Back to the Future and the Time Travelling Teen
An essay focused on Back to the Future protagonist, Marty McFly
Something about Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) has heavily contributed to my eternal love of Back to the Future. McFly was capable of doing everything a teenager wants to do when they grow up: play music, skateboard really well, stand up to bullies, hang out with an insanely great inventor, drive a Delorean sports car, and go to high school with your parents via a time machine. However, it wasn’t all fun and calendar hopping for Marty McFly. After coming from a family of “slackers” as his high school principal takes pride in telling him, Dr Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) might have been the only accomplished role model in Marty’s life. His father is crippled with insecurity, his mother is an alcoholic, his older sister is date-repellant, his older brother isn’t looking much past his big gig at a fast-food chain and Marty’s uncle has the none too flattering nickname of “Jail-bird” Joey. Marty is constantly late for school and didn’t quite set the world on fire with his band’s music audition. The opening sequence to Back to the Future lets you know everything that you need to know about McFly instantly — he’s not the most responsible kid in Hill Valley, but he won’t settle for anything less than making history.
What makes Marty McFly such a great protagonist is that he is well aware of his flaws, but once he puts his mind to something, he forgets that they exist until they rear their ugly heads again. Back to the Future has the most relatable time-travelling tour guide in Marty McFly. He is not some unappreciative spoiled brat that was born with every advantage in life, he is not a world-renown mathematical formula-spouting scientist, nor a cool under pressure tough guy. Marty is just what most of us would be in his incredible situation, just a spunky kid figuring it all out as he goes along.
His character arc is by far the most significant in the trilogy. This doesn't come to fruition until the end of Back to the Future Part III. One of Marty's defining traits throughout the series is his inability to keep a calm head when someone insinuates that he's a coward. It gets him into trouble in every movie. This is more so introduced in Back to the Future II as this is the first occasion that someone calls him chicken, in which the series starts to highlight this trait which may not be as obvious to the audience in the previous film. He finally lets it go when he decides he doesn't care if Mad Dog Tannen or anyone else thinks he's a chicken. Upon his eponymous return to the future, he solidifies this change by refusing to race Needles, then averting the accident with the Rolls Royce that would have ruined his music career. This is perhaps the most important change he makes to his life due to time travel. In the end, it's the lived experience he's acquired from his adventure that saves his personal future, not the time machine.
After re-experiencing Back to the Future, I managed to achieve the exact same feeling each time, the reminder that Marty McFly is a damn fun pair of white and red Nike’s to imagine myself standing in. For his cool-without-trying attitude, witty spontaneous responses and desire to not let history repeat itself.
Back to the Future will probably always stand as my favourite film. In hindsight, that’s due to Marty McFly. He is a classic protagonist figure: an ordinary person who finds himself in an extraordinary circumstance. The issues he is dealing with his dreams [music], family, school, girlfriend, parents are all things we know. Tie those into two really weird dynamics, the awkward realization that his father was a Peeping Tom and his mother was sexually provocative, and how on earth to get back to the present.