“Don’t take this as creepy or nothing, but I’m guessing your head weighs at least ten pounds.“
Movie: Back To The Future
Where would Gen-X be without this film? A teenager gets sent into the past only to endanger the fortuitous meeting of his parents and by extension, erasing him and his siblings from history. What’s a young time-traveler to do, why get his young father and young mother to fall in love again [again?]. George McFly is a hopeless peeping tom that his young mother doesn’t notice. She notices Marty, her son. Eesh.
Harried by the brute Biff Tannen, his mother only falls in love with him more as he wit-fully escapes his beatdowns. How does he deflect this creepy contra-Oedipal fascination onto George, the proper recipient?
Cue the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, the place he knows his parents shared their first kiss and sealed his eventual existence, he plans to take his mother to the dance, become very lewd and then in a pre-arranged hero moment, George was to fling open the door of her father’s car, knockout his yet-to-be-born son, and impress his someday-wife.
But…Biff is there instead, he gets frisky with the future Mrs. McFly and when George opens the door it his bully Biff, about to his rape her, she pleads for his help and he must summon himself to knock the bully out. Which he does.
The memorable scene however is in the dance, as time runs out for poor Marty as he begins to disappear from the family photo he carries—through one machination or another he is now on stage, playing “Earth Angel”. As he fades away, the lead singer frowning at his dissonant notes, when he sees his parents on the dance-floor. “Please, George” he psychically begs his teenage dad, this results in George, victorious from battle, grabbing his date and planting one on her. Suddenly Marty’s hand, which was fading in and out, reconstitutes, his siblings reappear in the picture. It has been accomplished—all except getting him back home, which will require 1.21 gigawatts, a clock tower and a heavily revised DeLorean.
When Marty returns his family is whole, but more than whole, successful and happy and Biff retouches cars for a living. All sweet moments. But it is that moment on the dance floor that had a ten-year-old me bleat in triumph.
It was heavy.
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