Back to the Future. The Grim, Grim Future
So last week I got to watch Back to the Future for the first time since I was, I don't know, twelve. It's still a pretty great movie, and especially in the coming-of-age, sci-fi genre, with far more quotable moments than I remembered. It was a blast and a half. But. The end of the movie is kind of disturbing. When Michael J. Fox comes back (...to the future!), his city, the city that was clean and economically prosperous in the 1950s, is back to being graffittied and depressed. The sign that we know we're back in the 80s is that the Delorean distrupts a man sleeping under a newspaper by a park bench. Fox gets out of the car, sees the adult theater downtown, the boarded up shops and knows--he's home! Some of this is just reflecting the rosy nostalgia for the 50s that is typical of the boomers, but I'd have hoped that some of that meddling in the past would have impacted the whole city's prospects. Even disturbingly, does the fact that the city is run-do...