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Note: This text was originally part
of a 1990 essay, “Some Kind of Wonderful: An Introduction to the Contemporary
Teen Movie”. For the surrounding discussion of the teen genre as a whole, a
74-page PDF of heretofore unpublished material written in 1989-1990 is now
available exclusively to supporters of my Patreon campaign for this website: www.patreon.com/adrianmartin
A Spectacular Teen Movie
Back to the Future (the first instalment of a trilogy) is a perfect example of what can be thought
of as (in all senses) the spectacular teen movie. It was both made and received on
its release as the quintessential Pop event: loud, bright, superficial, slight on theme but very elaborately
constructed, full of high energy pyrotechnics designed to make large audiences
“feel good” together. (Feel good became a film industry catchphrase during the 1980s, applied to entertainment blockbusters like the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Crocodile Dundee franchises, among many
others.)
The idea of energy is indeed central
– rather than incidental – to the film. Note how many kinds of energy are
indexed even within the first few scenes: electrical energy, the energy of
amplified music (the guitar “power chord” that is so loud it causes an almighty
explosion), mechanical energy (the professor’s gadgets), speed energy (the pyrotechnical
skateboarding feats of Marty McFly [Michael J. Fox], exaggerated even further
in the subsequent episodes of the series). Even the title of the film, in its graphic form, is traversed by a wave
of energy – a whoosh of sound and a glinting of light.
Eventually, sexual energy is added to
the list – most crucially when the handy surge of the teenage libido of Marty’s
father (George played by Crispin Glover) brings the disappearing body of Marty
(Michael J. Fox) and his fading music back to full life on the prom stage. The
title of Huey Lewis’ hit theme song is, naturally, not accidental: “The Power
of Love”.
The style and construction of the
piece are equally energetic. Beyond the obvious pace of the editing and the
frenetic physical movements and gestures of
the actors (particularly Fox and Christopher Lloyd as Doc), the
narrative itself is geared for maximum energy and intensity. This is achieved
primarily through the crucial use of a narrative deadline toward which all events inexorably move, and upon which
the outcome of everything hangs.
More subtle,
but threaded throughout the entire narrative, is a series of plot set-ups:
little details or pieces of information
which at first seem incidental or casual, but later become crucial in the
unfolding of events or the resolving of tricky situations (as with Marty’s
skateboarding skill). In this manner, set-ups lead to pay-offs, and the film behaves like a mechanism that stores and
then exhausts its reserve of narrative energy, totally spending or expending itself in an overwhelming climax – pardon the
sexual metaphors, but that’s at least partly what Feel Good spectacles are about.
Popular culture references abound in
all the Back to the Future films. The
first instalment gets many laughs out of the fact that the pop music of a contemporary generation makes little sense
to the ears to the previous one: Marty’s heavy rock guitar solo at the prom leaves the teen audience baffled (“Your
kids’ll love it”, he assures them); while a blast of 1980s Van Halen heavy metal through a Walkman’s headset
is pure 1950s sci-fi terror come true to another teenager of the time.
In Back to the Future Part II (1989), Fox confronts, in the future, an
‘80s nostalgia cafe, animated
with icons of Max Headroom, Michael Jackson, Ronald Reagan, et al. Thus, across the entire series, a
mini-history of pop culture on display – from Chuck Berry to Jaws (1975) to MTV – is undoubtedly part
of its surface, spectacular appeal to an expanded youth market. As Hervé Le
Roux acutely observed in Cahiers du
cinéma, the films of Zemeckis/Spielberg “bring together, at the height of adolescence, filmmakers in their 40s and a public of
kids ... creating a Father-son relationship, in which the filmmaker-Father forges,
in an obsessive fashion, an alliance with the Son-spectator, on the basis of
his own ex-teenage passions (music, TV, cinema).”
Le Roux’s
comment is too gender-biased, but one can explore a similar pop culture bonding
across the generations from mother to daughter in Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). Whichever
way it happens, pop culture, as it is ecstatically remembered and celebrated in
teen movies, tends to become a kind of total, self-contained, insular history –
one in which wars, recessions and Third World struggles matter a lot less than
the birth of rock’n’roll, Beatlemania and Michael Jackson’s moonwalk!
MORE Zemeckis: Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Contact, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Death Becomes Her
© Adrian Martin
March 1990
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