don't mention love... ([info]dontmentionlove) wrote,
@ 2009-06-19 10:28:00
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Entry tags:movie chatter

things i'd write about if i still wrote film papers
i know a lot of straight-up dudes who absolutely love Back to the Future, D included. i enjoy elements of the series, and by elements i mean mostly the fact that there is a time-travelling Delorean and the character of Doc Brown because Christopher Lloyd's portrayal is endearing and wacky and wonderful (memo to Andy Dyck: take notes! that is how it's done!). but in general i find that the film series has little of interest for me as a woman and a feminist. plenty of people have written about BTtF and revisionist history; i am certainly not the first to point out that these are, at their core, movies about men revising an already patriarchal world so as to better fulfill their patriarchal fantasies. for marty this is moderate rockstardom, and wealthy tennis-playing parents. well-adjusted in BTtF basically means reagan-era yuppiedom. i get that it's a marker of the times but it would have been nice if jennifer did more than pass out and lorraine had any interests besides snagging a guy. i love Mary Steenburgen as Clara Clayton but it's kind of ridiculous that the only woman who enjoys a moderate amount of mobility in the story resides furthest in the past.

also, the scene in Back to the Future part II where rich future Biff basically tells Marty exactly how to get the Almanac back with zero hesitation makes me want to tear out my hair. I guess you can wank it that he's still supposed to be stupid and a stupid person wouldn't figure out that it came from the future and so it might be possible to go back and undo that event, but seriously. Evidentally Future Biff should have read Watchmen.




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[info]pseudohistorian
2009-06-21 07:50 am UTC (link)
In the DVD commentaries, Zemeckis & Gale acknowledge that their ending for the first film constituted a very 1980's definition of "success," but only European reviewers really picked up on it at the time...

Looking at the details, though, I'm not sure how "filthy rich" the McFly family is supposed to have become. They still have the same house, and Dave and Linda appear to still live there, even though Marty has the truck now. A Match Made in Space is George's "first novel," so I also don't know how much of a "rock star" he is in the SF world, although the movie suggests that George and Lorraine's yuppiedom is a good thing. Since Marty (and we as viewers) don't have any further contact with this version of the family until a brief scene at the end of Part III, there aren't many clues there.

It's interesting that you mention your horror at the ending of the first movie, since the opposite happened to me when I first saw Part II--I didn't get that Marty's life in the future was supposed to be bad. I mean, he's married to Jennifer, he lives in Hilldale (a neighbourhood that his teenage self finds very exciting), he gets along with his aged parents, and his son now comes home for dinner instead of going to prison, so what's the problem? It was only later that I noticed the signs pointing to Marty not living up to his dreams.

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