Three decades after its release, the movie is being remediated in numerous ways in the digital realm, signaling its continued audience support, and has prompted a number of research projects, especially in cultural studies, musicology, and film studies. Critics and scholars generally agree that it is also among the most conservative and pro-Reagan movies at the time (Fhlainn 6). This assumption holds true for a number of 1980s Hollywood movies, but is perhaps best exemplified by Back to the Future which enacts a traditional narrative of American exceptionalism rooted in a revised and sanitized vision of the 1950s.ģ Back to the Future has entered the cultural vocabulary of the United States like few other films of the era. He argues that “he retrospective invocation of the Fifties teen struggling to define her identity or trying to make his way into the world often functioned as a synecdoche for a United States poised on the verge of maturity, at a point in its national history when everything (for better and for worse) began to change” (Dwyer 7). Michael Dwyer has recently analyzed how pop nostalgia for the 1950s played itself out at the intersections between visual arts and popular music during the 1970s and 80s. Cultural productions such as novels, films, records, paintings, photographs or TV series functioned as central locations and locutions for shaping and conveying nostalgic desires for the post-WWII decade during the Reagan years. Sorcha Fhlainn, for instance, has illustrated how the so-called “Me-decade” was marked by “a desire to return to a mythical past, to reinvigorate narratives which reassert and reify the American Dream,” and “to forget the realities of the 1980s: unemployment, class inequality, crime, increased drug use, AIDS, and rising levels of poverty” (5). Justice).Ģ As research in American history and cultural studies has shown, nostalgia for the 1950s was a widespread cultural phenomenon during the 1980s. In fact, that President Reagan referenced the movie in his address is but one indication of how Back to the Future lends itself for propagating a return to a “simpler” and “better” America of the 1950s that was, at the same time, geared towards a technological future, at least since the Sputnik shock (cf. As neo-conservatives embraced seemingly American core values such as self-reliance, hard work, and the nuclear family-which supposedly had gotten lost during the 1960s and 70s-the 1950s became the ideal focal point for projecting both the past and the future onto the present U.S. Ironically, Reagan’s optimistic vision of America’s future is in part based on its past. Reagan cites Doc Brown’s famous closing line from the film, “where we’re going, we don’t need roads” ( BTTF 01:51:37), to suggest that the future of the United States looks hopeful, despite some aspects that may need improvement. 1 In his 1986 State of the Union address, the previous actor and then-President Ronald Reagan ends with a quote from the top-grossing block buster movie Back to the Future, which had been released a year earlier.
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