The future of Back to the Future

Yesterday wasn’t just a single day. Yesterday we had two. It has passed October 21, 2015 that each of us, more or less, has experienced. And then the October 21 parallel, the one imagined by Robert Zemeckis and lived by Marty e Doc, Michael J. Fox e Christopher Lloydin the second episode of the saga of Back to the future. Saga that began with the first episode, the only one that was a true mass cult, just 30 years ago these days.

We had already tried it several years ago, inorwelliano 1984 and in kubrickiano 2001. But concentrated in one day this kind of singular celebration (it certainly cannot be called an anniversary or an anniversary) had an even greater effect: our time has reached that of a narrative. When it happens with one of the days where some Nostradamus had predicted earthquakes, asteroids and assorted apocalypses, a shiver of panic passes through. Here, however, it was a celebration, a count of invented and uninvented things was taken into account: the flying car, no; the fingerprint reader, yes; the flying skateboard, almost; plus we have the Internet, which was not foreseen.

Back to the Future Day: everyone at the cinema to celebrate Doc and McFly’s time travel

by Chiara Ugolini

17 September 2025

You find them more unexpected than Back to the Future Day were the amused statements from police forces all over the world, from Wales to Australia to Taiwan. They announced arrests of the protagonists for “disturbing the space-time continuum”; attempts to calculate the speed of the vehicle with the speed camera DeLorean (the legendary automobile in which the characters rode back and forth throughout American history); scientific findings on the fiery streaks left by the car itself waiting for “the canalizing flow to activate”. And if the police want to joke, let alone the rest of us.

Articles and Internet sites of all kinds have recalled the effort he made Robert Zemeckis to make the film, the many rejections received and the providential intervention of that genius of productive foresight that he is Steven Spielberg. How is it possible that a film that didn’t have too many pretensions – certainly less than The Rocky Horror Picture Show o di Star Wars – has aroused such a unanimous and warm cult?

A key can be found in the famous dialogue in which the boy Marty he finds himself projected to October 15, 1955, thirty years before the day he was living in, and goes to visit his inventor friend Doc, where he struggles to convince him that he has arrived from the future on a vehicle invented by Doc thirty years later. The eccentric and solitary Doc asks him who the president is, in the United States of 1985 and the answer is “Ronald Reagan!” he definitely decides that Marty is making fun of him: «Ronald Reagan, the actor? And who is the vice-president, Jerry Lewis? I imagine Marilyn Monroe is the First Lady, and John Wayne is the Secretary of War!

CINEMA

The future has returned, Zemeckis’ cult celebrated around the world

Chiara Ugolini

15 October 2015

Journeys into a not distant past, and then into a future that is close at hand: we don’t find Aliens there, but the premises and consequences of our own lives. An affectionate thing, in short. Even today, when another thirty years have passed, we see that scene again at least with a smile. The scholar Elisa Cuter, in the web magazine Doublezeroin this regard yesterday he spoke of a sort of “pop childhood of our modernity, what we could call the naive and benevolent face of postmodernity». It was the era, in fact, in which the products of the cultural industry began to play with pop memory, of which the public was now as competent as the industry insiders: winks, funny quotes, cameos. Marty teaching rock ‘n’ roll to Chuck Berry he reminded the Italians Benigni and Troisi who, only the year before, had had Leonardo da Vinci invent the train (as well as imparting Yesterday and theMameli’s anthem to Amanda Sandrelli). Except that where we have the Renaissance, white North America has pop, and if we wanted it Umberto Eco to make the Middle Ages pop, the American Middle Ages were pop since Tom Mix’s time: it’s the Far West where, in the last chapter of the trilogy, Marty will act under the resounding nickname of “Clint Eastwood”.

In the post-modern the historical products of the cultural industry are continually brought back to the stage, their noses are twisted, they are roughed up a bit, to excite affection. Here then is the real 1985 in which we went to the cinema to see Back to the futurethe future of our past manifested itself in the guise of a somewhat problematic but enterprising boy and an old inventor who was probably as crazy as he was brilliant. It was the dream of being able to live one’s own identity in an ironic, adventurous and above all continuously changing way. A dream of love, for one’s time: one’s today and the rest of the time we have had and will have. For us who will see the film again as soon as possible, for the umpteenth time, the doubt remains: which of the two October 21st would we have preferred to experience?