A few months back, over a few drinks with some childhood friends, it came to light that I had never seen Back to the Future. As a child of the 1980’s, this cultural oversight was an abomination. My friends were aghast and incredulous. I had seen snippets of the film on deep cable, so I felt like I had a handle on it. They were not convinced.
“Okay then, given everything you know about the movie, tell us what the plot is,” my friend Yosh challenged.
“No problem. Michael J. Fox is a high school student who wears a knit tie a lot.”
“That’s Family Ties.”
“Right. Okay, Michael J. Fox is actually a werewolf, and he has to…“
“That’s Teen Wolf.”
It was clear I would not be off the hook, and would not get out of watching Back to the Future as an adult. They bought me the DVD set of not just Back to the Future but the entire trilogy. Finally, after 27 years, I sat down to watch it.
You of course know the story better than me. Marty McFly, lovable but troublesome high school student, is transported from 1985 – a land of Pepsi Free, Tab, and pegged pants – to 1955 – a land of malt shops, poodle skirts, and pegged pants. He inadvertently prevents his young parents from meeting, and sets out to correct the situation, thereby ensuring his own existence, and ensuring he can get, ahem, back to the future.
I would have loved this film in 1985 when I was thirteen. I was the target market. I have to admit I love the film anyway, right here in 2012. Great characters, great story, abounding cuteness, and a healthy dose of Michael J. Fox scratching the back of his neck in despair. What’s not to love?
Throughout the ages and across disciplines, man has been fascinated with time and the idea of time travel. From the Old Testament to H.G. Wells to Einstein and finally to Robert Zemeckis, time captures us because our human minds cannot fully capture the concept.
As the great book of Ecclesiastes reminds us, we are beings caught in time. Chapter 3 opens with the famous “a time to this, a time to that” passage, presenting the idea that there is a bit of yin and yang in the Christian perspective after all. (Ironically, the b-side to The Byrds famous “Turn! Turn! Turn!” based on this passage was a song called “She Don’t Care About Time.”) In verse 11, Ecclesiastes’ teacher declares, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
The New Century translation takes it a bit further, “God has given them a desire to know the future. He does everything just right and on time, but people can never completely understand what he is doing.” Herein lies our problem with time – we live in the physical world of the immediate, where we can touch, taste, and see the world around us, yet we have a sense that we are eternal beings. But what does eternity mean to a mind that has never ‘seen’ eternity? We can only guess at the future, yet we believe in it as a concept – a way to measure our lifetimes and existence. Further, we are fixed in present time and have no way (according to Ecclesiastes) to fully grasp God’s unfolding of events in time. Because of our fixed view in the present, we are constantly trying to make sense of the future, based on events we have lived through in the past. How can we, as temporal beings with ‘an eternal sense of things’, imperfect in our interpretation and experience of time, understand an eternal history which a timeless God has wrought?
In 1905 Einstein blew our minds further with relativity, and the idea that time could be bent, or at least our perception of time could be. The characters in Back to the Future are allowed to break the bonds of time in a way we have always dreamed of. We are perennially caught in our present moments, but to fully be present in each moment is a perceptive impossibility. As each second tics, it is gone. Trying to grasp the concept of present time is like trying to think about not thinking. It’s the intellectual equivalent of chasing one’s own tail. The past, even the just-happened, very-recent events of the last few minutes, and the future – grand but unknowable – are the two bookends from which we make up our awareness. Time, for the conscious human mind, remains always just out of reach.
Recently I was tasked with creating a short film based on this idea of humankind existing between the temporal and the eternal. The best idea I could come up with was to record a raucous version of the old song “Time Is On My Side” with a couple of friends, and marry that soundtrack to a fixed-camera shot of nothing but a clock ticking for nearly four minutes.
The finished product was hilarious for some (myself included), but a rank frustration for other viewers. For four minutes, we were forced to reckon with present time and its passing. During that period, there was no action save for the music and relentless sweep of the second hand. The application was to force ourselves as an audience to address our present time, not based on the past, and in no anticipation of the future. We were united, caught in a suspended state of temporal awareness, imprisoned by a dumb video and an old soul song. High art it was not, but it brought home how uncomfortable we can be in the present moment.
Enter Marty McFly. His school principal doesn’t like him, his brother and sister are weird, his mother is an alcoholic, and his father is a sucker and a dweeb. All Marty really wants is to take his girl to the lake and make out with her in the back of a pickup truck. When he gets sucked back in time in the now-famous DeLorean, powered by the nuclear Flux Capacitor, he and his mentor Doc Brown, have a sense that although their lives are imperfect back in the present, it’s best not to mess with the true unfolding of events in time. This is an illustration of humans having eternity ‘set in their hearts’ so to speak, looking at the imperfections of life (yin and yang, shadow and light), but somehow knowing there is a sacred narrative being played out amidst all the incongruity.
Yet, the urge to give history a bit of a nudge here and there proves irresistible for both Marty and Doc Brown. Even as he’s encouraging his teenage parents’ budding romance, which is his main quest in the film, Marty also makes other, more minor adjustments like discouraging his mother from drinking and smoking, and trying to instill confidence in his father George McFly, one of the screen’s most colossal nerds, played to perfection by Crispin Glover. Toward the end of the film, Marty even goes so far as to ask the young lovers to go easy on their young son (if they should ever have one) when he misbehaves in the future. Even Doc Brown, the most staunch advocate of The Butterfly Effect, and the most adamant opponent of leaving time alone, intervenes to prevent his own death in the future.
One of my favorite quotes is by Western novelist Louis L’Amour: “If we remember richly, we must have lived richly.” This reflects all the juiciness of memory and nostalgia, but the phrase ‘we must have’ reveals that we don’t really know how we lived, because we lived through moments in a flash, and only in replay do we make sense of things, building the architecture of our lives through the process of memory. For Marty McFly, peeking behind the actual veil of the past proves titillating at first but then begins to undermine his very existence.
Trying to construct the future works in a similarly obtuse way, and according to both the book of Ecclesiastes, and another great quote (from Maximus just before he mounts up in the forests of Germania in Gladiator), we have more than a hint that our temporal lives create shimmers in “what God has done from beginning to end.” Although we remain caught in the present, “what we do in life echoes in eternity.”
Kevin Marks has been the Creative Arts Director for The Highway Community since 2001. He is also the Creative Director of Highway Media, a non-profit production company focused on spiritual filmmaking.
