Time and Taboo in “Back to the Future” (1985)

In the parking lot of the Twin Pines Mall, Doc Brown plans to use his Delorean time machine to head 25 years into the future and see, as he puts it, “the progress of mankind.” But like the license plate on the Delorean, Doc is out of time. Through his absent-mindedness—and angering some terrorists—Doc has failed to provide a future into which he or his friend Marty McFly can progress. Meanwhile, Marty’s own options and possibilities have been foreclosed by the mistakes of his parents, whose inaction and passivity have failed to secure happy lives for themselves or their children. Out of time and without a viable future, Marty’s only way forward is back. Wes & Erin discuss the 1985 film, “Back to the Future,” and how securing the provisions for one’s own future depends on two modes of confrontation: one in the present and one with the past. 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Meanwhile, Marty's own options and possibilities have been foreclosed by the mistakes of his parents, whose inaction and passivity have failed to secure happy lives for themselves or their children. Out of time. And without a viable future, Marty's only way forward is back. On today's episode, we're discussing the 1985 film Back to the Future and how securing the provisions for one's own future depends on two modes of confrontation, one in the present and one with the past. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I've been thinking a lot about the story of Marty's parents meeting, and it always struck me that it was similar to how my parents met. My mom's car actually broke down in front of my dad's house, and that was how they met. And so I was thinking a lot about just about cars in this movie, the significance of cars in the film and how that might point us in a lot of different directions in terms of where we might start our discussion. It seems to me that cars are a really significant part of American culture and this idea of American freedom in particular. They're really tied into sort of California's culture, and they seem to be. Besides being a method of time travel, they seem to be a really important mechanism in terms of how the plot is operating. So I thought we might start there. 1:58 Wes: Yeah, it's funny. I think the originally they were going to use for the time machine, they were going to use something like a refrigerator that you crawled into or some other stationary object. But they were worried that that would influence kids to crawl into refrigerators and attempt to go backward in time. 2:18 Erin: So isn't a refrigerator how. What's a refrigerator in terms of surviving nuclear fallout? What's that from? 2:25 Wes: Yes, I know what you're talking about. I can't remember the movie, but the 2:29 Erin: Brendan Fraser thing is just in a bomb shelter. But I'm trying to think of what movie someone survives in a fridge. The listeners will tell us, or we'll remember it as soon as we stop Recording. 2:40 Wes: I'm glad that they ended up going with the car. Cause of course, as you're hinting at symbolically it's a far richer and culturally it's far richer and it's more dramatic and there's lots of good reasons. But you know, the automobile, right, it fits in well with someone who's a teenager. And I think, right, he aspires to get that, I don't know what you call it, that truck, right. In the beginning of the movie, he's aspire. Is it a 4×4 or some sort of Toyota truck or outdoorsy type vehicle that he actually does end up getting in the end. And the car problem is really like the first plot point in the movie's external line of action. So, you know, you could have made it, in a way, the basis for a story. What it represents for teenagers, right, is newfound freedom. Then there's the sex aspect, being able to pick up women. What does the phrase pick up even come from? And go to the point or whatever they park, whatever they call it in the movie. And then the car that Marty is gonna go, he wants to go to the cabin by the lake with his girlfriend, right? And that car that he's hoping to do that with is wrecked in the beginning because his father is so spineless that he lets Biff, major antagonist of the movie, borrow the car. The bully, you know, the car is. In this case, the wrecked car as a stand in is closely connected to the spinelessness of the father, which at an emotional level is the big problem of the movie, right. 4:08 Erin: It's also something connected to Lorraine and to Lorraine's father as well, right? Because. Well, one of the first things she says in the film is about her dislike of Marty's girlfriend and the fact that when she was young she didn't call boys and she certainly wouldn't sit in a parked car with a boy. 4:26 Wes: Such a hypocrite. And I know, as parents always are sexually. But anyway, with regard to the sexual mores of the youth. But yeah, sorry, go ahead. 4:35 Erin: Right. No, but you know, the significance of sitting in a parked car will take on a really, really sinister association when Biff tries to, you know, basically to rape her in the parked car. You know, so there's the freedom that the car provides, which has been co opted by Biff. It's sort of stalled by Biff twice, right? So we have the totaled car at the beginning and then we have, you know, Biff assaulting Lorraine in the parked car and sort of like impeding her progress towards George and her, the future that she seems to be destined for. But I'm also wondering about Lorraine's father hitting supposed to be George and then hits Marty and what that might mean and what the passivity of that first meeting suggests. Like, obviously, there had to be some sort of plot mechanism in which George is introduced to Lorraine, in which Lorraine can feel sort of sorry for him, which will occasion their getting married in the first place. And so I think the fact that George is, like, run over by somebody else's car is a perfect image for that. And I'm also wondering if it's, to a certain extent, also an expression of some of the sort of incestuous themes that'll come up in the film. This is just occurring to me now, just the fact that the father is the one that has to initiate the relationship between his daughter and George and that the father seems to have the actual agency in that relationship. And both George and, to a lesser extent, Lorraine are just sort of agents or pawns in this sort of larger passive bringing together that will be flipped on its head or restored or righted, rather, when Marty intervenes and forces George to pursue her more actively. 6:19 Wes: Hmm. I'm just thinking about it. This is something I hadn't thought about. I mean, the incest part I've thought about a lot, and I feel like I'm going to be plagiarizing my own essay that I wrote many, many years ago on this as I talk about it. But, yeah, this part about the father, Lorraine's father, hitting Marty with the car and that being the thing that leads to their union, it's really interesting to me because the father's function is usually to be an impediment to that. Right. To be part of the daughter's selective mating strategy and to help her weed out the losers. But instead he runs over the loser and does the one thing that's gonna make her like a guy like that. Right. 6:59 Erin: Well, I think there's something to that as well. Right. You know, the fact that the father accidentally hits George. I mean, he does hit him with the car. And so there is something aggressive. Right. Like trying to take out the male suitor, which occasions, you know, the bringing together of the couple. Right. The fact that, you know, Lorraine is maybe going against the father's unconscious wishes. 7:21 Wes: It's too disorganized to be effective. Yeah. So it's more aggressive in a way, but also not focused and organized enough to be a real deterrent. Right. So ironically, it does the opposite of the thing that it should Be, you know, if he had killed him, he would have prevented a catastrophe, that marriage. The father's intervening role is importantly connected to incest in psychoanalysis. The father is the one who prevents incest from happening through threat of retaliation, through threat of castration. So what does that mean in more practical, less dramatic terms? It means that as part of the maturational process, there's some sort of detachment, separation and individuation that happens. It takes us away from our connection to the maternal and the mother or whatever primary caretaker is serving that role and forces us in a different direction. And that direction is towards the development of certain psychical capacities like a conscience, like aspirations, right? Our libidinal ties, our attachments, our energies get redirected towards those other objects, right? And not just towards the person who's going to feed us and take care of us. So that's part of maturation and theoretically part of the way that works is to realize that the mother is, is not just a feeder and a caretaker, a baby raising machine, but she has her own interests and desires. And that's partly what the father of the phallus represents. Her attentions are not just towards the child, they are elsewhere. And ultimately, as we get older, we have to realize, you know, our mother is actually just a person and imperfect and does lots of messed up things. And part of it is because she has her own interests and desires out side of us. So the father is part of that and the father. So the presence of the father intercedes and comes in between what might otherwise just be an incestuous relationship in the broad sense of someone never being able to separate from the mother, from wanting to have her entirely for himself or herself, and to have that forever, to not grow up. So when you have a spineless father like George, there are incestuous implications because the father can't play that role, he can't come in between. And again, father in a very abstract sense, like a paternal principle culture is also father teachers. Your mother, you know, can play the role of a paternal principle and does in certain ways. But it's just that interceding paternal principle that would lead you to the process of identification, to the building of a superego, conscience and ego, ideal aspirations to turns your libido in different directions. And if you don't have something that's strong enough, right, to attract you like a lightning rod that says, okay, I'm going to. My goal is no longer just to be taken care of, but now I want to do, I want to become a great Guitarist, like with Marty, right. If there's not something that can draw you in that direction, like a stronger father or something that intercedes strongly, then you get arrested development. You could get a maturational problem. And then the more complicated part of that is. And I'm sorry, I'm going on that length, but the more complicated part of that is aspirations and ambition can get wrapped up in. They seem in some way to be an escape from incest and an escape from the maternal, but they can get wrapped up in it symbolically in a way that interferes with them. So they can become grandiose. In other words, they can become symbolic of being with the mother, of being godlike. Right. You know, so in very grandiose people with grandiose psychological pathologies, people might think they're Jesus or God or this or that. That's ambition in a way, taken to the extreme. And, you know, we all have, I think, a bit of it at times. And what it does is it activates an incest taboo again, in the broad sense. And so it inhibits us. So the more grandiose we are and the more grandiose our ambitions and the more tied that is to the concept of love, the more inhibited we get about actually accomplishing them. And that's the position of Marty in the beginning of the movie, right? He's got a. An inhibition about guitar, about succeeding with that particular ambition. And then he's got some external obstacles to being with his girlfriend, his mother. Right. 11:39 Erin: So anyway, sorry, just so I'm clear, how does that inhibition activate the taboo? Like, how does that grandiosity return you to the mother? 11:47 Wes: Because it is reminiscent of. Of a perfect condition where one is no longer dependent. So the ideal state, right, is to be one's own parents or to be parentless, to be completely self sufficient. And the idea is that it kind of feels that way. Speculative. This is very speculative. But in the beginning there's such a symbiotic relationship with the mother. I mean, in the beginning you're in the womb and then you're in this very close, know, being taken care of type of relationship, which is, if it goes well enough, is very ideal in a sense. So the grandiose ambitions can give you the feeling of. And this is sort of what it means to be in a manic state as well. It can give you the feeling of reuniting or take you back to the feeling of being in that perfect Garden of Eden, basically. So being godlike. So there's the hubris element, transcending the disappointment, you know, the ordinariness of life and the disappointingness of our love objects. And so the, you know, the one's ambition becomes the ultimate love object. And if you can accomplish it, it can be perfect in a way that other people can't be perfect. The very thing that's supposed to take us away, you know, aspirations and a conscience. The conscience. We have a moral code and we want to be good. Where there's energy and gratification out of that, even if it's self denying, there's an element of gratification, it's compensatory. So we get told as children, you can't do this, you can't do that. And that's frustrating. But then the payoff is gratification in the idea that we're being good. But in either case, in the case of conscience or in aspirations, the very thing that's supposed to lead us away from the childhood situation can in a very subversive way, actually symbolically keep us attached to it. So that's the dilemma. 13:42 Erin: So, I mean, that's all super interesting. I was thinking a lot about the role of Lorraine's parents in this. Maybe according to the definition that you're providing here, you know, the fact that Marty only has to go back one generation indicates something positive about Lorraine's parents, even though they don't seem to be immediately, you know, particularly enlightened or even in spite of the intervention of the father, having several different potential meanings. I'm thinking about the fact that like Marty's problems seem to originate just with his parents. And so there's an Edenic quality, I think, to California and to the fact that to go back 30 years in terms of the town that he lives in is really to go back to the beginning, to go back to an origin. This could only kind of happen in America or maybe in California, you know, this time period, you know, the problem seems to spring up with his parents and not with some sort of earlier original sin that's been carried forward through generations prior. So I think in later there might be. In the what in the third one he goes back to like the Wild west or something that's not talking about that. So there's a sense of, yeah, ruin it with the terrible. 15:00 Wes: I think they're terrible. Maybe I don't remember them well. 15:03 Erin: I was really frightened of the second one. I can't even remember why now. I just know that I have a dread around that from childhood. Like the sense that you can go back to the beginning and that can only be 30 years ago. The one line in the film that stuck out to me for being maybe somewhat false. So much of the script is just really, really brilliant and complex. But I think it's when Biff calls George an Irish fly, which is like a funny. It's a funny joke, obviously, but it struck me as hitting slightly the wrong note because they're all so. Like. They're not Irish, you know, they're all like these California. Like, they have no origin. They've sprung up out of nothing, it seems. And Marty can go right back to where the problem is. So rather than having to go back thousands of years to some sort of problem, you know, some sort of generational finding, the origin of the generational trauma that's persisted in, you know, throughout his family for hundreds of years, as we might expect, he can just go back to his parents and fix the problem. 16:00 Wes: This is very interesting on so many different levels. It has me wanting to say a million things at once. But, I mean, part of what you're pointing to is the implausibility, right, of all of this. First of all, the implausibility that Lorraine would really get with a guy like George, I think, be very unlikely, even with the car accident. And I think Crispin Glover, you know, he really overdid it. And they were trying to get him to not overdo it because he's so unattractive. He looks practically, you know, just socially irredeemable. Just really messed up. But I. Although I think it's great. I mean, it's part of what makes the movie great, I think. But. But even. Even though it makes it less plausible. And then the fantasy here is of, you know, what if we could go back and repair our parents in a way that would solve some of our psychological problems, right? On one level, it's just, he's not going to exist. He went back there by accident and he's not going to continue to exist unless he gets his parents together. But you can see the effect in the end is that he makes his father an assertive guy and not a loser. And that's the wish, right? That's really what's motivating. If you saw this as a kind of dreamlike sequence in the second act. And it is. In a way, it reminds me of the wizard of Oz, in a way. Even though it's time traveling and the characters are the same, they're different in a way, they're reminiscent of each other in the way that the characters in the different acts of wizard of Oz are. Except the Makeups in the first act and back to the future. Right. So going back, just one generation to fix your parents, to make them better adjusted. So you could be well adjusted. Better adjusted because. Right. Marty's problem has something to do with music. I mean, there are only hints of this. I mean, he seems pretty. Right. He seems pretty well adjusted, which is another implausible thing. Although you could say. Well, he got that from his mom, essentially. And because she seems fine. Right. 17:49 Erin: Herself more indication that her parents were actually doing an okay job with her. 17:55 Wes: Yeah, by just being careless, schlubby, average parents. You know, you have your hang ups, but it's not. You know, you're not a George McFly. 18:04 Erin: Right. 18:04 Wes: So I was thinking about this too. It's 1985, and all you have to do is go back 30 years to get to 1955, which seems like such a. Like today, you go back 30 years and what has changed? And I've lived it, so it seems like very little has changed. You know, technology has changed, but socially it certainly doesn't feel as radically different. And it may be just the fact that I've lived it, but. 18:34 Erin: Well, now I'm here. So that's the big. That's the big change. 18:38 Wes: So that I thought about that as well. Wow. It's really amazing that in 1985. 1955 just seemed like a different world. It just seemed like an entirely different world. And you could play up these ironies or these distinctions between the cultures. Right. Him on a skateboard being cool and wearing the jacket that looks like a life preserver. And the concept of coolness in 1955 being so different with slicked back hair and this and that. You know, all that stuff. You could make a movie today that went back 30 years and had any of those contrasts, really. 19:13 Erin: That's something that I really noticed during this viewing. That opening sequence, which I really love, of all of the technology inside the garage. But it's all. It's all been just left there to operate on its own by Doc, who's out, you know, doing some whatever, getting his plutonium or whatever. Whatever he's doing that morning when Marty comes in, right. I started to see those images, you know, of the coffee boiling, but there's no. There's no carafe to catch it. The TV turns on and there's all these stories about the Libyan terror group, which comes into play, right. The newspaper showing that Doc's home has been. He's obviously sold it. And it's now been sold for commercial real estate. The dog Food just, you know, dumping it into Einstein's bowl. But you know, the bowl is overflowing cause he hasn't been there to eat it. And the burned toast and the automated toaster launching again and again. It's a microcosm of like the 1985 world outside. Right. So technology leading to a decadence on the one hand with the dog food bowl, like too much of a good thing, sort of the food bowl overflowing, but also to waste and you know, to a certain extent to ruin and decline. So it's like the whole future, the whole 1985 future seems to be out of time. And the way that I was using that phrase as like a cipher to interpret this idea of like the lack of futurity, the lack of a way forward that that message about 1985, at least, you know, insofar as the film sees it. And then the, you know, the renewal that happens with the spaces when you see the Same Town back 30 years earlier where the town square is not a parking lot. And you know, the things that were created to be something, you know, like the diner is still a diner. It's not been turned into some kind of aerobics class, some kind of gym. Right. So I didn't pay a ton of attention to in those ending sequences to whether or not Marty having fixed, fixed to the past has helped to avoid some of that decline that seems to be happening in 1985. But I think that what I'm trying to say is that there's a tremendous amount, I think, of difference that happens in those 30 years. That happens on a lot of different vectors. I think that the movie is pretty. Even though Biff is in both time periods and he's the real force for evil in the film. I think the movie is making an argument that there's a lot of decline that's happened in 30 years as well as a lot of technological progress. I don't know if that's fair or pie eyed or about the past or what. 21:41 Wes: Yeah, no, I didn't think about that because the 80s to me is such a time of innocence and wonder. 21:47 Erin: Sure. 21:47 Wes: Even though I wasn't a happy kid. But the 80s, man, the music and the culturally, I don't know how to explain it. So it's really just a matter of, you know, nostalgia for me probably. So when I look at the 80s, I see something more innocent in a way than 1955. It's interesting. A lot of things that I, you know, that we or I, or we even might find quaint about the 80s you could point to as a softening or making superficial of the culture. Maybe there's a level of superficiality with this movie in particular. Right. They had trouble, enormous trouble, getting it made, in part because the comedies of the time were generally more racy. There had to be a topless scene that was just de rigueur for those movies. And then Disney, on the other hand, wouldn't take it because of the incest. 22:38 Erin: Right. 22:39 Wes: So the movie is racy in a much different, less comfortable way, let's say. It doesn't flatter people's easy conceptions of sexuality at the time, which, as a kid, actually, I did find kind of disturbing because I came from Ireland, which had a much different attitude towards sex. And so when I saw films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I think actually is a brilliant movie, but at the time I was shocked by it. Right. That's one of the movies I pitched to you for this episode. So, yeah. No, you. You have me thinking about something else again that I hadn't really thought about, which is the social, cultural element of the film. It's not like they make a huge amount out of that, except they're trying to milk it for comedy. But I think there's something to that, you know, with that amazing beginning scene, in particular with all of Doc's inventions that I guess they work, but they're not very practical. Right. And you get the sense that no other invention that he's ever tried has really worked, except for the time machine. And he's the typical crazy scientist. He's disheveled and not taking care of his living space and not taking care of himself and somewhat crazy. Which has to make you wonder about why he and Marty are friends. Right. What's the story behind that? How has that helped Marty not become like his father? Maybe he's sought out a different father figure, but a very crazy, disorganized one. I think maybe what you've made me think of now is just some of the frivolousness of those inventions as a commentary on the frivolousness of technological advance in general. Right. It seems very practically oriented and very oriented towards progress, but it might just be, in some ways be masturbatory. Right. So that brings us back to the incest theme, you know, or a fantasy or playful or grandiose. Right. The time machine itself is, like, about as grandiose an invention, science fiction invention as you can get. 24:37 Erin: Right. The improbability of the Doc, Marty friendship is a great John Mulaney joke. People can look that up, but. 24:44 Wes: Oh, really? 24:45 Erin: What does he say? What does he say? He talks about how, like, weird that is that, you know, his best friend is a disgraced scientist who's decades older than him. 24:54 Wes: Have you ever seen Rick and Morty? 24:55 Erin: Well, I've seen parts of it. 24:56 Wes: The animated show. Yeah. But the same guy who did Community. Anyway, I think he's. He has to be ripping off, you know, and riffing. 25:02 Erin: Oh, right. 25:03 Wes: To the future with the. No, it's the grandson, actually. It's a grandson and a. The grandfather and it's much more racy. But, yeah, it's a weird relationship and it makes you want to say, wait, what's up with this? And the film never addresses it, which it shouldn't, but it should just make you think, huh, what's going on? 25:20 Erin: But, yeah, well, I like the fact that Marty is. What does it show about him? And, you know, this is just occurring to me now, but it's showing that he already has a flexibility in relationship to time. He's good at navigating these sort of cross generational spaces. Not as good as he will be once he has to go back in time and parent his father. Right. But it shows that he has some purchase on other generations already by being able to have this friendship and that he has this really great way of relating to people which seems to spring out of nowhere to a certain extent. But one of the things I was trying to get at in my intro is that Doc also. I like what you say about these inventions and about him being kind of a screwed up character in and of itself. He also has a fraught relationship to time, as anyone who is, you know, the absentminded professor character, Right. Has this fraught relationship with time. And I think, you know, to a certain extent, Marty's going back in time and fixing his parents, you know, also has that subplot of saving Doc's life. And I think in the end, when Doc is told what's going to happen, and then Doc makes the provision, right, to wear the bulletproof vest, that also shows a form of. Of growth and maturation for Doc, that he's able to provide for himself. I think Doc's problem repeatedly, is that he does not provide for the future. He has to get Marty to bring the video camera to the mall because he's forgotten it, which I think is pretty significant. And then he rips off these Libyan terrorists, like, that's not gonna. That's not gonna come back to bite him. So he's not providing for the future. And yet he wants to go into the future. Right. The whole time machine plot begins with this idea that he's not going into the past, he's going into the future, which I think is really significant. 27:05 Wes: 25 years, which is ridiculous. Yeah, he had the idea 30 years ago, and then he spent 30 years so that he could jump another 25 years. 27:17 Erin: Could have at least been wanting to go 30 years into the future. Well, I think he says something about wanting to see a time that he would not ordinarily see. Yeah, there's something about the fact that he doesn't expect to live 25 more years. Yeah, it's hard to tell what age the movie wants us to think he is at any given moment, apparently. 27:37 Wes: Yeah, he's old enough that he wouldn't expect to live that long, but still, why not go 100 or a thousand, you know? 27:43 Erin: Well, I think there's something significant, too, about the fact that, you know, it's funny when he sees the footage of himself on Marty's video camera and says. Remarks, you know, that he's such an old man when really there's no. He's also, I think, as you're suggesting, like a sort of replacement or surrogate father and has a. What, for the most part, is a really positive relationship with Marty. There's also this suggestion that he is also out of time. Like he's just born looking like that, apparently, and has no. Yeah, he doesn't really age. But I'm thinking about, just to return just for a second to this California thing and this idea that one's clock starts, you know, 30 years before and that you can go back in time. Someone, when they heard that I was recording on Back to the Future, said, oh, you should do a paired episode with Oedipus Rex. I said, I think we've already recorded on that. But I couldn't remember. We did. But anyway, I was reading Emerson. I was reading something else, but someone said that to me that day and later that evening, a line from another Emerson's. All of Emerson's essays sort of allied. I think that's an Emersonian phenomenon. So I was reading either Self Reliance or something else, and all of a sudden I had this memory of a line which I looked up, and it's from Emerson's History. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. In the section about how the whole of history is just in one man. You know, how man contains everything that has happened throughout history. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. And I was like, oh, this is so. This is so Great to bring up in this episode. Right. Because it has the Oedipus Rex connection and it has this idea that, like, you know, Marty has to go back and solve his own history, right? He has to solve his own parents. He has to solve the riddle that he's been given himself. 29:32 Wes: So what is it in Emerson? What does it mean exactly? 29:35 Erin: It's this idea that you have to, like, no one can solve your problems for you. You have to solve them yourself. Right. And that you have the ability to do that, that you have the ability to reckon with your own path. You know, it's typical optimistic Emerson. You know, it strikes me that this film is very much in an Emersonian vein. No other country could produce a film like Back to the Future. It has to be this American culture that invents itself, that thinks that you can just go back to when California was farmland and that'll. Which was only five seconds ago in the grand history of time, and solve the problem yourself with a time machine one generation back. Because that's where the origin is. Right. I mean, I wonder what European audiences made of this. When it came out, they probably laughed at it. Right. The idea that your problems only started, as I said, five seconds ago, in the grand scheme of things is a really American idea. Not to mention the fact that then you can also just solve those problems and everything will be great and you'll get what, in the end, the ultimate symbol of American success, which is a nice car, you know, that'll take you all over the place. So anyway, I was thinking about this film as being like an expression of a lot of those Emersonian ideals and this film as being like a kind of joining that really American philosophical tradition, which I love Emerson, don't get me wrong, he's. I love the Transcendentalists. 30:56 Wes: Yeah. This is really fascinating. I think you're speaking to the American idea of a pioneering spirit and self determination. And self determination is, of course, I think it's a theme in Oedipus, certainly, and here and even Chinatown. I was thinking of all three of these together. So self determination in the sense of. Right. Thinking back to our Oedipus episode, he solves the problem of the Sphinx just by using his reasoning power. He can do it a priori without collecting any empirical data. Right. It's just a. It's a language problem and the solution of the problem is just internal to the puzzle. He turns out not to be good at collecting empirical data, that is being an investigator. Right. When he actually. The city is sick and he has to figure that out. And likewise, you know, Jake has an investigation problem as well. So Sophocles makes a lot of the fact that reason and rationality, that there is an incestuous element to that because it is kicking off tradition and the need for connection to the outside world and to, like I said, empirical data to anything that might condition it right, to make it to anything that might not make it self determined. This is another thing Oedipus plays on a lot himself is the fact that he's kind of a self made man and what is he doing when he flees his, what he originally thought was his homeland to get away from it so he can avoid incest. He's trying to cast off all of these determinative influences, parental, cultural, whatever, and to transcend fate, to change fate, which is of course what Marty is doing to some extent when he goes back in time and tries to change the character of his father. So presumably he can change his own character and life as well. These are attempts at transcending fate, attempts at being self determining, and they go wrong. And the result in Sophocles, right, is barrenness. Hyperrationality is barren. It can't reproduce, it can't produce. You need something richer, something that involves the world more closely and feelings and facts about the world. And so the other thing that happens in Oedipus Rex is Sophocles makes a lot of the idea that to sleep with one's mother is to sow in the field from once one came. Right. In a way, it's like giving birth to oneself. And that's the problem. It's an attempt to evade dependency and, you know, which ultimately means evading any dependent relationship or any dependent relationship with a love object. And it's unproductive, right? It leads to blight in the fields. And we can think of this psychologically as well. The effect of it is to deprive us of a full featured psyche, let's say. You know, the other thing I wanted to mention is that Cadmus, the, you know, part of the reason why Oedipus is Thebes is cursed and then ultimately Oedipus is cursed, is because Cadmus, who's sort of like a Promethean figure because he brings the Alphabet to the Greeks from Phoenicians, right? So this association with rationality is it's also generally an association with history and culture, right? The way that we have of time travel, the way we normally time travel, is to have written history or to have the reasoning capacity to think about the future and deliberate about what we're going to do. The advent of that can seem like a crime. It's typically cast in terms of hubris and supplanting the gods. The gods get angry and then they knock you down. But, but the subtext of that is, sorry, oops is becoming, you know, becoming the go, becoming one's own parents and no longer paying proper homage to tradition, to the previous generation, to, you know, speaking of blight or whatever's happening in the 80s, you know, being unmoored from previous generations in this very terrifying and potentially destructive way. As good as technology is, as good as an Alphabet is as good as fire is all that stuff. Right. You know, the other way of time travel that we have, if we want to change ourselves, we do. I mean, history is like that too. We're trying to learn from history, but therapy, right? And memory in general. Memory is what is our time travel. 35:22 Erin: Right. I was thinking about the sort of double strand that goes on in the sort of literalization of this therapeutic experience or of the memory experience that Marty enacts. Right? Because I was thinking about this in terms of the word confrontation and the fact that Marty is being confronted with history and with the facts of his family's problems in front of him. And he's also trying to, he's trying to bring about several confrontations between his father and the things that his father must kind of face, right? So he's both like doing his own, taking his own therapeutic journey and taking his father sort of kicking and screaming through a kind of therapeutic journey that happens both in the past, but also in that present moment. Right. So there's like a collapsing that happens, which seems to me to be like very similar to what happens in the therapeutic experience or like in any experience, Right. Because we don't have the ability to time travel, right? But essentially like what we're doing is reckoning in the present with past memories. So I think like, there's something about the therapeutic experience that's being literalized here through the time travel trope. I don't know if that makes sense. 36:41 Wes: You know, the question is, how do we change ourselves? How do we change our character given our. The hang ups that come from. Right. It's kind of a cliche psychoanalytically or psychotherapeutically to say, okay, our parents messed us up, but the deeper, maybe the deeper way to put it is these are formative forces, right? We are creatures, we have been created, we have been plucked out of nothingness and just inserted into the temporal Right into the world and the temporal frame or stream and which is in and of itself a traumatic experience. Even if you didn't have messed up parents, that would be a source of, and is a source of hang ups and problems and pathology and all that. So, but, so it would be, what a wonderful fantasy, you know, if only we could have better parents but be better formed ourselves. Right. So you're going to go back the artisans, the ones who've made you, you're going to go back and give them instructions on how to do a better job maybe, or you're just going to make them better in some way at their craft by making them better people because the craft just is so closely connected to their own well, adjustedness, their own character and all that. And we do have that pattern in general. We try to repair our objects, so to speak, our love objects. We, we do all sorts of things. I even did it with my mom. I was constantly trying to like get her to take better care of herself, for instance. Right. Even though it's too late. It's too late to make her a better person in a way that makes me a better person and. 38:13 Erin: Right. 38:14 Wes: And then, you know, but, but we do it with love objects as well. We try to, we try to repair ourselves, to make ourselves worthy of the love object. And then we try to repair them by various forms of influencing them. So the therapeutic process, the way it's supposed to work, if you don't have a time travel machine, you can't actually go through all that. You know, the therapist can be something like a surrogate parent. And then you repeat some of what didn't happen or what happened in not the best way in your early childhood situation so that you can take in different formative influences. Even though it seems like it's too late, you're already formed. You try to put yourself in a position where the clay kind of softens up again and the relationship with the therapist can change you at a deep level. Right. Change your character. Right. So if it were George McFly, could he go to a therapist and become more assertive after living a life with that particular character? Probably not, but given enough time. Yeah. 39:18 Erin: I like what you're saying about the film as an expression of this fantasy. And I think it's also that you are. Everyone is Marty here. Everyone is the. What is the thing that kids are saying now that they have main character syndrome or a main character complex or whatever. Right. That like you are the. 39:35 Wes: I'm too old to have even heard that. 39:38 Erin: You know, you're the one. You're the exception. You're the well adjusted exception that's going to fix the rest of the family, which Marty literally is. Right. Once everyone catches up with you, they're going to give you the freedom that you want to sleep with your girlfriend. But what you're also making me think of is something that maybe, I don't know, it's occurring to me now, but maybe it's more obvious than I think. What do we make of George's interest in the future? Right. Seeing as his sense of futurity is so thwarted and that he can't really look forward to a positive future. What do we make of the fact that he is like Doc, Right. Doc wants to go into the future and so does George with his science fiction. With his science fiction. Right. And you would think that based on George's character that he would want to repeat, to retreat rather into a past. You know, he might be a history nerd or something. Right. That he would want to go into a past that actually like didn't contain him. 40:33 Wes: Right. 40:33 Erin: That's like the ultimate form of non confrontation is to not exist at all. Instead, he's sort of imagining a future in which what? It's not really a future in which he's. 40:43 Wes: You're asking a very deep question here, which is why nerds get into science fiction as opposed to going into the past. 40:50 Erin: Well, it must be a fantasy about being powerful. But the way in which that's enacted in the film is. Again, I'm sorry, I'm just like, I haven't thought through any of this. It's just happening to me right now or just occurring to me right now. But you know, the way it's enacted in the film is that those powerful forces in the form of Marty's like, you know, Darth Vader intervention, right. Is that they act on him. Marty finds a way, or he finds like a loophole to get his father to be more assertive by forcing him into an even deeper passivity. Right. By going and saying like, you have to do this because I'm this guy, you know, the sci fi guy that. 41:30 Wes: Yeah, he has to become a puppet master. 41:32 Erin: Sure. That's better than. That's better than how I was phrasing it. I don't know, I think, you know, 41:38 Wes: he has to make his father like 41:40 Erin: existentially powerless in that moment where he's subject to the whims of, you know, of another species. Right, 41:49 Wes: right. Because it is a retreat into fantasy and it's a retreat into a kind of power that lies in the future. And I guess it has something to do with the hope that when technology dominates the world, it's less about whether the bully has bigger biceps anymore. And that, you know, when this plays out, the high school nerd is the one making the big money at Google. 42:14 Erin: Right. 42:15 Wes: But then the other thing you're saying about Marty himself and the passivity of his father is also very interesting. How crazy is his plan? It's crazy that there's a film so focused on incest that's a very popular comedy, I think, where incest plays such a strong thematic role. 42:34 Erin: Well, it's unwitting, so it's. I mean, it's innocent. 42:37 Wes: I mean, the mother is literally trying to have sex with the son for a large chunk of the movie. And then he sets up this crazy plan to get them back together. What's the plan? He's gonna be messing around with his mother in the car, and then his father can intervene to separate them. Which, by the way, is a perfect representation of the psychoanalytic theory. Right. The Oedipal moment. The father intervenes and saves so that the father gets saved on the surface level, but really it's about saving the son from incest. But still, it's a crazy plan. Why would you do that? Why would you put yourself in a position? And George himself asked Marty, are you going to touch her on her. Oh, no, no. It'll just be. But he doesn't ever give a good explanation. How is he going to make that work? I find that so fascinating, especially because 43:32 Erin: he's been so disturbed by. I mean, he's had experience being at the receiving end of his mother's. 43:38 Wes: Yes. It's like. 43:40 Erin: And he's so, you know, obviously disgusted by it, that to put himself in that position all over again seems like exactly the opposite of what he would want to be doing at that point in the film. 43:51 Wes: It's brilliant because it could, because it. I mean, it moves the plot in the way that it needs to go, but it also reflects some of the unconscious dynamics. And then, of course, it gives us a good setup for George's inadvertent confrontation with Biff, where. So he's put in a situation where he can man up in the end, I guess, get physical, even though it's completely implausible, but still it works within the fantasy of the film. I think. 44:16 Erin: Before we move to that, and I think we should. I just want to say something about. It's a sidestep, but something about this idea of sci fi and the Honeymooners episode that features twice in the film. I'm a really big fan of Honeymooners. I know all the. There aren't that many episodes to know. Right. The classic 39. 44:35 Wes: I think I've seen them all. Yeah. And then they're great. I love Jackie Gleason. 44:40 Erin: He's the best. He's a great one. I was thinking about that episode and I actually went back and rewatched it just to totally refresh my memory. But it's the, you know, the man from space is Jackie Gleason's or rather Ralph Kramden's costume idea of this costume ball that they're having. And he wants to. It's a typical scheme where there's a costume competition and he wants to rent a costume for a certain amount of money and then win the competition, which comes with a cash prize, so that he'll make a profit. Basically. He figures if he puts. I can't remember what the amounts are, but if he puts, you know, $5 into a costume rental and wins the $20 prize, he'll make a profit of 15 or something. And he doesn't even have the money to be able to rent the costume. So he's looking to Ed Norton to try and, you know, get him to lend him the money to rent the costume. Ed won't lend it to him because Ed decides that he's going to rent a costume himself. So Ralph is instructed by Alice, his wife, to come up with his own costume. So he decides he's going to be the man from space. And what he does is he takes, you know, he has this famously, you know, dilapidated apartment, and he takes all this crap, this domestic crap from around the apartment. You know, their appliances, but their appliances, quote unquote, are all outdated. Like in 1955, it's a subject of great fun and hilarity that Ralph and Alice still have just an icebox. They don't actually have a refrigerator. But one of the things he does is he takes the icebox door and uses that as the sort of like, front panel of this really ridiculous looking spacesuit. In addition to all the things that the episode kind of contains within it. Like, it's the fact that George is watching an episode of the Honeymooners while he's sort of ignoring his wife. And while his wife is kind of. At first dreamily and then kind of ruefully recounting the inciting incident of their marriage. It's significant because even though Ralph and Alice are poor and there's always, you know, there's Always some kind of scrape that they get into or something like that. Right. They have a really happy marriage, a much happier marriage than George and Lorraine do. And also we have this image of this guy who wants to look like a man from space, a man from the future, but who's covered in the trappings of domesticity and kind of the symbols of Ralph's own domestic failures as a provider because Ed is able to afford a refrigerator that Ralph can't. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that Ralph can't hold onto money because of his own stupidity. So he's sort of like held back, right, by all of his failures, his past experiences. 47:24 Wes: And compared to Ed, that's saying something. But, yeah, anyway. 47:27 Erin: Right. Well, Ed. Well, there's a suggestion that Ed takes out a lot of things on credit, but Ed is a lot slyer about, like, he's dumber than Ralph, right. But he's better at, like, existing in the world and making things work for him than Ralph is. And to a certain extent, it's Ralph's kind of his sincerity that trips him up. But anyway, in the end, you know, the famous end of the episode is Ed Rather, who works in the sewer, has this emergency in the sewer, and then he ends up showing. And he had been shown earlier in the episode wearing this, like, almost like this underwater suit that he had to go down into the sewer with. Right. So Ralph goes to the costume thing with his own makeshift costume, which is really ridiculous. They think he's a pinball machine, and they think that he is about to win the contest. Right. And then Ed bursts in in his sewer outfit and wins the contest for being the man from space, which is a typical twist that happens. So anyway, I don't know how relevant that is, but I think the fact that it's not just the. For me, anyway, it's very telling, the combination of that particular episode with the film. And it's not just about the fact that there's this sci Fi thread in that particular episode that seems to make it chime with the purposes of the. Of the movie. 48:39 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right. There's something grandiose about what he's doing. Right. This is the way I'm thinking about it in relation to what I've said already about grandiosity. But when grandiosity kind of contaminates ambition and makes it stupid so you end up. There's a narcissism to it. You know, you're the. You're the cat who looks in the mirror and sees a lion, and you're putting together what's supposed to be an amazing costume out of outdated appliances. 49:05 Erin: Right. 49:06 Wes: And there's an element of trying too hard and aiming too high, which always backfires and reveals one's abject humanity. Outdated appliances. And then the. The way getting things done and ambition actually have to work, they kind of have to be a bit inadvertent, which is the way you avoid the incestuous implications. Right. There has to be kind of a implied father keeping enough of a buffer so that the implication of success is not incest or killing or the aggression or the killing of the father. This is. I know this probably sounds really implausible to listeners, but this is the theory. And I think, you know, someone who could explain it better would. Could make it more plausible. So if you create the sewer costume, Right. That's what it is. So it aims lower in a way, but it ends up being more successful. Because aiming too high is precisely the psychological dynamic of incest. The way it plays out in work. You're aiming at the mother, and you can't aim at the mother. 50:12 Erin: Well. And it's entirely accidental. Ed just shows up. You might take it as inspiration. I mean, it's totally unconscious on Ed's part, but you might take it symbolically as being the inspired choice to show up in sewer costume. I really like that. And I love. I mean, Ralph is just the perfect encapsulation of grandiosity in a TV character, which makes him sweet also. 50:35 Wes: Yes, he's grand, despite his constant threats of domestic violence. 50:41 Erin: Don't get me started. He's bang zoom. Yeah. That's just about the only time that I find a threat like that to be humorous. And it's only because he is so. He has such lack of power that it is funny. 50:57 Wes: Yeah, exactly. I think that's a good point for us to make our transition to the postscript. 51:04 Erin: Okay. 51:04 Wes: And I think we probably have quite a few other things to talk about, and even then, we're not gonna get to them. There's so much in this film, but. And I can't say exactly what we're gonna focus on in the postscript, but it'll be a pleasant surprise, I promise. Thank you, thank you. Thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. 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