Oedipus Multiplex, or, The Subject as a Time Travel Film: Two Readings of Back to the Future

You needn't dig for philosophical nuggets in either of the flick's time frames; simply sit back and let these zanies zap you happy with their frantic antics.

—Guy Flatley, review of Back to the Future in Cosmopolitan (September, 1985)

An essay that offers not just one but two readings of Back to the Future might first require an apology for exerting severe critical pressure on a text that doesn't seem to deserve it.¹ The scant attention this film has received from theorists—and I have no objection, in principle, to this scantiness—has consisted largely of an extended gloss upon what Vivian Sobchack rightly calls its "regressive title,"² a title which conveniently recaps the irony at the heart of the film's rudimentary ideology: futurism in the guise of bland nostalgia, or nostalgia expressed as bland futurism. Robert Zemeckis, the film's director and co-writer, says he "wanted to write a time-travel story where you didn't have to know anything about history to enjoy it."³ As many critics have pointed out, such simplification or condescension motivates a great deal of American popular culture of the 1980s, and is perhaps a reason why the most mainstream works of that period often fail to garner extensive attention from academic theorists, who are perhaps looking for more of a dialectical hook than such productions offer. Thus, although Back to the Future is regularly mentioned by theorists as an epitome of 1980s American culture, and of the retrograde outlook of the Reagan era,⁴ such references are rarely supplemented by more than brief exegetical attention to the film itself, and, as often as not, are accompanied by an understandable lament that such "banal and clumsily made" works have so fully absorbed the attention of popular audiences.⁵

Nevertheless, despite the brevity of most critical employments of Back to the Future, the film's conventional role as historical exemplar reveals a number of peculiarities or complications, some of which are themselves worthy of further scrutiny. Indeed, like many targets of popular culture criticism, the film tends to be interpreted as a sign of something quite a bit more complex than itself: a symptom or encrypted signifier of both the ingenuousness and the anxiety of a late modern epoch endeavoring simultaneously to recuperate and to forget its troubled recent past. Sobchack goes as far as to describe Back to the Future as a kind of incipient therapeutic dialogue, productively moving "toward a form of ideological hysteria—the 'political unconscious' of American bourgeois patriarchy teetering on the brink of babbling itself to consciousness and, perhaps, a cure."⁶ But the problem of analyzing Back to the Future, at such a moment, becomes the dilemma of squaring its all-too-obvious surface with its all-too-latent interior. In other words, how does the theorist reconcile the seemingly extreme ideological straightforwardness of the text with the complexity of the representational processes through which texts like this one are seen to embody their historical moments? One may conjecture that the discrepancy between straightforwardness and complexity here is less a manifestation of the film's own ambivalence, than of the gap between popular viewing and academic critical interpretation themselves, that is to say, between what a mainstream audience sees at the film's putative surface, and what the academic theorist discovers within its symptomatic depth. If, after thoughtful observations such as Sobchack's, there remain any psychological or ideological contents still to be revealed in Back to the Future, I would like to reveal them not simply in light of the film's own dubious philosophical commitments, but rather alongside the very mode of straightforwardness with which the film presents those same contents, a banality that in itself is a much greater source of difficulty for cultural theory than any specific psycho-social or socio-political representation.⁷

So, instead of an apology, I will begin, finally, with a suspicion: that a film such as Back to the Future remains opaque to academic cultural theory...