: they are simply deeply flawed and the kids learn to be the grown-ups in the relationship, as in
The Breakfast Club
. In
Heathers
, which brilliantly satirises all eighties teen film tropes, J.D. (Christian Slater) calls his father ‘son’ and his father calls J.D. ‘Dad’, and the result of this screwy lack of parental guidance is that J.D. blows himself and his groovy trench coat up on the school steps.

In
Back to the Future
, it is emphasised from the beginning how mortified Marty is by his weak father and drunken mother, and how disappointing they are as parents. It is only when he goes back to 1955 that he is able to teach his parents how to be the people they always wanted to be and, by extension, the parents he wants them to be. The ultimate message of all these movies is, your parents are idiots and you are right.

‘It’s in the eighties that you really start to see what I call the Tyranny of the Teen, with that repeated message: your family is mixed up, and you know everything,’ says Steven Gaydos, editor of
Variety
. ‘Also, a lot of people from the world of TV commercials and family TV were starting to make movies in Hollywood, like Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, who knew how to sell things to young people. They realised that people over forty weren’t seeing movies, so they created films that valorised young people’s experience. There was less finger wagging and more “Why are adults so weird?”’