It sticks out as a mistake and an opportunity missed. But his evolution comes at the expense of pain suffered by the principal female character, whose only positive changes in the new 1985 are reflected exclusively in her weight loss and lack of drunkenness.
(The film doesn’t get it all right, indulging in the brown enemy of the day: The Libyan terrorists who seek revenge on Doc Brown, spouting Arabic-sounding gibberish.)īut in Back To The Future, the black busboy and future mayor Goldie Wilson is just an avatar for progress George, in finally standing up for himself and for Lorraine, is the only character allowed to actually progress. The band that plays at the Enchantment of the Sea dance, Marvin Berry and the Starlighters, coolly intimidates the white toughs who call them “spook” and “reefer addicts.” That means more to me 30 years later, when too many Hollywood stories still treat black folks and their lives like racial wallpaper or indulge in stereotype. While the film surely underplays the slights these black men would have likely suffered, those characters aren’t depicted as the archetypal Magical Negroes, either. In a story that primarily centers on fostering one’s own self-confidence, it meant something to me as a boy to see the only folks who looked like me not backing down from anyone or anything. As a PG-rated ’80s sci-fi comedy with a nearly all-white cast the racial realities of Jim Crow aren’t addressed too explicitly, but it is notable that director Robert Zemeckis made sure that the most self-assured people in the film are the few black people who show up in Hill Valley. Even though Back to the Future is set in a small northern California town, Marty travels 30 years back in time to 1955, the same year that Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi. Marty arrived in a pivotal year, as it turned out. Thirty years on, I still can’t shake the image of a drunken Val Kilmer running over Mare Winningham in “One Too Many.” These stories may have hit with a sledgehammer, but they worked. And even if they embodied the ’80s in their obviousness and tacky dialogue, they were damned effective. The apotheosis of this preachy genre was ABC’s Afterschool Special, which began in the previous decade and hit their stride in the Reagan era. Today, I can’t feel good as a feminist about how we saw George’s vindication come about.įew movies geared towards children and young adults in the 1980s came without a heavy-handed message. While I appreciate the generically positive representation of the film’s black characters, I cannot say the same for how it depicted women and the violence visited upon them.
Back to the Future’s 30th anniversary gives us a chance to see why it’s worth reflecting on how deeply popular culture can root itself inside of us, particularly with regard to our attitudes about race and sex. We can continue to indulge in the delights of our childhood, but they’re also worth taking seriously.
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