At the end of Back to the Future, our hero crashes his time-travelling car into a building. It used to be a cinema but now it’s a church. That seems right. In a way, certain kinds of movie, including Back to the Future, are morphing into religions, offering us opportunities to be together and happy – though I’m not sure they offer us hope, and few are spiritually nourishing. God is dead but Marty McFly lives.
That’s what I took away from Secret Cinema’s Back to the Future: The Live Cinema Experience (BTTF: TLCE), which I saw a few days before it ended its run at the weekend. It was a fun night, which I’d expected, but also an interesting one, seeming to have at least as much in common with a religious revival meeting as an old-fashioned repertory screening.
Secret Cinema are known for creating film events at which the world of the movie erupts into the exhibition venue thanks to themed set dressing, live performers, food and drink and other ambient nudges. BTTF: TLCE was their biggest production to date, the first in which the film’s identity was known in advance, and the source of a big old PR headache when they were unable to open on time at the end of July. The fact that this became a big UK news story owes something to the fact that it was summer silly season, but there was something real there all the same: some people really cared about this event, and were really annoyed at being denied access, especially those who had traveled from around the country or even internationally.
Perhaps you’d get a similar response if pilgrims turned up at Lourdes to be told the grotto was inaccessible due to a technical hitch. Many cult films thrive on churchlike elements of congregational gathering – there’s the liturgy of iconic lines, the hymnal aspect of familiar soundtrack songs, the display of items of clothing with special significance, the sacramental succour of imbibing food and drink featured on screen.
Still, you usually bring the world of the movie with you. BTTF: TLCE was truly immersive, placing these ingredients within a grand-scale replica of Hill Valley, the Californian town in which Marty McFly’s adventure with Doc Brown takes place. On entering the site, you could be excused for displaying some of the goggle-eyed wonder Marty shows when he first stumbles into town having traveled back from 1985 to 1955: here were cops and schoolkids, homes and diners and record stores, splendid vintage motors cruising around, a town square facing the familiar clocktower so crucial to the movie’s plot.
After a couple of hours exploring this world, you were primed to experience the film at a heightened level of involvement. But just before the screening, you started noticing glimpses of what looked like Marty and Doc themselves – actors who, it turned out, would perform live versions of key scenes before our eyes even as they played out on screen. Obviously we knew they weren’t Michael J Fox, Christopher Lloyd et al – but it didn’t matter, just as it didn’t matter that audiences for a Passion Play knew they weren’t actually watching Jesus and Pilate. This was the enactment of a familiar and reassuring ritual, allowing us to bear witness to the Hill Valley equivalents of the Stations of the Cross, from a skateboarding Marty hitching a ride with a pick-up truck to George walloping Biff in the parking lot. Look! An actual DeLorean! Look! Doc zip-wiring over our heads at the story’s climax! The frisson of embodiment is a curious thing.
That the film suited this context so ideally prompted a question: seriously, is Marty McFly Jesus Christ? There are pointers within the film to suggest an affinity, albeit a profanely inverted one. He’s certainly fond of using Jesus’s name as an exclamation (at least six times in the film), and Doc refers to the birth of Christ as their adventure gets underway. Marty’s specific identification with JC starts with Drew Struzan’s poster, which locates him as a kind of metaphysical intermediary between celestial beams of light above and infernal flames below. And the storyline is a kind of blasphemous revision of the Christ mythos, in which Marty’s ultimate mission is self-preservation rather than self-sacrifice, to be achieved by teaching his mother how to be virginal (or at least more demure) and his father how to be powerful.
There’s a crassness to the film that suited the surroundings too. Marty is kind of a complacent brat who seems to learn nothing but have his presumptions affirmed; and BTTF: TLCE didn’t try to challenge or problematise its material any more than the original movie did its period setting (non-white faces, for example, were little seen on or off screen). And Marty’s materialism – if the film’s happy ending can be refined to a single moment, it’s when he discovers he now owns a shiny new 4×4 – was aptly reflected in the endless stream of spending opportunities hardwired into the live event, from burgers to body-warmers, souvenir posters to imported cans of Tab.
All the same, there’s something invigorating about the spirit of agency with which this fandom proceeds – a kind of talking back to and taking ownership of Hollywood output that’s not to be sniffed at. Even the faintly obnoxious guy sitting near us who insisted on yelling out not-very-funny commentary (“I hope your car starts!” “You’re not going to be in the second film!”) was really just declaring his investment in the story and hoping for a connection with fellow devotees.
I’ve written before about post-80s folk-cinema culture: the idea that the adventure films that inaugurated both the blockbuster and the home-viewing era have become our modern equivalents of the stories of King Arthur or Robin Hood, settings and characters towards which everyone feels a sense of entitlement, copyright be damned. Gatherings like BTTF: TLCE are one manifestation of this. Another is sweding: homemade, DIY remakes of mainstream movies such as Star Wars Uncut or Raiders: The Adaptation, not to mention the hundreds of fan-made trailers online and of course Be Kind Rewind, which christened the movement and paid tribute to Ghostbusters.
So, Marty McFly lives, and so do Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker and the Goonies, kept buoyant by nostalgia for projects that were steeped in nostalgia to begin with. Elsewhere, Kate Bush lives. Monty Python lives (mostly). Old, it seems, is the new new. It’s important to acknowledge and cherish the achievements of the past, and Lord knows we need more spaces where people can feel connected and celebratory. But do projects like BTTF: TLCE represent the glorious resurrection of salvific redemption or the lurching of a zombie culture content to gnaw on its own remains instead of seeking new ways forward?
Will we ever get back to the future?
