Back to the Future

Terry Rouche once told me that being a writer means that you have permission to steal anything from anyone at any time. Someone says something witty -- you are perfectly within your rights to put that into a script you're working on. Or perhaps you are privy to the particularly nasty falling apart of a couple who was once deeply in love. That story is now yours. You may write about it. It may be as factual or fictitious as you like. Doesn't matter. It's yours now. Whatever. Anything anytime, anywhere. Because all the bests artists know that being a great artist simply means that you are the best at stealing. You can steal so well that people thought you had an original idea at some point.

So when I watch movies, sometimes I like to imagine how I might remake them. How I might steal some particular element from this movie and turn it into something unrecognizable. Or, how I might take the entire plot and make one little change -- enabling all new possibilities for themes and messages and totally altering the tone of the original.

This is what was happening when I was watching Back to the Future the other day. Now, Back to the Future, is a great movie -- one that I've seen probably dozens of times. And who could blame me? It's a classic. Honestly, I think of it as being sort of a live-action Pixar movie. Everything is there. Picture perfect casting. Mastery of nearly every single shot. Tension in every single scene. A lovable main character, who discovers a fairly obvious moral that everyone in the audience already believes -- and several goofy, larger than life supporting characters. No seriously, it's a Pixar movie. And like Pixar movies, it's absolutely flawlessly made. It tells the story it sets about to tell perfectly -- in a way that could never be topped.

Which is why it's such a problem that I suddenly want to remake it.

I'm gonna back up and tell you a bit about my family life now. My mother was a junior (I believe) in college when she met my dad in a bar. I don't know exactly how they started dating, but I imagine he bought her a drink or something and asked her out...the usual. They were married fairly quickly I guess. Actually, I'm gonna be honest and say I'm not really sure when my parents met or how long they dated. I know that she was married her junior year of college. And pregnant within a year of being married. My mom was my dad's second wife. I am told that he married his first wife because she got pregnant, but later miscarried. I don't know how long they were married, just that his family loved her, and were slightly less keen on my mother.

My brother is a year and a half younger than me, and my parents were fully divorced not long after he was born. I'm under the impression they were already separated when my mother was giving birth to him. Not long after that, my mom moved back home to Sumter. I know of one half brother, Tyler, who was born less than a month after Trevor (my full brother) and I am told that there was another illegitimate child born during the approximately three year marriage between my mother and father. That is...in three years, my father managed to cheat so much (with multiple women) that he fathered two illegitimate children.

My mother and father hate each other. My mother has become a hardened, bitter, independent woman. She never remarried, and I feel like she would probably consider that to be weak. She spits venom every time my dad is mentioned and used to get in a foul mood for days if my brother and I would return from visiting him having actually had fun. My father equally hates my mother, though he doesn't make it as obvious. He is currently on his fifth divorce. I have watched him over the years, and I am starting to believe that he truly doesn't understand what's going on. He believes he is picking awful women and can't believe his dumb luck. Every once in a while, I will catch glimpses of my father that make me feel pity for him in his situation with women. But most of the time I just think he's a womanizer.

My father's life since then has spiraled out of control. And the marriage to my father caused my mother to harden herself against the outside world -- never to allow herself to be hurt like that again.

And as I was watching Back to the Future a few weeks ago -- though I've watched it dozens of times -- this was the very first time I thought "What would I do in that situation."

Marty's family is far from ideal (at the beginning of the movie) but they are all together. They more or less love each other. There was no adultery or divorce or abuse or jail time or child molestation. And that makes for a better little story -- a more Pixar, family friendly story. But I don't think that's a representation of America anymore. And what about those of us who grew up around terrible things, or saw our parents terribly damaged over the events of a failed (or continuing) marriage. What would we do in Marty's shoes.

It's easy enough to leave it all alone -- just let what is going to happen happen. But Marty accidentally throws things out of whack. By pushing his father out of the way of an oncoming car, he causes his mother to fall for him instead of his father. So he has to FIX their relationship in order to make sure he is born. Later in the movie, he has not yet successfully fixed their relationship, and he actually begins disappearing.

So, to those of you with awful home lives -- those of you who's parents hurt each other in ways that seem unfixable. What would you do in Marty's shoes. Do you play matchmaker to two people who you know with absolute certainty will never work out? Or do you die? Not even die -- cease to exist. Do you do it? Because what Marty has to go through to get his parents together is a lot of hard work. He does it without hesitation because he must if he is to survive. I think some of us might hesitate. I would. Ultimately, I don't know what I would choose to do. But I like to think I would quietly disappear knowing that there was some slight possibility that I'd saved my parents that pain and that perhaps they might have a chance to be happier this way.

But, honestly, I don't know. And the likelihood of my hopping into a Delorian and time traveling back to the day my parents met is probably pretty slim. But this is what was on my mind today, so I thought I'd share.