(Editor’s note: Columns often contain opinion which belong to the author.)
Where you’re going, you’re going to need roads – roads that lead to the Miller Theater on Sunday, June 8, that is.
And what you’ll be seeing will not be the second “Back to the Future” with a bunch of flying cars that do not require roads but the original film which gives a few glimpses into the sequel.
Anyway, let’s travel back to the year… 1985!
I first saw the inspiring original in the regular cinema in Augusta and then on satellite television. A youth leader took some of my youth group to see both 2 and 3 at different times at a dollar cinema on St. Andrews Road in Columbia, not much further from where I lived in South Carolina than Augusta. I loved seeing the characters develop and the different usages of the DeLorean time travel device.
Even before seeing those films, I was somewhat of a techie and science fiction fan – particularly of the more fantastic variety. My late father was a Doc Brown type – always into the latest gadgetry. He worked for AT&T and had a side satellite dish business – dealing in the large, old-school kind. I helped him install those satellite dishes when I was a child and young adolescent, including doing some of the labor for them. And I remember him having various meters and gadgets in addition to regular tools, which I helped him use. He also kept us up to date on computers from the 1970s to the 1990s.
His love of tech and tinkering reminded me of Doc. And he had wild hair like a salt and pepper afro that he kept cut down some but not quite as wild and Einstein-like as Doc Brown’s. Some of my friends from high school called it Kramer hair – alluding to the character from “Seinfeld.” Perhaps, my liking the movie so much was a way of trying to get closer to him. We were not very close. But we did our best during the last decade of his life when he had dementia.
Years like those sometimes make me wish I had a time machine. One thread that runs through the films is the temptation or drive to want to change things and alter the past.
Next, after continuing to wipe away tears and moving forward, we’re going to the year 1990 and several years thereafter!
Given that I was quite different in early high school, I was bullied by various Biffs, so I like to see Biff get his comeuppance in the film. But unfortunately, I tried to be a bully for a little while in middle school myself. In short, I learned from Zemekis’ series of movies that being a hot head can alter one’s destiny.
In high school, I think I liked watching “Back to the Future” on VHS and on satellite TV because I related to George McFly. Like him, I did not always share with everybody that I wrote science fiction as a high schooler. I too had the sense that I could never share my stories, that I could not face that kind of rejection. In fact, confirming that I kept it a secret at times, at my 50th birthday party this year, an attending classmate said she never knew I wrote, though those closest to me in high school (best friends and a few others) and in university knew.
Yet I did start sharing my work around my junior year of high school and published a skit in a glossy youth magazine and columns in a church youth newsletter.
Set the time circuits for 1998!
Toward the end of university, I published poems and stories in a university literary magazine. I became more willing to share my work in workshops, dealt with my imposter syndrome and became less 1950s George-like. I uncovered the bushel and showed my light. And I’ve spent plenty of time praying for success and putting in the hard work.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, I also published poems in a non-university journal and an essay and columns in the journal of the International Wizard of Oz Club, “The Baum Bugle.” I even published the first edition of my first Oz novel, “The Talking City of Oz” in 1999 which still gets me attention in Oz fandom.
I continued to work on being different than George was (or even I was) in high school. I published many pieces after university. In fact, as evident from my CV, many Marty McFlys encouraged me just as the character Marty did his father in the past. God, as I worked hard, prayed, and did my best to credit Him, had blessed me.
A few years later, in my mid-to-late twenties, my self-published young adult “Cycling the Moon” satirical science fiction series was partially inspired by “Back to the Future” but with different time travel concepts. I unintentionally or perhaps subconsciously named my very different, geekier main character Marty. But I had a crazy-haired inventing blue-skilled alien obviously inspired by Doc Brown, and his name was Tempus Fugit.
Now it’s time to go… back to the future!
The Southern TV series I am working on (codenamed Project Neon) is partially inspired in a small way by “Back to the Future.”
Some people in it are longing for an ideal past, like the 1950s that Marty McFly travels back to. Others realize that there was good and bad in all time periods. Some progressives in the series may realize they are wiping out too much of the past but need it while still trying to make some changes.
In contrast, those conservatives like Zemekis-fan the late former President Ronald Reagan may realize the past was not always as great as they thought it was. They may realize they will still need some of the past and may still learn to make some changes.
Also, as I think back to the past decade, I can see how the year 2015 in “Back to the Future 2” may have been on an alternate timeline itself. (Spoiler alert and bear with me because the first film relates to this.) Remember, if you have seen the first film before, that certain actions by Marty and George McFly in the 1950s caused a change in George McFly in the future.
I contend that those changes in him and even the science fiction he created and had published affected “alternate 1985’s” people’s vision of the future. So, yes, we did not end up with everything in the 2015 in the second movie in reality (such as the hoverboard). But we aren’t on the Zemekis timeline – the one the characters changed. And the changes in the second film’s 2015 were, again, a direct result of the first film’s changes to 1955.
Though it is a pop culture work that is more science fantasy than science fiction, “Back to the Future” definitely reminds Gen X’ers like me of our pasts and has relatable characters which remind us of ourselves and our loved ones as well as our society. Pack into the DeLorean and head to it on June 8 to bring up old memories from the past and think about how that affects the future.
Barnwell, S.C. author Ron Baxley, Jr. is a social media manager for Paula’s Family Restaurant in Bamberg, South Carolina, a correspondent for Augusta Good News, and a graphic novelist and screenwriter who is currently writing a series set in a small Southern town which he has codenamed “Project Neon.”
