Luke Skywalker Can't Read (10 page)

The Biff Tannen Family Tree Paradox

Throughout the trilogy, the Tannen family terrorizes the McFly family in five separate time periods: 1885, 1955, 1985, 2015, and an alternate version of 1985 in which Biff Tannen rules Hill Valley from his hot tub. But who the fuck are Biff's parents? And where did all the Tannens come from anyway? In the original
Back to the Future
, Thomas F. Wilson brilliantly plays a fortysomething Biff Tannen in 1985, and a teenage Biff in 1955, both providing nice McFly nemesis parallels. In 1985, Biff is George McFly's biggest problem, but in 1955, Biff becomes Marty's problem, and thanks to time travel Biff and Marty are “the same age.” Similarly, when Marty travels forward in time to 2015 in
Back to the Future Part II
, he's confronted with Griff Tannen, a teenager about Marty's age who is Biff's grandson. In a flip from the first film—where Marty's
father George is Biff's age—Marty's son, Marty Jr.,
*
is exactly Griff's age. Oddly, there is no member of the Tannen family who is
Marty's
age. Or, at least not one we see. In 1985—the temporal location where all this “starts”—Biff appears to be unmarried, and yet in 2015, it's confirmed that Griff in 2015 is the grandchild of Biff, thanks to Old Biff's quip “Whatdya think, Griff calls me gramps for his health?”

Yet, we have no idea who Griff's parents are. Presumably, one of Griff's parents should be Marty's age in 1985 and hanging around with people Marty knows in high school. Could there be a member of the Tannen family in Marty's band, the Pinheads? Could Jennifer Parker actually be friends with Biff's
daughter
? Early script ideas for
Back to the Future Part
II
did include a “Tiff Tannen,” who would probably have existed in 1985 and served as the Tannen foil for Marty's generation, but as it stands, we never got to see her.

Weirder still is the fact that in
Back to the Future Part II
we see that 1955 teenage Biff lives with his grandmother, and like his descendant, Griff, has no parents to speak of. Griff's immediate progenitor maybe just didn't get screentime, so therefore might still exist. But dialogue from
Back to the Future Part II
tells us the house where Biff lives with his grandmother belongs to “the only Tannen in the [phone] book,” leading us to believe the only Tannens who actually live in Hill Valley in 1955 are
Biff and his grandmother, making Biff's origin, at that point in the story, even more unclear than Griff's. I suppose we have to assume Biff and Griff have parents, but that's no fun.

In
Back to the Future Part III
, we meet Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen (though we did hear him mentioned in an alternate version of 1985 in
BTTFII
) in the Old West of 1885. Mad Dog, we're told, is Biff's great-grandfather and this highlights another conspicuous missing branch in the Tannen family tree. If this is Biff's great-grandfather, that means he
might
be the father of Biff's grandmother in 1955. However, maybe not. Biff's grandmother—the only Tannen in the book, remember—may have married into that name. If we journey outside the canon of the films, this supposedly gets explained, since the
Back to the Future
video game “reveals” Biff's father was a mobster named “Kid” Tannen, who we're supposed to infer was Mad Dog's son. The only problem with this is that you're pretty sure that Mad Dog will be hanged after Marty and Doc split 1885 in
BTTFIII
, and even though we don't
know
if Mad Dog had a family, wife, or something, we certainly don't see them. Biff and Griff's only male ancestor probably dies in 1885 and from that point on, the Tannen family seems to only have a representative alive from every
other
generation, at any given time.

The conspicuous absence of various branches of Biff's family tree can mean only one thing: Biff is both his own “father” and his own “son.” In
BTTFII
Old Biff from 2015 steals the DeLorean and travels to 1955 to give young Biff the sport's almanac that will make him all sorts of money in the
“future.” Now, just because we don't see Old Biff time traveling elsewhere doesn't mean that he doesn't. I know, I know. Conspiracy theories always tend to work better when there's less evidence, and this one is a great conspiracy theory. But I think the best solution to this is that Biff figures out that he's the product of a paradox and, as a result, has to ensure his own existence by becoming his own ancestor and descendant. This means the missing parts of Biff's family tree are just him, time traveling. Genetically, I've been told this is actually impossible, as you'll never create a perfect genetic replica of yourself. Still, that quintessential Robert A. Heinlein time-travel short story “All You Zombies—” features a character who is his own father and mother and also gives birth to him/herself. If you can't do these things in science fiction, I ask, what is the point of science fiction?

The George McFly Writing Career Pseudo-Paradox

We know George McFly is the density—err—
destiny
of Lorraine Banes, but his initial timeline did not have him becoming a celebrated science fiction author. When Marty visits the 1955 version of his father in the first
Back to the Future
, George has all the traditional traits of a total dork: bad haircut, lame clothes, no confidence, and, of course, an interest in science fiction. Famously, Marty uses science fiction to convince George he is an alien with a special message: Marty impersonates a faux alien with his low-budget version of a Star Trek/Star Wars
mash-up. Without this one event, Marty would not have been able to put the timeline back on course, meaning science fiction inside of science fiction saves the day in
Back to the Future
. But, it gets better, because in the new timeline Marty has accidentally caused his father to become a science fiction writer and, judging by the state of the McFly household, a reasonably successful one, too!

Some naysayers may point out that
A Match Made in Space
is only George McFly's first novel, which wouldn't account for the comfortable living environment. It has been asserted that it shouldn't have taken him this long to get the novel done and published. However, it's possible that George McFly, after his encounter with Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan, went on to become a hot short-story writer like Harlan Ellison or Kurt Vonnegut. Hell, George McFly may have been selling scripts to
The Outer Limits
or
The Twilight Zone
, assuming such things exist in the
Back to the Future
world, which they probably do, because we saw an episode of
The Honeymooners
in the first movie. This era in George McFly's science fiction writing would certainly fit the post-1955 time frame, and the fact that the McFlys live in California, near the TV world action, makes it all the more plausible. You could even say that in Marty's reality, George McFly sued both George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry over the use of his original concepts “Darth Vader” (Star Wars) and the planet “Vulcan” (Star Trek). This would explain why George McFly has a ton of money
before
his first novel comes out. And if Marty McFly, through his father, actually created both Star Trek and Star Wars via paradox,
Back to
the Future
becomes a work of fake nonfiction and übermetafiction simultaneously.

The Jennifer Parker Paradox

The actress who plays Jennifer Parker in
Back to the Future
is different from the actress who plays her in
Back to the Future Parts II and III.
In the first movie she's played by Claudia Wells, who's replaced by Elisabeth Shue in the sequels. Most fans would probably consider Elisabeth Shue to be the “real” Jennifer the same way people consider Maggie Gyllenhaal to be the “real” Rachel in the Batman movies and not Katie Holmes. The explanation for this is confusing: writer Bob Gale and director Robert Zemeckis supposedly couldn't get Claudia Wells back, but who really knows. The craziest thing about this Jennifer switcheroo is that you'd never notice it if you'd only seen these films once as a little kid.
Back to the Future
succeeds at creating the ultimate fake nostalgia by totally reshooting the ending sequence of the first film almost five years after the fact with a totally new actress. Still, Claudia Wells did the voice of Jennifer in 2010/2011's
Back to the Future
:
The Game
, in which she reclaims some of her canonical Jennifer status. This more than anything, I think, is proof that the alternate universe in these movies directly blends over into what we pretend to call the real world.

More troubling than the Jennifer switch, though, is the fact that the character of Jennifer herself is almost worse than tertiary to the plots of any of the films. In the original
BTTF
, she's
nothing more than Marty's trophy girlfriend. In the second film, she's literally unconscious for most of the action, and she only appears at the very end of the third film. Marty is never unfaithful to Jennifer, but she is something of a sleeping Penelope throughout these movies, unwittingly waiting for Marty to come home from his Odyssey. This is obliviously and totally sexist in the worst way, but in a film series that plays with oedipal themes from the very beginning (Marty's mom wants to screw him), progressive roles for women are unsurprisingly scarce. Not all fake nostalgia is good, and in fact, when it comes to gender and race,
Back to the Future
represents our past pop tendencies all too accurately.

The Past and the Future: Not Quite Perfect

Marty McFly is a person who is clearly like thirty years old and pretending to be in high school. In fairness, all big movies set in “high school” have this problem; everyone in
Grease
looks like an actor pretending to be in a fake high school, which in
Grease
is sort of the point. But we already know that
Back to the Future
has a more surreal approach to all of this, and the most surreal thing about it is the almost total absence of black people.

To say that
Back to the Future
is a racist movie since it only has a few black characters isn't exactly fair. The white people in
Back to the Future
(nearly everyone) are almost as badly stereotyped as the few black characters. I think imaginary
Back to the Future
black characters got lucky dodging being in this bizarre representation of whiteness. Because it's here where
Back to the Future
's fake nostalgia gets sad, but is totally accurate in terms of how pop culture often hews. Anyone who's read any history is aware that America in 1955 was worse for blacks than it was in 1985, but the 1955 Marty McFly travels to in the first and second movies is super-rosy. There are black guys in the 1955 backing band, and we're told that Goldie Wilson, a black guy sweeping the floors in the diner, will soon be the mayor of Hill Valley. We also learn one of the guys in the band is Chuck Berry's “cousin” Marvin Berry, and that the authorship of “Johnny B. Goode” is actually the result of a time-travel paradox. Obviously, in real life, Chuck Berry didn't write “Johnny B. Goode” thanks to some time-traveling white guy, but shit, it sounds pretty racist to think
Back to the Future
asserts that very fact. Marty and Doc and literally everyone else in this movie are allowed to just casually “exist” and even make their lives better through their wacky technology and funny adventures. Meanwhile, Marvin Berry and Goldie Wilson are required to “dream big,” rather than actually live big.
Back to the Future
is accidentally trying to achieve paradoxical revisionism that makes white people feel better about the past. This is fake nostalgia for something the (white) target audience didn't experience—in the case of racial equity, because it didn't exist.

Back to the Future
isn't a bad movie series at all, though, and if you can't tell, I totally love it. But, if there's one thing I feel is important about love, it is understanding the deeply flawed characteristics of things you love, so you can better understand yourself, and how best to enjoy yourself. There's a great episode of
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
that helped me see this and
think about how a progressive, forward-thinking person can make sense of the occasionally scary side of fake nostalgia. In Star Trek, they've got the holodeck: a souped-up virtual reality place where endless fantasies can happen. And in an episode of
Deep Space Nine
called “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang,” there's a holographic (fake) 1962 nightclub called Vic's that a bunch of the Star Trek people like hanging out in. The main character of
Deep Space Nine
—if you're unaware—is Star Trek's only black lead, Avery Brooks as Ben Sisko, the guy who runs the space station, plus a spaceship, both full-time, while also being a single dad.
*
In this episode he argues with his girlfriend, Kasidy Yates (Penny Johnson), about the morality of enjoying the fake 1962 nightclub, as such enjoyment essentially requires pretending racism didn't exist back then. Sisko takes the stance I think most of us would take now: historical entertainment that eschews or avoids the unpleasant racial truths of the past is bullshit. However, Yates gives Sisko a counterargument: enjoying this form of entertainment can be empowering, as long as no one forgets what the real truth was.

I think for a certain class of Americans born at a certain time (regardless of race)
Back to the Future
is a beloved film series because of its endless charm. It's also a tricky series of films that insinuated itself into our consciousness through sly manipulation of nostalgia that seemed so real it must have been created by a time paradox. Today, I hear there's a hoverboard
prototype being tested, as if matching our current technology is just fulfilling
Back to the Future
and not our real future. Which is missing the point really, because I think all this fake nostalgia was more of a series of jokes than anything else, since these movies were comedies above all. The flying-car future was a joke, more of a reference to the 1950s science fiction “golden age” idea of what the future would be like than any sort of “real” future.