It's Grand Getting LOST in Back to the Future

I’m a geeky 80s child, so it should come as no surprise that I love the Robert Zemeckis era-hopping romp Back to the Future. What may be surprising is the fact that I saw the second movie about a mad scientist, his time-traveling DeLorean and the hapless teenager caught up in the craziness before I saw the first. When I did see the original movie for the first time, it was fun to pick out all of the references that filled the second movie. They were that much funnier now. My experience of watching Back to the Future this time around was similar, but instead of looking at it through the lens of the second movie, it was through the lens of LOST. I hadn’t watched the movie in years, so this was my first time watching specifically looking for places where Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse and other writers of my favorite show took their cues for their own epic. It may be kind of a goofy way to watch a movie, but it’s certainly fun.

Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is an ordinary teenager in 1985. He lives with his parents, wimpy George (Crispin Glover) and world-weary Lorraine (Lea Thompson), along with two quarrelsome siblings, and he has a girlfriend who plays a more significant role in the second movie. Like Daniel, the title character in The Karate Kid, another 80s staple, Marty spends a lot of time hanging around with a late-middle-aged man who has a lot to teach him. Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) is a genius. Of course, he’s also borderline insane, which Lloyd brings across in a way few other actors could. Marty is a trusting soul to put his life in the good doctor’s hands, trusting that his experiments aren’t going to get him killed. Then again, sometimes he has no choice.

After the combination of a freshly fine-tuned time machine and the threat of a band of Libyan gangsters who furnished Doc Brown’s plutonium leads Marty to take a little jaunt to the 1950s, he finds himself in a strange yet familiar world. It’s his own hometown, but the clock’s been dialed back, and it’s now 1955. In no time at all, he manages to make one of the classic blunders; just after Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia and Never Go In Against a Sicilian When Death Is on the Line, I believe you would find Never Go Back in Time and Let Your Own Mother Fall In Love With You. Yup, that’s a pretty big problem, and not just because of what something like that is bound to do to poor Marty’s psychological health. Because if the teenaged Lorraine is head over heels for suave Marty, how is she ever going to hook up with pathetic George, who spends all of his days cowering in fear of lunk-headed Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson)? If that doesn’t happen, Marty will cease to exist. Oh, and the paradox will tear a hole in the very fabric of space and time, and the universe will collapse upon itself. So, no pressure, kid.

After his accidental run-in with his mother, what Marty really needs is to touch base with Doc Brown, the one person who can help him get his bearings. He does, and after he manages to convince him that his time travel babble is the truth, he leaves the Doc to tinker with his machinery so that when the famous bolt of lightning strikes the town’s historic clock tower in a few days, Marty in the DeLorean will be able to harness that energy to get him home. It sounds complicated, and it is, but Marty still has the tougher task: making a man out of his lily-livered dad, who’d much rather curl up inside with a good sci-fi novel than defy brutish Biff or ask Lorraine out. The scene in which Marty convinces him to show a little gumption demonstrates Marty’s cleverness and always reminded me a lot of the scene in Dumbo in which Timothy the mouse uses the power of subconscious suggestion to get his flying friend his big shot in the circus. But getting George on board is only half the battle…

Looking at the movie as a LOST fan, the most obvious nod in the show was when Hurley came right out and mentioned Marty’s disappearing hand in the scene in which he plays the guitar at the dance where his parents are destined to fall in love with each other. This moment became the cornerstone of one of the funniest exchanges in the show’s most mind-bending season, one that attempted to establish the parameters of how this time-hopping stuff worked and that openly acknowledged that suspension of disbelief was a must. But there are other references too. For instance, everything in the film builds up to the moment when the lightning strikes that clock tower, and on the show, Desmond’s first premonition involving Charlie’s death involves him getting struck by lightning. In the movie, Marty writes a note to Doc in hopes that he will read it and prevent a future tragedy; in the series, Daniel writes a note to himself so that when his hour is darkest, he will remember who it is that he can call upon for help.

That who would be Desmond, and it’s the relationship between Desmond and Daniel, so beautifully established in season four’s The Constant, that I found myself thinking of most as I watched this movie. Desmond, like Marty, is out of chronological synch with the rest of the world, and he’s totally disoriented. He badly needs a mentor. He finds one in the form of Daniel Faraday, who he met in the future. While he and Daniel were barely acquaintances in the future, as opposed to Marty and Doc, who were already firm friends, there’s enough of a connection there to build on. Both Desmond and Marty seek out younger versions of their mentors and get very skeptical receptions from these eccentric scientists. Both gain their trust after furnishing numbers that are key to the proper functioning of an audacious experiment. Both Desmond and Marty end up on a mission that involves bringing together two people whose love is deep but endangered – in Desmond’s case, it’s himself and Penny, while in Marty’s, it’s his parents. And in both cases, I find the friendship between the unwitting time traveler and the one person best equipped to help him navigate his strange situation to be extremely touching.

Another point of similarity is the fun Spot the Differences exercise when it comes to the beginning and end of the movie. At the beginning of season six, everyone noticed that in the controversial Sideways world in which 815 doesn’t crash, there are changes in these long-established characters, as well as their circumstances on the flight. That game of figuring out what was different about each person continued throughout the season, but it’s the two Flight 815s that really seem an homage to Back to the Future. Cursed Hurley considers himself lucky. Nervous flier Rose is the one reassuring Jack. Self-serving Sawyer’s looking out for his fellow man. What’s going on? In Back to the Future, we get to see Marty’s family before his journey and afterward, in which each member ends up changed as a result of Marty’s actions 30 years earlier. The main impact: Dad, played with such marvelous fidgety awkwardness by Glover, now has some self-confidence, and Lorraine is taking better care of herself. He changed just a tiny bit, but not enough to negate his own existence.

Back to the Future is one of those essential 80s movies, but you don’t need to have grown up in that era to appreciate its humor and fun, and you certainly don’t need to have watched LOST to understand why Marty and Doc make such a terrific team. Then again, it sure doesn’t hurt!