Power over Ethernet (PoE)

Back to the Future (1985) is not strictly a teen-genius film, but it embraces their central premise: that the future belongs to those who rock. Its central relationship, between teenaged rocker Marty McFly and middle-aged scien- tist Emmett “Doc” Brown, mirrors the one between Hank and Dr. Gavin in The Horror of Party Beach and the one that Dr. Otto Lindsay aspires to cre- ate with his son Richard in Beach Girls and the Monster. Marty is not just Doc’s assistant, but his trusted junior partner, and Doc is not just an adult friend but a mentor to Marty. The bond between them rests on shared per- sonality traits: a disdain for convention, a talent for on-the-fly improvisation, and an unshakable calm in the face of the unexpected and the fantastic. Those traits, the film suggests, are equally essential to the rocker and the scientist. Far from giving up rock to embrace science (as Hank or Richard were expected to do), Marty is free to be both an aspiring rocker and an apprentice rebel scientist.

Doc — played by Christopher Lloyd in conscious homage to the eccen- tric scientists of 1930s and 1940s horror movies and 1960s comedies — lives in a rambling house on the edge of town and creates wonders in his basement and garage. He is a master of improvisation, building a time machine out of a limited-edition DeLorean sports car and scamming Libyan terrorists out of plutonium in order to run it. His younger self, whom Marty meets in 1955, improvises the means to send Marty back to his own time with a large reel of electrical cable, a public clock, and Marty’s knowledge of an impending lightning strike. His house, with a gigantic speaker-amplifier system in the basement and an absurdly complex machine in the kitchen for automating his morning routine, suggests that he improvises for the sheer joy it brings him. Creating the technological future from bits and pieces of the techno- logical present is, for Doc, not a means to professional advancement (since he has no visible professional ties) or economic security (since he is independ- ently wealthy) but a form of play.

Marty — played by Michael J. Fox as a teenaged everyman who dreams of a cooler car, a less-embarrassing family, and time alone with his girlfriend — also creates wonders, but they are musical rather than technological. Marty lives for rock and roll in the same way that Doc lives for science. It is the background to everything Marty does, from Van Halen blasting out of his

clock radio in the morning to Huey Lewis and the News singing about “The Power of Love” as he skateboards to school. His garage band, The Pinheads, is dismissed by clueless school administrators as “just too loud” to play at the school dance, but their audition hints at solid skills overlaid with enthusiasm and a willingness to push the musical envelope. Marty’s before-school encounter with the giant speaker-amp in Doc’s basement is also telling. Pick- ing up a tiny Erlewein Chiquita guitar, he plugs in and powers up with the crisp assurance of a pro. When the first chord he plays generates a wall of sound that blows him across the room, he lays in the wreckage of a bookshelf slightly stunned, but mostly intrigued, by its power and possibilities. Marty’s blend of serious action and playful intent is clearest when he takes the stage at his parent’s 1955 high school dance, filling in for the band’s injured gui- tarist. Picking up the leader’s Gibson as if it was his own, Marty tells the band that “it’s a blues riff in B, watch me for the changes and try to keep up” before launching into a full-throttle cover of “Johnny B. Goode” ... a year before Chuck Berry would write it.

The parallel between Doc, the scientist, and Marty, the rocker, goes beyond their personalities, however. Just as Doc creates the future in his work- shop and laboratory, Marty — like Doc, a natural innovator willing to let go of what is to bring to what will be— creates the future on the stage of his par- ents’ high school gym. Taking the place of the dance band’s injured guitarist and ensuring that the dance goes on, Marty ensures that his parents will fall in love with each other: a “natural” process that Marty accidentally disrupted when he first arrived in 1955. The act of playing a song — and not just any song, but one of the seminal songs in the rock and roll tradition (Marsh, 2–3)— thus erases the accidentally created future in which Marty’s parents never connect and Marty is never born and replaces it with one in which they do and he is. In Back to the Future, Marty’s rock and roll is — just as much as Doc’s nuclear-powered DeLorean — the tool with which the future is (re)cre- ated. It is, perhaps, not coincidental that “Johnny B. Goode” is a song about a boy who shapes his own future through his guitar playing.

Back to the Future suggests, however, that in playing the song Marty has also participated in two larger acts of creation. The first, implied, is revealed in Marty’s return from 1955 to a 1985 different than the one he left. In the original 1985, his parents are downtrodden failures; in the revised 1985 (the one Marty creates by rocking the school dance and strengthening his once- ineffectual father), they are vibrant and successful ( Jeffords 65–78). The audi- ence is left to conclude that the spirit of rock and roll — the drive and daring that Marty has shown throughout the film — touched them in 1955 and shaped the next three decades of their lives. The second, explicit, is revealed during the dance scene. The pivotal moment comes at a 1955 high school dance 7. “It’s Hip to Be Square” (Miller and Van Riper) 129

where an all-black dance band (electric guitar, upright bass, piano, drums, and tenor sax) has been playing jazz (“Night Train”) and sedate mid-fifties pop (“Earth Angel”). The injured bandleader (whose name has been subtly established as “Marvin Berry”) excitedly dials his “cousin Chuck” from a back- stage phone and holds up the receiver to give him a taste of what may be “the new sound you’ve been looking for.” Marty thus acts as midwife at the birth of rock and roll, whose future he previews by successively mimicking Chuck Berry, Pete Townshend, Angus Young, and Eddie Van Halen in the long gui- tar solo that ends the song.