Back to the Future and Time Travel

Posted November 9, 2015

Welcome to the future. Today’s date — Oct. 21, 2015 — was important to the story of the 1989 Robert Zemeckis sequel Back to the Future II. It’s the date when Marty McFly, Jennifer Parker, and Emmett “Doc” Brown arrive in the future. Tobias Wilson-Bates, a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, said we can learn a lot about ourselves by how the arts portray time travel.

Notions of physics pretty much make this kind of time travel impossible. The central construct of most time travel fiction is that time can be traveled through the way you would travel through space. It’s an idea that stems from the globalization of industrial economies in the 19th century. Ships needed longitude and railroads needed time tables, so there was an immense pressure to produce standard time laid out across the globe like a grid.

Although the concept of time travel can be found in ancient Hindu mythology, H.G. Wells was the first to theorize time that could be traversed by a machine when his seminal work The Time Machine was published in 1895.

Time machine stories always fall apart at some point. They’re messy logically. Back to the Future II is interesting because the first movie had already done the narrative of what happens to the present when you go to the past. This film actually speculated on a near future, which politicizes the act of time traveling in a way that seeing the end of the planet doesn't.

One way to think about future speculations is to imagine that there are all these failed futures that co-exist with a present reality. And that’s really the way it is for all of us, if you think about it.

Of course the machine used for time travel says a lot about the culture it originates in as well. Wells dreamed up a barebones device with a seat alongside some mysterious levers and crystals because his time machine was really more a theory of dimensional time. Zemeckis’ films used a DeLorean automobile.

A DeLorean is the perfect machine to represent the 1980s. The car becomes the static center of the movies as the characters go from present to past to future. Time and space may be fluid, but let’s face it, the DeLorean will never truly leave the ’80s.

I recently assigned students the task of creating their own version of the Declaration of Independence as a 21st century social media campaign aimed at contemporary social justice.

The fantasy of time travel helps us examine what narrative we are in right now. How do you place yourself in your own memories. Time travel is built on the idea that the time you use to organize personal and cultural histories is really just a theory of time.