...What happens when you make a young adult actually a young adult?
Back to the Future is 40 years old! Have you re-watched it yet? YOU SHOULD.
There's all sorts of fun and crazy things that jump out (like the simultaneously hilarious and somber realization that the modern-day parts of the movie are now the nostalgia bait*.)
*Pepsi cans used to be white! WHITE! Can you imagine?
However, the thing that jumps out the most is Marty McFly as a character.
Despite being one of the most iconic teenage heroes of the 80s (and cinema as a whole, honestly), Marty McFly is a surprisingly nonstandard depiction of a teenager.
I guess I've just gotten so used to the sneering, eye-rolling, aimless suburbanite rebel that I was kind of shocked to meet a teenage protagonist who was, you know, a person.
What?
Now, some of this may just be that we had yet to fully define (and by "define" I mean "squish into a box") the concept of teenager.
We took 17-year-olds a little more seriously in the 80s. It was still an era where you could marry your high school sweetheart right out of high school without people rolling their eyes and setting countdown-to-divorce timers. Heck, just 10 years before, turning 18 meant you could get sent to kick landmines in Vietnam. Being on the cusp of legal adulthood carried a little more weight.
Whatever the reason, Marty McFly comes out as one of the only non-infantalized teenagers in cinema.
One of the most interesting things that the film decides to do is keep Marty out of high school.
Despite being a highschooler in a story about going back in time to another high school, Marty predominantly operates as a grown up in a grown-up world. His concerns and aspirations are those of an adult.
It sounds a little crazy to say this about the story of a kid traveling back in time to meet his own parents as highschoolers, but the film wisely ignores the tempting, low hanging fruit of making a young versus old story or a now versus then story.
A world without cardboard stock characters
For a story about a highschooler, a mad scientist, a nerd, a bully, and a girl, the film manages to avoid making itself into a puppet play of two-dimensional stock characters.
It would have been really easy to make this the story of a stock teenage character reacting to all the hilariously dated stuff of his parents' generation*. Instead, they managed to dodge this pitfall at just about every turn.
*Perhaps it was just the high wave of 50s nostalgia, or perhaps it's just the film's fundamental positivity, but I really enjoyed that Marty likes the stuff from the 50s – he recognizes the TV shows and calls it a classic, he's able to play 50s rock 'n' roll from memory. There is an innate delight in this kind of character positivity. I feel like that's something that we've lost with more cynical stories, where thinking the world is garbage is necessary for a character to appear sane and intelligent.
Marty himself is perhaps the best example of this. Marty doesn't belong to an easy, pre-existing subculture. It's interesting to me that Marty rides a skateboard without being a skater kid and plays rock music without being a rocker kid. (I know these cliques existed because I made the mistake of watching Valley Girl the other day.) There's a lot of obvious shorthand that they could have done to the character – an 80s punk goes back to the 50s! Hilarity ensues! Instead, Marty is a guy who also rides a skateboard to school and plays the guitar really well (but is too afraid of rejection to actually attempt doing it professionally.)
I think one of the most important things that they do with this is make Marty's aspirations grown-up. He's not trying to win battle of the bands, or worrying about who he's going to take to prom, or where he stands in high school popularity contests. He wants to take his (serious) girlfriend out on a camping trip.
In fact, other than his girlfriend, Marty interacts with nothing but adults in his own day and age. (The most meaningful friendship he forms is with a 65-year-old mad scientist.) Even most high school stories of the time kept their characters in a kind of high school age ghetto, where the farthest you could think into the future was the homecoming dance.
Wait, we can experience coming-of-age conflict and growth without rebellion?
"Teenage" and "rebellion" have become so synonymous that we almost can't have one without the other.
But Marty isn't much of a rebel at all. When confronted with the (cartoonishly) overbearing authority of his school principal (in the only scene in which we see him in his own high school), Marty just bears it with calm and resignation.
It's interesting to see that Marty is allowed to feel things without saying them. Just look at the first scene where his parents are introduced. Marty says almost nothing, but we see him observe (and be affected by) the fundamental dysfunction of his family. That's a level of trust that we don't usually give actors (or audiences).
I feel like we sort of half-abandoned this in the last 40 years. At some point, we decided that comedy was clever, and cleverness was something that could only be conveyed in dialogue.
A random aside about the curse of cleverness:
…As an experiment, Try watching something that is renowned for its clever writing, and pay attention to the characters who AREN'T talking. Oftentimes, you can see the actors visibly deactivate because there is simply nothing for them to do – the clever dialogue leaves no space for anything else. It is as if all the actors are merely sock puppets for the writer, but the writer has only one hand. This might be the reason that I've never been able to get into Joss Whedon classics like Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The episode that I watched felt like characters had to pass around the my-turn-to-tell-the-joke-stick and everyone who wasn't holding it just stood there in an idle animation waiting for the joke to pass to them. (But then, treating actors like puppets was apparently more than just a writing style for him. ...It's okay to criticize Joss Whedon now that he's officially off of the Internet's cool people list, right?)
A non-consumer concept of identity
As a final note, I think one of the most interesting (and depressing) things that jumped out to me was this: All of the major characters – Marty included – are introduced and defined by what they create than what they consume.
We learn that Marty is a musician because we see him pick up a guitar and play (or rather blast himself across the room with a mad science amp cranked up to 11, but still – he's introduced by doing. He could have been rolling around with the boombox listening to music, but instead the story introduced him creating it.) We know that Doc Brown is a mad scientist because the movie opens with a montage of his insane Rube Goldberg dog food dispensing machine. Back in the 50s, we learn that Marty's dad is a nerd because he writes science fiction stories. (I'm particularly struck by that last one because it stands is just such a sharp contrast to modern depictions of nerds, which are more or less just by gigantic pile of media consumed.)
That's just… kind of nice.
I think I need to go make something now.
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