“It’s a very weird movie.”
— John Mulaney
I.
Listen: Marty McFly has come unstuck in time.
This is to say, he has lost track of it. The clocks are running twenty-five minutes slow—Doc Brown’s doing, we’ll learn—and so he is late for school. Again. He is a slacker, Vice Principal Strickland informs him, cut from the same defective cloth as his father. No McFly has ever amounted to anything in the recorded history of Hill Valley. This is the ground state of our hero: temporally disoriented, congenitally behind, a boy out of sync.
The film that contains him is, by contrast, immediately established as a marvel of precision. Its opening shot, a nearly three-minute unbroken pan across Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd)’s laboratory, starts with a haphazard tangle of ticking timepieces, including, in a nice bit of foreshadowing, a wall clock with a little Harold Lloyd (no relation) dangling from the minute hand. The camera muses over these, forges its way onward, entering expository territory: newspaper clippings about the Brown family mansion’s destruction; framed photographs of Edison, Franklin, and Einstein; a radio spitting out an ad for a model Toyota; a coffee maker on the fritz; a television playing a news report about some missing plutonium and a Libyan terrorist group; blackened toast popping repeatedly out of a toaster; and a Rube Goldberg mechanism that upturns a tin of Chunky Beef Dinner into an overflowing dog bowl. Only then, as the empty Kal Kan is deposited into a wastebasket full of tin cans just like it, does the door crack open and sneakers and a skateboard enter the frame.
Before a word of dialogue is spoken, Robert Zemeckis has fed us into the great maw of his well-oiled machine. He has built for us the platonic ideal of a blockbuster, a marvel of interlocking gears and impeccable timing. It has everything films like Star Wars, E.T., and Jurassic Park have: action; comedy; suspense; and a big, brassy, instantly recognizable main theme, effects that either still hold up or remain charming enough to not matter. It was the biggest movie of 1985, out-earning even Stallone at his most veinous and testosteronal. To use the industry term, Back to the Future absolutely rips.
Success, as they say, has many fathers, and this particular baby has a crowded waiting room. Ronald Reagan is in there. So is Oedipus Rex. (And trust, we’ll get to both.) There’s the DeLorean, a real-life lemon repurposed into one of cinema’s most iconic automobiles.
There’s star Michael J. Fox, who brings a fizzing, wired, faintly unreal charisma to the role of Marty McFly. His champagne-and-insomnia energy, which carries the movie, was wrung from an exhausted body; famously, he all but shot Back to the Future in a fugue state. By day, he was still Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties—the breakout star of the sitcom, a Young Republican who endlessly needled his ex-hippie parents—and as soon as filming wrapped a Teamster would grab him, throw him in the back of a car, and shuttle him to the Universal backlot, where he’d play Marty until dawn. Fox would catch two or three hours of sleep, then do the whole thing over again. In Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (2023), he readily admitted that he doesn’t remember much of that time; he lost track of which set he was standing on, and eventually of who he was.
Present, also, is the setting, though not so much its spatiality—who gives a hoot about Hill Valley, anyway?—but its temporality, with the bulk of the picture unfolding in a matinee-bright 1955 held out like a dose of cod-liver oil on a spoon to an ailing country, queasy about its present and terrified of its future. (We are talking about 1985 here, right? Right?)
That quality of nostalgia is not strained, rather, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. But it’s also not quite enough on its own. Nostalgia is cheap, and plenty of films peddling it have died on the vine. (See also: nearly every cash-grab reboot ever, plus Pixels.) No, what sets Back to the Future apart is not that it is nostalgic, but that it grasps nostalgia as a production, a site of labor. It doesn’t remember the past; it re-manufactures it, to spec, on a studio lot. Marty is less a stranger in a strange land than a contractor sent back to bring the past up to code. The past, in Hill Valley, is not a place you drift back to. It is a job site, and you are on the clock—sometimes, as in Doc Brown’s case, literally.
Marty is a time-traveling pilgrim, then, but not quite Vonnegut’s kind. Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck and suffers; time happens to him, and he drifts through it with the passivity of a man watching his own life from a train window. Marty comes unstuck and is handed a to-do list. And the work he’s sent to do—the fabrication of a better yesterday, for a new tomorrow—turns out to demand, like all fabrication, the consumption of raw material. Somebody’s timeline gets fed to the furnace. The past is not a place you return to but a thing you build, at cost, and generally on someone else’s back.
And so it goes.
II.
Let us start at the end.
You are Marty McFly, average American teenager, and you have woken up to a coup. Overnight, your family has been swapped out for better-looking, better-adjusted, more solvent editions of themselves: a novelist father, a trim and adoring mother, a brother in a suit, a sister with suitors. There is a gleaming black Toyota in the garage—yours, apparently—for ferrying a girlfriend who appears unaltered (though how would you know?) up to the lake.
What do you do?
(a) Demand to know what became of your actual parents.
(b) Alert someone. Anyone.
(c) Say “Everything’s great!” and kiss your girl.
If you are Marty, you pucker up.
The instant the swap registers, to Marty and to us, composer Alan Silvestri gives us what might informally be called the time-twinkle: a sparkling little figure of two triads a half-step apart, cued whenever the machinations of time travel result in a change. It is, fittingly, an heirloom—scholar Sorcha Ní Fhlainn traces it back through Russell Garcia’s music for the 1960 George Pal flick The Time Machine—which is to say the sound of temporal magic in this movie is itself a passed-down antique, an object of nostalgia doing the work of nostalgia.
Like all magic, it depends on misdirection, on your not asking where the previous tenants went. Because they are gone. The original McFlys—the drunk mother, the doormat father, the loser siblings Marty was so ashamed of—have been stripped for parts and written out of existence so the wished-for icons can instead occupy the frame. Here is nostalgia’s mortification rendered as plot: the old reality abraded to nothing, an entire family annihilated so the gleaming symbol can stand in its place.
Pauline Kael, God rest her, was disturbed. The film’s notion of idyllic eighties domesticity, from the gleaming white furniture to the shiny happy people populating the frame, should be a satirical joke, she wrote, but isn’t. Crispin Glover, who played George McFly, was similarly revolted by the film’s ending, fighting bitterly with Zemeckis over what he read as a cash-register morality, in which money equals happiness. Their discomfit doesn’t quite jibe with Silvestri’s time-twinkle, which promises the viewer a little sprinkle of temporal wonderment, and Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s script, which presents this as an unambiguously happy ending for all involved.
You know who remained untroubled by these implications, though? President Reagan, who screened the thing at the White House and quoted it, five months later, in his 1986 State of the Union—where we’re going, we don’t need roads—to burnish a vision of a deregulated, unshackled American tomorrow. The screening pleased him for reasons past the obvious; he gets a little shout-out from Zemeckis and Gale more than once in the movie. The president’s first appearance is when Marty passes the Hill Valley cinema in 1955, where a marquee advertises Cattle Queen of Montana, a real 1954 Western starring some B-lister named Ronald Reagan. A top aide, Mark Weinberg, watching it with him at the White House, noted Mr. and Mrs. Reagan’s glee at the film. Weinberg also thought he spotted his president inside the movie—in Doc Brown, he thought, the visionary crank ranging godlike over history and ushering the youth of today towards a better tomorrow.
But there’s also a bit of Reagan in Marty himself, the teen who insists that history’s gonna change and then, by God, changes it by sheer force of will. Reagan, after all, built his whole political self atop a lovingly renovated boyhood, one in which a tableau of an 11-year-old boy—Ronnie, then known as Dutch to his family—coming home to find his insensible, alcoholic father sprawled in the snow on the porch was not a tragedy but a lesson to be learned about responsibility and social propriety. “I wanted to let myself in the house and go to bed and pretend he wasn’t there,” Reagan wrote in an early autobiography. Whether out of decency or shame, or more than likely both, Dutch instead dragged the great bulk of his father inside, out of view of the neighbors. It’s a scene you can easily see showing up early on in a biopic, the boy actor’s cheeks rouged as imitation snow falls around his ears. The Reagans of the ‘50s and ‘80s, older and stronger and deeply ambivalent about drinking, both sold America a vision built on a soundstage too. Whether hawking frontier virtue in a Western nobody remembers or spinning a fable of a decade that never actually existed to a generation that lived through it but didn’t care to remember the dark parts, his America was one scrubbed of everything inconvenient and lit for the warm fuzzies. The only difference between the aw-shucksing B-lister on the backlot and the morning-in-America president pounding the campaign trail was the presence of someone else to yell “Cut!” His entire career was a nostalgia machine.
III.
Roll it back.
You are average American teenager Marty McFly, and you are fleeing a van of Libyan gunmen—the screenplay’s ugliest and most bizarre shortcut—who have just murdered your best friend, you believe, when you accidentally punch the DeLorean to 88 and, in a wash of fire and one clean thunderclap, land in 1955.
And what a 1955 it is. The film announces it with the Four Aces crooning “Mister Sandman,” a song literally about a dream, laid over a slow reveal of a bustling and pristine town square: cornflower skies, a stately courthouse, sidewalks scrubbed to the bone, a record-shop window pushing Nat King Cole. Everything is brighter here, more saturated, more solid than the grubby 1985 you’ve just fled—the past rendered not as it was but as it glows in the rearview, what Fredric Jameson called “the privileged lost object of American desire.” The sign on the courthouse lawn reads HILL VALLEY: “A Nice Place to Live.” Those civic scare-quotes are doing Herculean work, a dam holding back the weight of unspoken history. Here in Hill Valley 1955, there is no McCarthy, no bomb, no Betty Friedan, no Emmett Till, whose killing had convulsed the rest of the country that same year. It is an oxymoronic non-place, a hill and a valley at once, and it is, once again and not incidentally, a Universal backlot, every leaf and lamppost under total artistic control. The film is not depicting the manufacture of a usable past. It is the manufacture of a usable past, writ large and in real time.
But a soundstage is only as good as its extras, and here is where the set starts to buckle.
Marty trips into 1955 expecting a rerun of The Honeymooners, because that is the only 1955 he has ever been issued. “When I was your age, I never chased a boy, or called a boy, or sat in a parked car with a boy,” Lorraine McFly (Lea Thompson) informs her son over the dinner table in 1985, hand wrapped firmly around her glass of vodka. Her power as a mythmaker is instantly refuted by the reality of 1950s Hill Valley, a town full of people who have not been briefed on the legend. (“What’s a rerun?” Marty’s 12-year-old uncle Milton literally asks him at one point.) His father is a fidgeting teenage peeping Tom, up a tree with a pair of binoculars, spying on the girl he will one day fail to make happy. His mother, whom Marty has previously assumed was born a nun, drinks, smokes, lies to her parents, and, at almost 18 years old, has seemingly “parked” with many a boy before. Most nightmarish of all is the realization that she now wants to do it with him. With Thompson playing Lorraine like “a kitty cat in heat,” as she once put it, Marty’s mother is the literal Madonna-Whore come to life, and he is ensnared in a rerun—of Oedipus Rex.
So the pristine ‘50s crack, and what leaks out is not history—not Till, not the bomb—but sex. The film will admit the return of the repressed on the condition that it stays, for lack of a better term, all in the family. And Marty’s assignment, once the crisis is legible, is the oldest one there is: extinguish the mother’s desire, redirect it, and hand her over to the father—but not before rebuilding the father into a man worth handing her off to. He is not merely preventing incest. He is staging a courtship, blocking it, casting it, and, in the parking lot outside the dance, arranging for George to throw the punch that will constitute his masculinity forever after. Marty as director is a laborer, endeavoring unconsciously to produce Freud’s family romance, the child wishing to swap his disappointing parents for better ones. Here, the unsatisfactory parents are not replaced by fantasy. They are replaced by work—Marty’s, performed in the past, on their bodies—and the improved models he brings home are the finished product. The nostalgia machine, it turns out, runs on the same fuel as the unconscious.
IV.
Can we talk, just for a moment, about the car? I’ve been dying to talk about the car.
By 1985, the DeLorean was a punchline. Its parent company was bankrupt; its founder, John DeLorean, had been hauled up on cocaine-trafficking charges—eventually to be acquitted, on entrapment—in a lurid flameout of vanity, fraud, and Zurich wire transfers. The DMC-12 itself was a gorgeous stainless-steel shell bolted over standard, underpowered parts: priced like a Porsche, cursed with gull-wing doors that sealed its occupants inside and a battery that reportedly died on Johnny Carson the week he drove his home. It was a beautiful object that did not work, conjured by a man who was himself a species of confidence trick—a carmaker who had reconstructed his own face and his own past, borrowing ever more boldly against an ever more notional future, on the operating principle that American business is whatever you can get away with. Reagan would turn pirouettes.
Back to the Future takes this monument to speculative failure and gives it a hero’s entrance—the fog, the gull-wings lifting, the whole shot framed and lit like it’s a spacecraft touching down. Here is your hero, it proclaims, and you willingly buckle yourself in. And why not? The film’s success reached back and laundered the DeLorean, converting a disgraced grifter’s clunker into the most beloved machine in American movies, a collector’s item to be treasured, and rehabilitating John DeLorean himself into a misunderstood visionary. (He apparently mailed Zemeckis and Gale a thank-you note.)
All of this is to say the film performs, on its own literal flagship, the precise operation it performs on the Eisenhower ‘50s—and the precise operation Reagan was performing on the country: go back, fix the record, repackage the failure as a golden age.
V.
The work, of course, has its victims, and the film cannot help but keep showing them to you.
Tune into the ‘Enchantment Under the Sea’ dance, for instance. Marvin Berry’s all-Black band plays for an all-white gym—one of the movie’s few flickers of actual 1950s social reality—and when Marvin cuts his hand it is Marty, white and from the future, who takes the stage, counts it off, and teaches the room “Johnny B. Goode,” an oldie, he explains, where he comes from. The gag, a literal whitewashing of history, pulls back the curtain on the actual mechanisms of labor underwriting the movie—by working overtime in the spotlight, Marty writes the actual author out of his own song. The one erased from the timeline is, over and over, the one who did the original work. (And here we might pause for a brief moment to consider Eric Stoltz, if only we had the time.)
Marty knows this better than anyone: The second he knocked George out of the way of Lorraine’s father’s car and spun the timeline off its axis, he set his entire family on the path to destruction. He does his resolute best to wrench it back into place, attempting to choreograph a fake incestuous overture that turns, horrifyingly, into a real sexual assault as Biff Tannen (Tom Wilson) crashes in on him and his mother. George was meant to be the contrived hero of the first plot, reading from Marty’s script; instead, he becomes the reified hero of the second, writing his own lines on the fly. The timeline is George’s to run now, and Marty is once again his son rather than his rival, his director, or his competition. Once George seizes Lorraine back from another boy who rudely cuts in during their dance, the new timeline is set. Marty, whose hand was at that moment becoming partially, horrifyingly see-through, is at once restored to existence.
To get home, Marty needs 1.21 gigawatts, a quantity of power available in 1955 from exactly one source: a bolt of lightning, timed to the hundredth of a second and run down a wire from the courthouse clock. The screenplay’s fourth draft describes the moment: THE MOST SPECTACULAR BOLT OF LIGHTNING IN THE HISTORY OF CINEMA STRIKES THE LIGHTNING ROD! This is what manufacturing the past costs: a preposterous, near-unattainable surge of energy, the bill for which the movie swears will never come. And the symbol the film gives us for it is Doc Brown dangling off the clock face, barely pausing to allow the viewer time to remember that Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! is a comedy about a man nearly killed by labor. The clock stops at 10:04. Hill Valley freezes there, its past pinned in place, for thirty years.
Marty makes it home, and here comes the film’s one flash of genuine cynicism: the town square is still a dump. The porn theater, the litter, the man asleep on the bench—all still there. Only the McFlys have been renovated; society is untouched. Two different mayors, three decades apart, promise the identical slate—more jobs, more education, lower taxes—and nothing whatsoever moves. The labor of nostalgia, violent though it may be, remains situated in the private sphere. You can remodel your own family into the upper middle class. The republic stays broke.
Reagan understood this better than anyone, which surfaced at his own White House screening. When Marty tells Doc that Reagan is president in his own time (his second ghostly appearance in the movie), the good doctor, incredulous that an actor could be president, sneers out his kicker: And I suppose Jane Wyman is the first lady? The air in the screening room, Weinberg recalled, chilled at the mention of Reagan’s first wife, a woman he had so thoroughly written out of his own timeline that her name went all but unspoken. “It was as if he had willed himself to forget about that period of his life, and was startled and resentful when asked to return to it,” Weinberg recalled. Reagan had performed on his own life the operation the movie performs on Marty’s: annihilate the inconvenient past, keep the improved present, and never, ever look at what you fed to the furnace. Nostalgia, frictionless and guilt-free.
And yet—herein lies my confession—the ending exhilarates, landing just as hard on an umpteenth-time viewing in 2026 as it did when I was a kid. After Marty has taken in his new life, Doc screeches up in a DeLorean that now runs on garbage and flies, and the pair blast off to a future they’ll spend two more films securing, free at last to choose themselves into being. It should curdle into the satire Kael was waiting for and yet it never does. The sleepless boy, the fraudulent car, the stolen song, the frozen clock, the annihilated family—Back to the Future documents the full cost of its own fantasy even as it winningly, grinningly sells you a ticket to ride anyway.
The last irony is one no one on the production could have engineered: The image of Marty skateboarding through 1985, past the aerobics studios and the Walkmen and the Texaco signs and the sweating cans of Pepsi, Huey Lewis and the News blaring for the first of what will be four times throughout the film. The scene plays exactly the way 1955 played to viewers who saw Back to the Future upon its release: a lost, luminous, impossibly clean pocket of the past, an object of desire refracted through the iron laws of fashion and culture. The movie about manufacturing nostalgia has become the nostalgia. It went back in time; it never came home. It got stuck there, in the amber of its own perfect afternoon, doing the work, forever.