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So yesterday was ‘Back To The Future Day’.
For the uninitiated, 21 October 2015 marks the exact day Marty McFly and Doc Brown using their iconic electric DeLorean had powered their way into the future through the fourth dimension. From 1985.
If that still doesn’t make sense to you, it’s time you sat down and watched one of the most iconic (and comic) sci-fi trilogies from Hollywood. Although I have reasons to believe that it would lead to excessive cringing and “that’s so cheesy!” utterances from the present generation of moviegoers. But I digress.
What I really waited for was how that inescapable universe comprising Twitter and Facebook — and the digital media at large — would prepare itself to pay tributes to this cult film phenomenon. And it was quite predictable, really. Everyone was armed with their own compilations of what the film got right and wrong about the year 2015. To those who guzzle trivia — pop culture nuggets especially — this was nothing less than solid gold.
The Guardian had a live blog which basically crowdsourced how the world celebrated ‘Back To The Future Day’ and ran it in *TWO* parts. Yes, you read that right.
The most venerable (and relentlessly tweeting) astrophysicist of our times, Neil deGrasse Tyson in his own inimitable style >dissected the rights and wrongs of the film’s prediction for the future. He does this for almost every big science fiction movie that’s released these days.
So by now, if you’ve tracked this trend dutifully on the internet (or rather faithfully sat through the trilogy), you’d know how the series (Part 2 specifically) fared as a soothsayer for 2015: ubiquitous flying cars (nope), flat TV screens that can be used for teleconferencing (yup), self-drying and autofitting jackets (no, thankfully), hoverboards (sort of got it), self-tying shoes (we’ll hold you to that one for now), wearable devices (bingo), abolition of lawyers (LOL), devices that talk back to us (Siri agrees) and so on and so forth … you get the idea.
Why yes, the filmmakers did sort of predict that we would be engaged more with our devices in 2015 than with our fellow human beings. And no, people did not end up wearing a double tie or develop a taste for outlandish fashion with colour combos that would throw us off-balance.
But that’s not exactly the point.
What the big picture really is, is about how such a goofy and slapstick and excruciatingly American plot managed to create a global phenomena like none other from its genre.
This manifestation of a buzz around a sci-fi film that chooses to set itself in the future — wholly or partly — of how much it gets right about stuff yet to be invented is nothing new. Enough has been written or said about whether Stanley Kubrick pre-empted the design of the modern day digital tablet way back in 1968 (2001: A Space Odyssey). Why, this ‘tech cameo’ has even been used in defense by Samsung against Apple when the latter filed a patent infringement case against its South Korean rival in 2011 (the iPad isn’t original itself because it was modelled on what appeared in the film publicly, Samsung said).
But wait. Let’s prod a bit deeper, just for the trivia enthusiasts. 2001 is based on the novel of the same name by Arthur C. Clarke, who for some reason in his books (written in the 1960s, mind you) chose the creator of his diabolical supercomputer that outsmarts humans to be an Indian; with an exotic name to boot — Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai! I find this personally to be of greater significance, a greater prophecy of the type of people who were to take over Silicon Valley's nerve centres. And yet, 2001 with all its intellectual baggage scores nowhere near the entertainment quotient that Back To The Future managed to gather. Nor do the serious ones such as Blade Runner , I, Robot , Minority Report or even (should I dare say it?), The Terminator . And therein lies our answer.
Back To The Future was conceived while its scriptwriters (Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale) were having a freewheeling chat about whether Gale would have been friends with his father had he somehow managed to travel into the past and attend school with him. And the duo let their imagination run riot on blank paper — a practice advocated by Quentin Tarantino. By their own admission, the filmmakers didn’t spend too much energy into matching scientific expectations of the future.
It's almost as if the creators are silently chuckling away as we belt out these prediction listicles, patting our shoulder to say, "Slow down! Even we didn't expect it would cause this much flutter!".
But there you go, wackiness prevailed over depth and meaning. And no, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just when you think about it, there’s a lot of praise and recognition that’s due in the aforementioned list of ‘serious’ science fiction candidates — mostly built on the work of giants (Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury). They ask deeper questions of our humanity and plunge into greater depths of existentialism. There’s even been a case where a movie itself >has inspired a scientific paper. But that's not nearly as much fun as hydrated pizza is it? Perhaps that’s why they don’t attract a mass following. And perhaps they’ll never reach the cult status as Back To The Future did.
Back To The Future is one of those once-in-a-while sci-fi flicks which does not depict a dystopian future (to the extent the ‘serious’ ones do). It is built upon the foundations of a self-sustaining American culture (save for the Japanese corporate overlords, the lack of demographic diversity for the year 2015 is quite stunning). But who cares? Pepsi >unveiled its ‘Perfect’ soda — the very same ‘future’ beverage McFly orders at his cafe — with the not so perfect tribute price of $20.15 a bottle. Universal Studios paid tongue-in-cheek obeisance with a >Jaws 19 trailer . And yes, Nike did finally create that self-lacing shoe (hurray!).
If you can imagine the future, you can create it.⠀⠀⠀ ⠀Find out about pair no. 1 at >https://t.co/ptkErznzjl>pic.twitter.com/Gi6UMNsNML
— Nike (@Nike) >October 21, 2015But no, you're probably not going to get that hoverboard anytime soon, sorry.
Do carry on with your celebrations of ‘Back To The Future Day’, by all means.
