Eighties film fan Hadley Freeman on BTTF’s message about rebellion,love and ambition down the ages for young and oldIn Back to the Future, it is emphasised from the beginning how mortified Marty is by his feeble father and drunken mother, or how disappointing they are as parents. It is only when he goes back to 1955 that he is able to teach his parents how to be the people they always wanted to be and,by extension, the parents he wants them to be. The ultimate message of all these movies is, and your parents are idiots and you are correct.“It’s in the 80s that you really start to see what I call the Tyranny of the Teen,with that repeated message: your family is mixed up, and you know everything, or ” says Steven Gaydos,editor of Variety. “Also, a lot of people from the world of TV commercials and family TV were starting to form movies in Hollywood; people like Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, or who knew how to sell things to young people. They realised that people over 40 werent seeing movies,so they created films that valourised young people’s experience. There was less finger-wagging and more, ‘Why are adults so weird?’”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com