Marty McFly Won the Battle, But Biff Won the War

Back to the Future is one of the great movies from the '80s. It contains all of the elements for a perfect hit: adventure, time travel, humor, wonder, a beloved hero, and a crappy villain. The two movies that followed to make up the trilogy were just as good, and decades later came the musical, which we saw in Los Angeles this past week. The musical followed the movie very closely, and in the final scenes where both Marty and George find their confidence and stand up to the menacing bully, Biff, the crowd cheered, as they should have. Bullies are terrible, selfish people who harm others for their own pleasure and means to their end, and as the theater goers cheered loudly, I wondered how many of them voted against the bully earlier in the week?

It's highly unlikely that many of the Los Angeles theatre going crowd would support Trump, but the irony of a group of people cheering for the bully's demise was not lost on me. It is a no-brainer that the ignorant, rude guy who is mean to everyone and doesn't care about who he offends or hurts is the bad guy, but somewhere between 1985 to now, the real life Biff became the one that the majority chose to follow.

If comparing Trump to Biff Tannen seems like a stretch, just look at Back to the Future II. Future old guy Biff gives his younger self a sports book that has the winner of every major game for the next 30 years, and upon making a fortune placing bets, Biff ends up owning a casino and destroying his hometown, along with everyone around him. He even has really cartoonish bad hair. The parallels between Trump and Back to the Future II Biff are hard to ignore, and seem so predictive given that BTTF II came out in 1989.

The issue that I had while sitting in my theater seat was, when did we, as a society, start cheering for Biff? I really believed Trump's political career was over back in 2015 when he stood at the podium and proceeded to mock Serge Kovaleski, a reporter with a congenital joint disability. Watching Trump hang his hand and studder was absolutely disgusting, and definitely a Biff Tannen move. There are a few standard rules that our civil society had come to establish as norms between 1985 and 2015, and one of them was that you don't make fun of people with disabilities. It's cruel and extremely unjust. Parents had taught their children that mocking the disabled was a horrible thing to do and would punish them for doing so if they ever found out about it. However, so many parents were willing to forego the values they upheld for their own families in order to support their real life Biff Tannen, and to this day, I am still struggling to understand why.

I have heard the standard dismissive excuses of "the economy" meaning that for some people, economic recovery hasn't come fast enough, but given the fact that we experienced a worldwide shut down of our entire economic system during the COVID-19 pandemic where distribution supply chains were not just halted, but destroyed completely, did you really expect that to fix overnight? Over a million Americans died, another million+ were left with varying degrees of permanent disabilities from the effects of COVID, the Baby Boomer generation who made up a large chunk of our workforce chose to retire, and hundreds of thousands of workers made career changes. New supply chain systems and, in some cases, entire industries, had to be redeveloped from scratch. I realize that our instant gratification, personalized algorhythm, 24/7 drive-thru society expected everything to be back up and running immediately, but I gave too many people the benefit of the doubt that they would be smart enough to know that an immediate fix to this would not be possible. Unfortunately, they didn't and decided to place the Biff who had a big hand in breaking everything back in charge, hoping he would bring the prosperity of a yesteryear that no longer exists.

One of the biggest laugh drivers in Back to the Future is the 1980s Lorraine telling Marty about the terrible behavior of modern-day girls, and through her alcoholic ramblings informing her son that she was never like that. Of course, once Marty finds himself in the 1950s, he realizes that the young and sober Lorraine is somewhat of a shit disturber who loves to break the rules. Hypocrisy is great for big screen humor, but infuriating in real life. In this past election, it was stunningly on display as those who proclaimed to be followers of Jesus and his teachings cast votes for modern day Biff. In the fervor to see themselves as the "oppressed" with a need to bring back an idealized 1950s that was, in reality, just as fictional as Hill Valley, itself, they betrayed their very identity as Christians to vote for the bully. Yet, if you asked them what their favorite scene is in Back to the Future they would likely say, without an ounce of introspection, it was when George or Marty stood up to Biff.

Cheering for the hero is still the norm, but 40 years later, as a society, we need to re-establish what the definition of "hero" actually is. The hero is not the mean, selfish bully who treats his parents, teachers, supposed friends, and a love interest poorly. The hero is not the angry, butt hurt ignoramus who, if given the chance to make millions, would use it to make the lives of everyone around him miserable. The hero is the one who wants to protect their family, inspire others to be their best selves, and is willing to work hard to achieve their dreams.

Right now, Biff won, and we just have to brace ourselves for the dystopic Hill Valley that a second Trump presidency will likely bring. During this dour time, we must figure out what a hero truly looks like, reconnect with our inner Marty, and next time we have a chance to affect the future, send the embodiment of today's Biff Tannen into a giant pile of maneur.

Thoughts on the Anti-Hero

It's intriguing; the idea that a person is completely evil. Surely, they must've had a trigger or intricate back story to "make them evil". They must also have good in them somewhere, right? No one could really be totally evil, because, as we know, evil is usually created, not born. Therefore, a part of us always wants to cheer for the anti-hero, not the evil antics that they do, but the belief that at a crucial moment, the anti-hero will find their goodness and make everything right. This always makes for great fiction and superhero movies, but applying to reality is a far more dangerous game.

In simpler times, everyone cheered for the hero. The hero, usually male, usually handsome, lived by a code of conduct and ethics whereby their goal was to serve humanity and make the world a better place. Superman, Spiderman, Batman, most of the tv dads prior to the 1990s, they were all the good guys who saved people or took care of the people around them. There was no such thing as the "anti-hero", they were simply known as the "villain".

Villains didn't care about society, in fact, they sought to destroy it. Villains wanted to unpend the order of things, their goal was chaos, and they did it with an unabashed selfishness where if hundreds, even thousands perished, they just didn't care. The villain's solitary goal was self-service, above all. No one cheered for Lex Luthor, the Joker, the Green Goblin or the criminal in the tv cop drama. Good guys were good, bad guys were bad, and we knew where society stood.

Then came the 1990s. The 1990s saw unprecidented change in our society. GenX was touted as the first generation that would not do better than their parents economically, educationally, and would not be given the reigns of political power. GenX would live under the yoke of the Baby Boomers, until such time that their aging Boomer parents would have to be taken care of, which GenX was expected to do, while at the same time, raising their own children. With this turn of culture, GenX began to question everything from why women and minorities were still second-class citizens and underrepresented to why heros were lauded despite maintaining a status quo for an unequidable society.

There was a lot of cynacism about the future, and who would control it, which laid the perfect foundation for the rise of the anti-hero. From characters like "Stone Cold" Steve Austin who beat up supposed heros in World Wrestling Entertainment to the bumbling Homer Simpson who was good-hearted, but also a terrible father and husband to politicians like Pres. Bill Clinton who appointed women to positions of power usually after he was busted for a sex scandal and Newt Gingrich who orchestrated the toxic, "the other political party is the enemy" strategy that our country has suffered dearly for, these "anti-heroes" with their extreme fundamental flaws turned cultural norms on their heads and became the people we started cheering for.

Anti-heros seemed so much more complex than the boring hero. Anti-heros allowed you to question norms, they allowed you to delve into their fascinating backstory, which creators of media were all too eager to provide and monetize. Anti-heros would surely show us another path, whereby the societal status quo, which in the '90s and through the early '00s, was causing inequality, war, and economic hardship, would be re-invented into something better.

What we could not have known at that time was that anti-heros were the villains, and bad guys are bad guys for a reason. Fast forward to today: community service is at an all-time low, adolescent male idolize criminals (as in men actually convicted of terrible fellonies), adolescent girls and young women have zero trust in societial institutions such as marriage and family (why would they when lately everytime they go on their socials, a young man spams them with "Your Body, Our Choice"), and this myth of the anti-hero has now permeated into real world politics. 

What our society is going to learn very hard and fast over the next few years is that the anti-hero isn't going to save them. The anti-hero isn't going to usher in that better, more equitable world where everyone can thrive, but they also will not maintain the safe and secure societal status quo, because the anti-hero is a villain, and no matter how much time you try to spend unpacking their backstory or searching for that kernal of goodness hoping that it comes out at a crucial moment to save us all, the villian will focus on the only thing they care about; themselves. They will achieve their solitary, self-serving goals no matter who they have to sacrifice, and it will be up to the rest of us who recognize the villains we have elevated, to call them out, protect our communities, and be the heros.