Back to the Future Part II

As a young­ster I was dri­ven to school by a neigh­bour because my par­ents – both teach­ers – had to leave for work much ear­li­er than my day offi­cial­ly start­ed. The week­day régime was that we’d march out the house, head down sev­en doors, and then wait qui­et­ly for half-an-hour for my car pool­ing chauf­feurs to ready them­selves. Every morn­ing we’d sit qui­et­ly on their pink sofa and, by way of paci­fi­ca­tion, they would play a VHS tape of some­thing they’d grabbed off of TV. The rota­tion was pret­ty small, but we (my younger broth­er and I) were at an age where heavy repeat con­sump­tion mat­tered not. There was Time Ban­dits (which had the final scene chopped in half so Kevin’s par­ents nev­er die), Ani­ma­lympics, Labyrinth, Flash Gor­don and Back to the Future Part II.

All of these films worked per­fect­ly as 20-minute dai­ly seg­ments as they were large­ly episod­ic jour­ney nar­ra­tives which com­prise of about five big set pieces. The one that we would watch the most often was Back to the Future Part II because the tril­o­gy as a whole was con­sid­ered hal­lowed among col­lect­ed peers who all, in ret­ro­spect, seemed less inter­est­ed in ​“fan­ta­sy” titles or, indeed, ani­mat­ed sports movies involv­ing farm­yard ani­mals. We could gen­er­al­ly get through the entire movie in a sin­gle week (fast-for­ward­ing through ad breaks, of course) and this mode of view­ing, at the time, seemed the per­fect way to con­sume these works.

In pro­to-cinephilic terms, this must read like high sac­ri­lege. A scuzzy VHS record­ing, with adver­tise­ments, pos­si­bly ​“edit­ed for con­tent” see­ing as it like­ly played in a tea-time slot, and viewed not as the direc­tor intend­ed, as a sin­gle nar­ra­tive mass. Yet, this did not pre­vent us devel­op­ing a pro­found ado­ra­tion for the film. A Mon­day would get us to 2015 and we’d just about make it inside the Café Eight­ies. Tues­day would take us through to the re-/de­hy­drat­ed piz­za and ​“Read. My. Fax.”. Wednes­day we’d make it to bad 1985 and Biff Tan­nen in a dress­ing gown. Thurs­day we’d be back in good ol’ 1955 and flip­ping through Oh LaLa mag­a­zine. And the Fri­day, we’d be get­ting the let­ter from 1885 assur­ing us that the Doc was okay.

It was a per­fect set-up. In fact, it was so per­fect that, years lat­er when I devel­oped a mild fix­a­tion with the tril­o­gy in my ear­ly teens, see­ing Back to the Future Part II in one go actu­al­ly revealed how dis­joint­ed and con­fus­ing the nar­ra­tive actu­al­ly was, not a patch on the expert plate-spin­ning of the orig­i­nal. The raz­zle-daz­zle pro­duc­tion design had bewitched me in my youth. The con­ver­sa­tion­al focus on the real­i­ty of Hov­er­boards (side­note: a friend would repeat the con­stant claim that Hov­er­boards exist­ed but that they were too dan­ger­ous to be released into pub­lic, and that his uncle had one) had left sane crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties sad­ly dimin­ished. Our love for the films was such that a reg­u­lar open­ing gam­bit for accep­tance into our ​“gang” was to rank the Back to the Future films, and any­one who divert­ed from the stan­dard ​‘One, Three, Two’ for­ma­tion, was severe­ly chid­ed, and occa­sion­al­ly beaten.

All of this aside, it’s inter­est­ing now, com­ing to work on the train and see­ing peo­ple watch­ing movies on phones and tablets to alle­vi­ate the drudgery of the morn­ing com­mute. They, like I did so many years ago, are con­sum­ing movies in the same way that I enjoyed doing so many years ago – in bite sized chunks, only ever inter­ven­ing to swipe away a pesky pop-up adver­tise­ments. The idyll of a well air-con­di­tioned cin­e­ma audi­to­ri­um and a pris­tine 35mm print doesn’t even enter the mind, as there are some movies which are so right, but only if you watch them in the wrong way.