The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Zemeckis · a film · 1985 · about 116 minutes · written with Bob Gale · Amblin Entertainment for Universal · in English
Mode
High-concept studio comedy; time travel turned into a family comedy, with causality played as farce and run against the clock
Mythos
The son who must make his father worthy of his mother before he can exist; the mother’s desire turned on the son and refused; the inventor who brings down the lightning
Phase
Three movements: Hill Valley on the night of 25 to 26 October 1985; Hill Valley from 5 to 12 November 1955; Hill Valley in 1985 again, altered
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 35 mm, in English, about 116 minutes; the theatrical cut, the one version; a score and two songs placed as engine
Register
Comic and propulsive from first scene to last; slapstick, suspense and a threat of rape in one rhythm; heights of exhilaration rather than awe
Scale
One family at two ages, one town square in two eras, one boy against a deadline
Governing Proposition
A boy of seventeen is thrown thirty years back by his friend’s time machine, meets his parents as peers, and must bring them together before he can be born. The wager of the film is that a comedy can be built as strictly as a clock, every object set down in its first movement paid in the two that follow, and that a son can learn, by seeing his parents young, that a life is turned by one act of nerve or its absence.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a wall of clocks in Doc Brown’s garage, all running, and on machines that make coffee and pour dog food with no one there to work them. The law of the film is stated before its plot: time runs, and what is set going goes on without its maker. Then the first movement lays down almost everything the film will need. A flyer for the courthouse clock, pressed on Marty McFly for a quarter. A photograph of three children. A mother who lectures her daughter on propriety, a father who has given way all his life, a bully at the father’s desk. A mall named for two pines.
Robert Zemeckis directed the film from a screenplay he wrote with Bob Gale. Gale and Neil Canton produced it for Amblin Entertainment, with Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall as executive producers, and Universal released it in the United States on 3 July 1985. Dean Cundey photographed it; Arthur Schmidt and Harry Keramidas edited it; Alan Silvestri wrote the score, and Huey Lewis and the News the songs “The Power of Love” and “Back in Time”. Michael J. Fox plays Marty, Christopher Lloyd Doc, Lea Thompson Lorraine, Crispin Glover George McFly and Thomas F. Wilson Biff Tannen. Eric Stoltz was cast as Marty first and was recast after some weeks of shooting; none of his footage is in the film. One version exists, the theatrical cut, in English, of about 116 minutes, and it is judged here alone, apart from its two sequels of 1989 and 1990.
On the night of 25 to 26 October 1985, in the car park of the Twin Pines Mall, Doc shows Marty the DeLorean, and the Libyans arrive and gun him down. Marty’s flight makes the first jump: a flash, two trails of fire between the parking lines, a licence plate spinning on the asphalt. The inheritance is plain, the time-travel story from Wells onward, the teen comedy of its decade, the 1950s of American Graffiti and Happy Days, and the turn from it is narrow: time travel made into a family comedy, the parents’ courtship the machine’s whole object. The recasting was a real cost. But the film was made inside the Spielberg house for a major studio, and it perfects its formula rather than leaving it.
Movement II
The long middle of the film is Hill Valley between 5 and 12 November 1955, and it is built as a mirror of the first movement. The courthouse square that was run down is new. Biff, who bullied George at a desk, bullies him at a counter. The knock on George’s head comes again, with its “Hello, McFly”. The viewer learns the parents’ adolescence by recognising it against the middle age already seen, and only this form could give that knowledge: the present is made of the past’s small acts, and the mirror shows which ones.
What the mirror discloses is that a child cannot know his parents as they were. Met as peers, they are young, foolish, sexual and frightened, as he is. Lorraine, the mother of the propriety lecture, was at seventeen the one who drank, smoked and pursued, and the boy she pursues is her son. The Oedipal structure is turned inside out and made to bear the plot: the son must refuse his mother and make his father worthy of her, or he will not be born. Doc, the inventor with the hair and the laboratory of Frankenstein, stands beside the family as Prometheus in costume, a figure evoked rather than built. The family myth carries alone, and it is played as farce.
History is held as the distance between the two years: in prices, songs, a television set, and Doc’s disbelief at the future president, “Ronald Reagan? The actor?” The 1955 town is given half as nostalgia and half as critique, and the critique is light. Goldie Wilson, a busboy, speaks of becoming mayor; Marvin Berry’s band at the dance is black; both stand at the edge. The film looks at the decade its audience’s parents grew up in with affection, and with a small, smiling doubt that it does not press.
Movement III
Before the dance, the plan is a staged rescue: George is to pull Marty off Lorraine in a parked car. He opens the car door and finds Biff instead, says the line he rehearsed to the wrong man, and the punch that follows makes the father. Crispin Glover has built George as a body that slowly straightens, and the punch lands as a change of posture. The scene is also the furthest the film goes in range, from slapstick to a threat of rape, and it obeys the one law of every other scene: what is done in this minute determines what will exist in another.
At the dance, Marty plays guitar with Marvin Berry’s band, in white dinner jackets, while George and Lorraine fail to kiss. The photograph of the three children fades from the edges and then figure by figure, and Marty’s hand goes transparent on the strings as “Earth Angel” holds a son’s existence in the balance. The kiss comes, the hand returns, and the film reaches one of its heights: exhilaration, not awe, a suspense resolved into joy. Then Marty plays “Johnny B. Goode”, and finds the room is not ready for it.
The joke that gives a white boy from the future the origin of Chuck Berry’s sound is one of the film’s open questions, and the others are of the same kind: whether the altered present rewards an interference the film calls dangerous, why the changed parents do not know their son, the comedy of the mother’s desire, the black figures at the edge. They are real and bounded. Most of what the film has drawn in forty-one years is study of its screenplay, puzzles of paradox and the record kept by its admirers. Return gives the pleasure of noticing setups and rhymes, a machine admired again rather than discovered again.
Movement IV
Lightning struck the courthouse clock at 10:04 p.m. on Saturday 12 November 1955, and the flyer Marty carried from 1985 says so. That one fact is what the return requires, and the film has had it in his pocket since the first movement. Doc stands on the ledge of the clock tower; the cable he has run across the square comes loose from the lamp post; the car stalls and starts; the bolt finds the clock. The sequence is intercut so that three separate actions, the cable, the car and the bolt, become one rising line, and a stunt becomes a moment of grace. The DeLorean’s tyres burn at the line, and Silvestri’s brass lifts it.
The screenplay is the strongest of the film’s departments: exposition delivered as comedy, every plant paid, the deadline tightened to the minute. Schmidt and Keramidas cut for momentum and clarity. Fox carries nearly every scene with a comic timing that never pushes, and Lea Thompson plays one woman at two ages. Cundey’s photography makes one square into two eras. The film won the Academy Award for Sound Effects Editing. The faults are several. The 1985 bookends are lit and played flatter than 1955; the audition, the Darth Vader visit to George’s bedroom and Doc’s mugging run to sketch; Strickland’s two scenes partly repeat; and the effects serve the story without carrying it.
The film perfected the high-concept studio comedy, made time paradox a popular plot rather than a science-fiction premise, and left a model of setup and payoff that the teaching of screenwriting still uses. Its reach is wide: the trilogy and all that grew from it, the time-travel comedy from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) to Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), a standing reference for causal paradox in later blockbusters, a chapter in the screenwriting manuals. It is broad in popular cinema and in common culture, and shallow in what it changed about the form of film.
Movement V
Marty comes back to 1985 and to the Lone Pine Mall: he ran down one of farmer Peabody’s two pines in 1955, and the name has followed. Doc, whom he warned with a torn letter, is alive. At home his parents sit trim and easy at the breakfast table, Biff waxes the car, a new truck stands in the drive, and George’s novel, A Match Made in Space, arrives in a box. The son has made his father, and the father has made a life.
Here the film’s hand weighs on its own truth. The disclosure about parents stays true on return, but the close rewrites the family into prosperity, so that courage is proved by possessions and a servile Biff, and the meaning gives way to a wish that is not weighed. The coda states what the mirror had already shown. It also strains the film’s law: interference, which every scene has treated as a danger to existence, is rewarded with a better life and no cost. The coherence holds, but by comedy’s rule rather than the film’s own. This, with a narrow turn from its inheritance and a yield on return that is the yield of craft, is what keeps the film where it stands.
Forty-one years on it survives whole, in the one version released, unrevised, on television and home video and in revival, with a date from its sequel, 21 October 2015, kept by the public as its own. Its surface has become period: the Libyans, the brand-name jokes, the president who was an actor, and some of the comedy reads with more unease than it did. It holds a family fully, two generations of adolescence, a town and the distance between two years; the state, the economy and the sacred barely enter, race is a margin, and all of it is held through one family and one square. Within that frame it is exact: a clock wound in its first half hour, which runs down to the minute.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, and structure is the film’s strength. Nearly every object set in the first movement is paid in the second or third. The clock-tower flyer, pressed on Marty for a quarter and kept for his girlfriend’s phone number, gives Doc the one fact the return requires: the minute of the lightning. The Twin Pines Mall becomes the Lone Pine Mall because Marty runs down one of farmer Peabody’s pines. Doc’s fall from the toilet, mentioned as a date, is how Marty proves himself in 1955. What gives is real: the audition and the Darth Vader visit to George’s bedroom run long as comedy, Strickland’s two appearances partly repeat each other, and the plants carry plot far more than meaning. Permitted, not compelled.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a child cannot know his parents as they were, and when he meets them as peers they are young, foolish, sexual and frightened, as he is; and a life is turned by one act of nerve or its absence. Lorraine, who in 1985 lectures her daughter on propriety, was at seventeen the one who drank, smoked and pursued. That truth is real and holds. What holds the figure among the film’s lowest is its hand on its own disclosure. The 1955 town is half nostalgia and half critique, and the critique is light. The close rewrites the family into prosperity, so that courage is proved by possessions; the meaning gives way to wish fulfilment and is not weighed.
Score: 7.1 / 10
The register is comic and propulsive, and its elevation is exhilaration rather than awe. It rises several times. The first jump in the mall car park: a flash, two trails of fire between the parking lines, a licence plate spinning on the asphalt. The dance, where Marty’s hand fades on the guitar while his parents fail to kiss. The clock tower, a stunt intercut until it becomes a moment of grace, with Silvestri’s brass lifting each summit. What holds the figure: nothing is terrible or grave at length, Doc’s apparent death is reversed, and the summits are all of suspense and joy at one pitch, with the long stretches between them carried by momentum rather than height.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The myth is built, not cited. The Oedipal structure is turned inside out and made load-bearing: the mother desires the son, the son must refuse her and make his father worthy of her, and only by uniting his parents can he be born. The photograph of three children, fading one by one, makes the son’s existence hang on his father’s courage, so that Marty is, in plot and in fact, the father of his father. What holds the figure: the myth is played as farce and resolved without cost; Doc as the Promethean inventor, with Frankenstein in his laboratory and his hair, is evoked in costume and gesture rather than built; and the family myth carries the whole weight alone.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The inheritance is the time-travel story, from Wells to Pal’s The Time Machine (1960) and television’s anthology fiction; the teen comedy of the early 1980s; and the 1950s nostalgia of American Graffiti (1973) and television’s Happy Days. The turn is real and narrow: time travel made into a family comedy, causality into farce, the parents’ courtship the machine’s whole object. The stake was the recasting of the lead after weeks of shooting, at real cost. But the film was made inside the Spielberg production house for a major studio, in a formula of setup and payoff that it perfects rather than leaves. A synthesis of proven paths, brilliantly joined; the wager was commercial, not formal.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the present is made of the past’s small acts. The form is the mirror: scenes of 1985 recur in 1955 with the roles shifted, Biff bullying George at a desk and then at a counter, the same courthouse square run down and new, Marty’s band too loud for one judge and too strange for another room, the same knock on George’s head. The viewer learns the parents’ adolescence by recognising it against their middle age, which only this form gives. Held lower by what lies outside the mirror: the grammar is the studio comedy’s, cut for momentum and clarity, used well and not remade, and the coda states what the mirror had already shown.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Evidence over forty-one years. Return yields formal pleasure: the setups noticed on a second viewing, the rhymes of the mirror, the intercutting at the clock tower. The open questions are real but bounded: whether the altered 1985 rewards Marty for an interference the film calls dangerous; why the changed parents do not know their son; the comedy of the mother’s desire; the joke that gives a white boy from the future the origin of Chuck Berry’s sound; Goldie Wilson and Marvin Berry at the edge. Much of the writing the film has drawn is screenplay study, paradox puzzles and fan record rather than new reading. Its yield on return is that of a well-made machine, admired again rather than discovered again.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1980s. Intrinsic force is moderate: the film perfected the high-concept studio comedy, made time paradox a popular plot rather than a science-fiction premise, and set a model of setup and payoff that the teaching of screenwriting still uses; it did not reorganise what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the trilogy and what grew from it; the line of time-travel comedy from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) to Hot Tub Time Machine (2010); a standing reference for causal paradox in later blockbusters; a place in the screenwriting manuals. The reach is broad in popular cinema and common culture, and shallow in what it changed about film form.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-one years. The form survives whole: one version as released, no altered cut, restorations that repair, a director who has not revised it. Presence is of the widest kind for a film of its span: continuous television and home video, revival screenings, two sequels, and a public calendar date, 21 October 2015, borrowed from the second of them. What holds it short of the widest figure is the surface. The 1985 frame, the Libyans, the brand-name jokes, Doc’s “Ronald Reagan? The actor?”, is itself now period, and some of the comedy, the car scene with Biff and Marvin Berry, is read with more unease than it was. The 35 mm colour and optical effects are the smallest charge.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium. The screenplay is the strongest department: exposition delivered as comedy, every plant paid, the deadline tightened to the minute. Arthur Schmidt and Harry Keramidas cut the clock tower so that three separate actions, the cable, the car and the bolt, make one rising line. Michael J. Fox carries nearly every scene with a timing that never pushes; Crispin Glover builds George as a body that slowly straightens; Lea Thompson plays two ages of one woman. Dean Cundey’s photography makes one square into two eras. The charges are several: the 1985 bookends are lit and played flatter than 1955, comic turns run to sketch, the Vader visit and Doc’s mugging among them, and the effects are serviceable rather than load-bearing.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Libyans gunning Doc down in a mall car park at night, and a high-school dance with a band in white dinner jackets. One law governs both: what is done at one minute determines what exists at another, and every scene is a race against a clock. The farce of the mother’s desire and the menace of Biff in the car are moves in one problem, a son’s survival. The range is moderate, from slapstick to the threat of rape and a death reversed. The strain is at the close: the law says interference endangers existence, and the coda rewards it with a better life and no cost. Coherence holds there by comedy’s rule rather than the film’s own.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 116 minutes holds. The family is held fully: two parents at two ages, three children, a household’s fortunes. Adolescence and sexuality are held in both generations. The town is held as courthouse square, diner, school, dance and a busboy’s ambition; history as the distance between 1955 and 1985, in prices, songs, a television set and a president who was an actor; invention in Doc; labour in George’s servitude to Biff. What holds the figure lowest: consciousness is Marty’s surface; the state, the economy and the sacred barely enter; race is a margin; and every order is held through one family and one square, as a set for comedy.
Score: 6.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Inevitable at 8.2 and The Made at 8.1. A film that survives whole in its one version, with a presence of the widest kind for its span; a structure in which nearly every object set in the first movement is paid in the second or third; and a screenplay, an edit and a lead performance that carry exposition as comedy and turn the clock tower into one rising line.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.5: a family held fully at two ages, a town and the distance between two years, but the state, the economy and the sacred barely present, race a margin and consciousness the hero’s surface. Below the rest, The Swerve at 7.0, a synthesis of proven paths made inside a studio formula; The Unconcealment at 7.1, a true disclosure about parents withdrawn by the prosperity of the close; The Bottomless Well at 7.2, a yield on return that is the yield of craft; and Pressure on Tradition at 7.3, broad reach and modest force. These four hold the work below Tier IV.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 7.8 and The Living Form at 7.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.5, Pressure on Tradition at 7.3, The Unconcealment at 7.1 and The Swerve at 7.0 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.0, The Unconcealment, 7.1, The Bottomless Well, 7.2, and Pressure on Tradition, 7.3, all below 7.5; The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep meet it exactly at 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.5. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.5, from a sum of 90.5, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Back to the Future as released by Universal in the United States on 3 July 1985: the theatrical cut, the one version, in English, about 116 minutes, from the wall of clocks to the return to the altered house. Directed by Robert Zemeckis from a screenplay by Zemeckis and Bob Gale; produced by Gale and Neil Canton for Amblin Entertainment, with Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall as executive producers; photographed by Dean Cundey; edited by Arthur Schmidt and Harry Keramidas; music by Alan Silvestri, with songs by Huey Lewis and the News. The sequels of 1989 and 1990 are separate works and are not judged; they bear on the film’s reach and presence only. No print or script was consulted, and timings are approximate. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain: two short lines. Facts that could not be verified, among them the minute of the departure, the share of the running time given to each year, how long the first lead was on set, the budget and schedule, the film’s takings, honours other than its Academy Award, its history before it reached a studio, and later adaptations, are not given.