Where's My Hoverboard?

On Time Travel and Our Storytelling Future

The second part of the Back to the Future film trilogy, as all dutiful fans remember, opens with Doc Emmit Brown, his friend Marty McFly, and Marty's girlfriend Jessica (brought along who knows why) descending on the whimsically named town of Hill Valley, California on the morning of October 21, 2015.  It turns out that this date falls on a Wednesday; I know this now because, extremely strange to say, I find that today happens to be that same date.

The date is a long way coming, of course.  I first saw the second film at some hazy point in my early childhood, being only four or five at the time of its release, and essentially ever since then 2015 has been "the year they go to in Back to the Future."  It was true when I would occasionally become fitful about the movies during my childhood in the 90's, and would wonder where I'd be in 2015 and if I'd really have a hoverboard by then (I think I doubted it, but who knows), and it was true on New Year's day this year.  "Reminder," a cheeky social media notification announced that morning, showing a picture of the bionic-implanted Griff and his weird lackeys saying something like, "In October of this year we'll be dressing like this."

But I hardly expected the Internet turnout the date has provoked today.  There's no weirder barometer I think for the funny little film trilogy's lasting popularity than a casual glance at the news articles, merchandise advertisements, appearances by the film's stars themselves, and *ahem* blog posts all trying to cash in on the sudden popularity the movies are getting.  How much of this excitement is in earnest and how much is happening, as I suspect many many things on the internet happen, in the spirit of Follow the Leader?  I suppose a search in a week or two for people still talking about Back to the Future might be a good way of testing the waters; internet fads seem to flash up and die away faster than any other fads I know of.  But at the very least it's touching that this many people clearly saw the day coming, and wanted to do something about it.

So why are these movies still so popular?  The answer seems straightforward enough.  Speaking as a blogger, I would say it's a combination of three factors.  First, there's the fan's affection for its heartfelt characters.  If the audience can believe in a character and like them, and want them to succeed, then those characters tend to stand the test of time better than almost any other part of a good story. 

2015 was BTTF Year in my mind even while discovering hidden depths in 2012, like finding out how to make cars out of cardboard

Second, there's the memorable style, and which seems to have been a result of both happy accidents and careful refinements of the vision of its filmmakers.  From the unlikely and iconic DeLorean DMC (the early drafts called for a time machine made out of a refrigerator and powered by Coca Cola), to the huge and breathtaking score (the first film had the largest studio orchestra recording to date), to the continuity hints (look again at the name of the mall at the end of the first film, see what's in the pattern on Doc Brown's shirt after he changes to less conspicuous getup in 2015) and quirks (compare the scene which ends the first movie and its meticulous, shot-for-shot recreation at the start of the second, made in order to replace Herbie the Love Bug's Claudia Wells' Jennifer with Leaving Las Vegas's Elizabeth Shue), there are a thousand small details across the three pictures that stay in the mind and reward repeat viewings.

And third, of course, there's nostalgia.  When we saw this movie things were easier and probably happier, or at least the passage of time has made them so, and we can relive that feeling a bit when we pop in the bluray or DVD or betamax copy today.  It makes us feel close to our own selves, our own stories, to revisit the adventures we've had, even (and perhaps especially for people like me) in make-believe.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to what I have to say about the movies, and I'll try to say it as quickly as possible.

When I was a kid, if I wanted to rent a movie from the town video store, four times out of five it was Back to the Future Part II.

What I want to know now is, why was this?  

Watching it again earlier this year with my Films Are Art For Serious Hat on (it's not very comfy), I saw that the same thing is true now that was true when I was a kid.  I was spellbound for the first twenty-five minutes or so, when the luckless Marty has to match wits and newly-found hoverboard skills with a gang of roughs in order to avert his son, the apparent clone Marty Jr., going to jail as per Doc Brown's scheme (the whole reason that they went to the future besides, well, you know, to make money with more movies).

Three things jumped out at me about those early scenes set in 2015 when I watched them again.  First, Thomas F. Wilson, here playing Griff and elsewhere playing Young Biff, Old Biff, Really Old Grandpa Biff, and the original Mad Dog Buford, might be the most wonderful and most underrated asset those movies had.  By the way, for anyone not aware that the guy is an accomplished musician and stand-up comedian in his own right, I request that you at least watch this video.

Second, I love the fact that the fact that in 2015 they're nostalgic for the 80s.  This is almost certainly a not-so-sneaky ploy to avoid hazarding any guesses as to what pop culture in the year 2015 would be like, but it's also proved to be a weirdly accurate prediction: in thirty years, we'll be looking back to now.  And here we are, 30 years in the future, and they've been proved right.

(Also, that I still don't know what baby Frodo and Video Game Boy #2 are using to play their games if they're not using their hands.  We have the Kinect now, and similar products, but that still works by registering body movement.  Their thoughts I guess?  Maybe that's why people be all the time wearing wierd plactics on their heads?  We're getting closer to this all the time, but it still seems a ways off.)

Third, I noticed that as soon as Old Biff picked up the almanac from the trash can and they all headed off to Hilldale (spoiler alert I guess), my attention level dropped sharply.  The rest of the movie is tightly paced, intense at times, and has a satisfying conclusion that is technically amazing to consider (they re-made the first movie's penultimate climax, interweaving a second penultimate climax seamlessly through it.  Plus Billy Zane in 3D glasses).  But if I'm trying to find out why I liked the second movie so much as a kid, then I have to admit the answer doesn't lie in the Potterville-esque version of 1985, or in 1955 revisited.

Where's My Hoverboard?

If I want to explain what I love most about the first thirty minutes of Back to the Future Part II, the blogger part of me wants to wax analytic about how the future is always one of the most fun places we can go in fiction, about how tomorrow being brighter has much the same to do with how the grass is greener, and perhaps into an exploration of other things promised to us in visions of the future from elsewhere in fiction which haven't yet come to be.  But that would be ignoring the plain answer staring us all in the face.

I loved Back to the Future 2 as a kid for three reasons.  Power laces, the flying DeLorean (the only way in my opinion they could have made it cooler), and the hoverboard.

All said and done, the idea of a Hoverboard, has to be one of the sheer simplest, sweetest, and coolest notions to come out of pop culture since the New Coke.  After all, what can you do on a hoverboard that you can't do on a regular skateboard?    Marty McFly does some great stunts on the one he borrows from a little girl, but how well to most of us know how to use a skateboard without finding out what the sidewalk tastes like?  And sure, you're flying, sure, but you're flying about three or four inches above the ground.  Doesn't any of this matter?  Not in the least.  I don't think there's a person reading this who wouldn't love to own one, myself included.  Not even the promised Weather Service scheduling rain and sunshine down to the second can compete.

Pictured: the secret of happiness
(image courtesy of flikr)

Yet here we are in 2015, no hoverboards.  Disappointing, and I suppose doubly dissapointing for the kids who apparently thought they were real even in 1989.

Obviously we dont' have any of these things yet.  And that's hardly the most disappointing thing I think about how the twenty-six years have turned out since the second film's release.  There's an excellent short article on Wired that describes roughly where we're at, as a species, in terms of battling away at physics in order to bring the last of these into existence, which you can find here. 

No word yet on the flying DeLorean, but there's always 2085 to look forward to.  

But this version of the future isn't all bad.  What have we got instead?  The wikipedia article on Moore's law, the (very) rough idea being that computers (well integrated circuits) get twice as complex every two years, has a fairly iconic and interesting image of its own to share:  

"An Osborne Executive portable computer, from 1982, with aZilog Z80 4 MHz CPU, and a 2007 Apple iPhone with a 412 MHz ARM11 CPU; the Executive weighs 100 times as much, has nearly 500 times the volume, costs approximately 10 times as much (adjusted for inflation), and has about 1/100th the clock frequency of the smartphone."
courtesy of wikipedia

Computers are everywhere now, as they were more or less hinted to be everywhere in the film, and the impact they've had on the way we work, think, relate to each other, communicate, see ourselves, and interact in general with the world around us on a daily basis is of course nothing that anyone in 1985 or even 2005 could have predicted.  Would I trade my smartphone for a hoverboard?  I think the answer is yes, but I have a nagging doubt that after about an hour of zipping about suburbia, I'd be reaching in my pocket for the use of the instant internet that wasn't there.

Incidentally, U.S. Patent Number 8,769,844, owned by Nike, Inc. and issued July 2014, is titled "Automatic Lacing System".  I think we all had secret hopes that they'd be rolling these out by now, but sadly so far no shoe, as far as I can see in scanning the voluminous Back to the Future Day procedings online.

LATER, as I'm about to publish: great Scott.  And it's for an excellent cause.

But my real reason for writing this is to point out that this seems to be a different, and for me very strange, kind of thing.  It's nostalgia, sure, but nostalgia for what exactly?  

What's Next 

It's a strange kind of nostalgia that seems to be directed towards a past image of how things can turn out one day, except now of course the image is in the present, and soon to be in the past.  

What?

Let's try that again.  So this picture of the future, which is so old now that even the future part is now in the past, has turned into this kind of a different version of the present we're nostalgic for, one which of course was fiction all along, but which was still meaningful for us, and is meaningful still.  It's almost like looking into a parallel universe, or even an alternate timeline.  One which we never really thought would be true, but which it would have been great to see.

The former philosophy major in me wants to christen this kind of thinking with some odd and uselessly technical term, something like "Counter-factual" nostalgia.  But this isn't a new thing; there were science fiction stories in the late 1800s about the turn of the 3rd millennium that have been proved wrong a hundred times over.  Take the following illustration, which I think I've mentioned in these posts before, Leaving the opera in the year 2000:

The policeman in the middle is owning that look like a boss

Nor is this sort of thinking very uncommon.  Come to think of it, it happens to me about once a week: on Sunday afternoon I'll look up from my junk food and video games and discover the To-Do List for the weekend that I made on Thursday, and shake my head at how foolishly optimistic the past version of myself seems to be.

But it is a funny sort of thing, and today's connection with 1989 and with all of our own personal histories seems striking.

It also, I'd like to tentatively suggest, can be a dangerous way of thinking.  The thing that troubles me is, 30 years from now, what will we be looking back on?  What's new in the world today

Earlier today, when I realized what day it was, I was almost overwhelmed with a feeling that I was spending today fairly uselessly, on forgettable day-to-day work in a more or less dull office.  There's no BANG BANG Streak announcing the appearance of a flying DeLorean that I've seen so far, so what makes today special, outside of this longing for the past?

We're living in a world, in terms of popular fiction, and especially in the medium under discussion namely Movies, of sequels and re-makes and other recycling of past ideas and past stories.  It seems like more and more of the serious film-making production money is getting spent in less and less chancy ways, investing and re-investing time and again in properties which have succeeded before, and which they feel to be more or less safe.

Ironically this is indeed part of Back to the Future's legacy; they never really meant for there to be a second or third film when they made the first -- why on Earth would Doc have taken Jennifer to the future along with Marty if they really had planned on doing so?  That part seems to have stumped the writers so hard they had to tranquilize the poor character out of existence throughout practically all of both sequels.  The two follow-ups were filmed and released back-to-back, which was also not a common practice in the late 80's and which is much more common today, and are of course wonderful fun, but the precedent they set is, I think, sort of a dangerous one.

Back to the Future, the first movie, was a crazy idea.  It didn't really strictly speaking have any reason to have become such a smash success, besides that weird fateful combination of luck and charm that worked so well in its favor, and still works today.  But I rather doubt if it would succeed if it were released for the first time today, especially with only a modest budget and marketing.  Word-of-mouth and the phenomenon of viral social media go a long way towards making things popular that might be unknown to us all otherwise, but it's a different world now than it was in 1985 (citation needed), and new ideas and new movies simply don't have the welcome that they used to have.

But don't let's get downhearted about that!

What I'm saying is that the idea of a hoverboard makes me happy, even if the hoverboard itself doesn't.  But even in this era of  blockbusters there are good ideas coming through.  The idea of Jaegers fighting Kaiju makes me happy too.  So does the idea of TARS snarking at Coop.  So do Rocket Raccoon and Groot.  Let's keep embracing and encouraging new ideas with the same fervor we look back on the old, and 30 years from now the world will be a much richer place for it.

If the success of these movies, and their enduring popularity, have anything to teach us, it's that we should get wild in making our new stories.  We should do unusual and un-obvious things, and not be afraid to be idiosyncratic.  More often than we'd be willing to believe, our ideas might be crazy enough to work!

The whole point of this story is invention!  If we were to find Doc Brown in his lab today, I don’t think he’d be talking about stuff that happened 30 years ago.  He’d be asking us to look at what's next, about his next big project, whatever it is.  He invented a refrigerator in the old west and an electronic telepathy helmet (it was in beta) in the 50s.  This is the character whose parting shot of the whole trilogy is to say that he’s not interested in revisiting the times and places he’s already seen.  (Of course that could just be to set up the amazing hover train sequence, in which case I’ll still let it slide.)

Let these movies inspire you to be creative, to go make something new, to answer a question or fill a need that you see in the world, even if it seems like a dumb or wild or crazy idea at first.

The sequel movies have a wonderful message at their heart, which I think is worth repeating to oneself at least once a year in the form of the films themselves, and which is worth repeating often when things aren't going right.  And it was delivered again, today, with a surprisingly moving delivery from the man himself (in an advertisement of course, but the feeling is there).

But the original movie had a message equally important to remember, and possibly even more worth repeating to one's self.  It's the message I'll close with, and it's because of that sentiment, I would argue, that we have the pocket computers and even half-hoverboards we have today.

If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.



Related: How to Make a DeLorean for a Monkey

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