Popsmacked!: Back to the Future at 30 more about past than future

"The Honeymooners?" Ronald Reagan? Fax machines?

Watching the 1985 blockbuster "Back To The Future" in 2015 is like being smacked in the face with a triple-pronged dose of nostalgia.

On one hand, Michael J Fox's intrepid time traveller leaps back to 1955, when rock music was in its infancy, Reagan was a movie star and full service gas stations were the norm.

The Golden Age.

On the other hand, with his feathered hair, Mom jeans and Sony Walkman, he's a walking advertisement for what, 30 years later, has become a nostalgic focal point of its own.

Nineteen eighty five personified.

When he catapults 30 years into the future in "Back To The Future Part II" — into the flying car, hoverboarding, self-tying shoelace world of 2015 — it's the same retro-thrill we get from the 1939 World's Fair, Expo 67 and Disney's Tomorrowland: past representations of a future that, having come and gone, seem charmingly naïve in their predictions.

Twenty-fifteen, of course, is the temporal nexus, the magical flashpoint where past, present and future collide in a phantasmagoric display of retro firepower.

"We did a lot of research," Bob Gale, who wrote 1985's top grossing movie and its two sequels, told Newsweek. "We didn't want it to look completely silly, at least not to audiences of the day.

"(I'm) totally jazzed that kids that saw that movie back in the day are now adults trying to invent hoverboards (skateboards that float above ground) because they saw it in our movie."

The Back to the Future trilogy was, in the end, nothing short of revolutionary, blending scientific speculation with an engaging story about a teenager who bounces between past and future realities with such breezy intensity it made time travel a "thing" in mainstream Hollywood films.

Every post-1985 film dipping into the same pool — from "Austin Powers" to "Looper," "Groundhog Day" to "Hot Tub Time Machine" — owes a debt to the series that made a point of answering the universal question: what would happen if you leapfrogged 30 years into the past and came face to face with your hot-to-trot teenage mom?

But beneath the exhilaration of a studio franchise that paired intelligence with effects, science with slapstick, there's a bittersweet tug.

Everyone who enjoyed the films during the height of the Reagan/Rambo era knew this day would come, when the film's present would become our own past, its future our present, its past something akin to, well, ancient history.

It raises intriguing questions about our relationship with nostalgia: how we define it, how it changes over time, when it stops being relevant.

Woody Allen tackled this, comedically, in 2011's "Midnight In Paris," in which a disgruntled writer wishes himself back to the Golden Age — 1920s Paris — only to find the inhabitants of his fantasy world equally dissatisfied, wishing themselves back in time to La Belle Epoque.

Why? Because there is no Golden Age. People are hard-wired to yearn, through some half-baked romantic haze, for a time period not their own.

"Back to the Future" is cinematic proof, both satirical survey and the living embodiment, with its 1985 perspective, of the time travel conceits it works for dramatic effect.

"Tell me, future boy, who's President of the United States in 1985?" 1955 Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) asks 1985 Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox).

"Ronald Reagan," he announces as Doc's jaw drops.

"Ronald Reagan? The actor?"

Doc chuckles in disbelief: "Then who's vice president? Jerry Lewis?"

The joke worked because, in 1985, politics and entertainment operated in different spheres of reality.

The idea of a Hollywood actor attaining the nation's top political office still seemed novel, unprecedented.

Thirty years later, with everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Donald Trump throwing their hat in the ring, it's old news.

Nor has the series' depiction of the future held up, scientifically speaking.

Fax machines in place of the Internet? Flying cars? Broadsheet newspapers as the primary means of mass communication?

It is to laugh.

And where's the tech revolution begat by smartphones?

"We didn't figure that one out at all," Gale admitted to NBC News. "This is a technology that nobody saw coming in 1989, and it's totally ubiquitous now and has totally changed how people live."

"From where we were sitting in 1989, it just seemed like there were going to be more and more faxes."

On a laudatory note, the series correctly predicted flat screen TVs, Skype, Google Glass and, with its holographic ad for Jaws 19, the sequel culture in which we now exist.

But mostly, it's the year 2015 viewed through the lens of 1985, which is a kind of nostalgia all its own.

"You gonna order something, kid?" a '50s waiter asks 1985 Marty.

"Ah, yeah," he responds. "Give me a Tab."

"Tab? I can't give you a tab unless you order something."

"Right. Give me a Pepsi Free."

"You want a Pepsi, pal, you're gonna pay for it!"

Since both Pepsi Free and Tab have virtually disappeared off the pop culture radar, this pun-filled exchange is as relevant as the old-fashioned dial phone in Doc Brown's lab.

So what, you may wonder, would a modern update look like, with the '80s as the past, 2015 as the present and 2045 as the future?

The first two are obvious: the '80s are exactly as represented in the film, a world of primitive computers, Huey Lewis songs, VHS machines and Jane Fonda aerobics classes.

The present would be our present, with smartphones and social media taking the place of flying cars, hoverboards and self-drying jackets.

But the future? Again, it's that conundrum of trying to predict things that may or may not happen a lifetime from now.

"There's of course the big question of whether or not some religious fanatics will get their hands on a nuclear bomb and do some serious damage," Gale told Newsweek.

"And undoubtedly, there will be something that happens in the next 30 years that will be one of those things nobody saw coming. And yet, when it happens, everybody will say 'Oh yeah, how come nobody thought of that before?"'

Scanning websites devoted to scientific prognostication, the popular image is of humans interfaced with computers on a biological level, along with super hurricanes, animal extinctions and the rollout of driverless cars now in the early testing phase.

Since we still haven't managed to predict the weather more than five minutes in advance, I will gleefully add the flying cars, hoverboards and self-drying clothing touted so confidently in Back to the Future Part II.

I'm not worried. By the time 2045 rolls around, they will either be reality, or fodder for more high-minded missives like this one.

The Back To The Future trilogy will return to theatres in October. Available now on Rogers On Demand.

Source: Popsmacked!: Back to the Future at 30 more about past than future