The future is now

The world has finally caught up to Back to the Future II, the 1989 comedy sci-fi sequel that hurtled Marty McFly, as memorably played by Michael J. Fox, towards the bright, shiny and high-flying future of Oct. 21, 2015. We’ve caught up in time, but not quite in the technology of the movie’s imagined 2015. Sure, Lexus has recently come out with a hoverboard and Nike has just released the Nike Mag, the self-lacing shoes Marty wore in Back to the Future’s future, but we still don’t have flying cars, the one thing that would actually be useful these days and may be our only hope to finally solving Metro Manila traffic.

As the pop culture world celebrated “Back To The Future Day” this past Wednesday, it dawned on me that this year also marks another, perhaps more noteworthy, milestone. The first Back to the Future movie, released and set in 1985, is now 30 years old. In that movie, Marty McFly travels back 30 years to see his teenaged parents’ world in 1955. This means that 1985 is now as distant to us as 1955 was to Marty McFly. Great Scott, we’re old.

I recently saw the first Back to the Future movie again and it delighted me how dated it all was. It was a travel back to a time when no one questioned the celluloid friendship between a guitar-playing, skateboard-riding Bart Simpson-type teenager and a graying mad scientist (there was no social media to mock this fact yet). This was a time when the Walkman was still pretty new. This was a time when Huey Lewis was still a thing.

Yet the 1955 of Back to the Future was even more dated in Marty McFly’s eyes. It was an alien civilization. They couldn’t dig his music, there weren’t any skateboards yet, and his jacket was seen as a life vest. Transport a present-day teenager to 1985 and he’ll be delighted to see people wearing the same clothes and listening to essentially the same music. It seems the more technology has advanced, the more culture has become visually stagnant.

Golden Age of Sci-Fi

1955 was also right around the Golden Age of science fiction, to which Back to the Future pays an homage through Marty’s dad’s fixation on sci-fi comic books. It was the decade of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s “Who Goes There?” (short story that spawned The Thing), The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Forbidden Planet; the decade when sci-fi went from pulp fetish to mass entertainment.

Sci-fi has a rich tradition of fearing the future, where either robots or aliens are about to take over the world and enslave or kill all humans. The 1980s saw a sci-fi renaissance of sorts in popular media, where this fear would become more palpable. Movies like Blade Runner, Alien and Terminator imagined a future where mankind’s ingenuity would be its own downfall. The Back to the Future trilogy isn’t about a despotic or murderous non-human entity but it’s a fable about humans playing god.

In Back to the Future II, Marty zooms forward to 2015 to save his future son from imprisonment. Along the way, he buys a sports almanac he hopes to use in future betting (in the past). Scientist Doc Brown warns him of the perils of altering the natural course of history, which is a strange warning from the dude who invented the time machine. Marty doesn’t listen, and in a karmic twist of fate, has his sports almanac stolen by villain Biff Tannen, who goes back to 1955 and changes the course of history.

Most of the movie deals with an alternate 1985, where Biff is a billionaire sports-betting god who has turned the town into a dystopian hell. I remember watching this movie as a kid and being disappointed by how little I got to see of 2015. Marty spends a few movie minutes in the future, but is mostly scared of what he finds out: that his son is a loser and that he loses his job.

I find myself being terrified of the future most of the time, but I’m not sure if it’s from decades’ worth of sci-fi conditioning. Maybe it’s just human nature. We‘re in constant fear of the future and now that we’re finally here — the long-dreaded 2000s of sci-fi stories of yore — it’s actually more confusing than it is scary. We’ve always predicted the wrong things to be scared of — Y2K, the takeover of aliens or robots, time travel — but what we’re really scared of is the unpredictability of technology itself. Not knowing is the seed of all anxieties.

Alternate 1985

People from 1985 would look at us now and not see us as the future, but more of an alternate 1985, not quite similar to the one in The Back to the Future II, but nearly as strange. We’re wearing roughly the same clothes and synth pop is still popular. But what is this thing called the “Internet” that’s changing the way we behave in ways we never imagined?

The most relevant sci-fi movie of recent years imagines a more chilling dystopian future because it’s a more realistic one. It is Spike Jonze’s Her, where Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore falls in love with his computer’s operating system, his own Siri, as voiced by Scarlett Johansson. In the age of social media and increasingly intuitive artificial intelligence, this seems to be our newest fear: we would become so entrenched in our automated lives that they would be indistinguishable from our real lives. We no longer fear evil robots, or aliens, or the pitfalls of time travel. We now fear ourselves and the rich algorithms that fill the world with ourselves.

Our consciousness has been looking outward for so long — to space, to our own inventions — that we’re now shocked to find ourselves looking into a vast mirror. It turns out our natural progress isn’t horizontal or vertical; it’s internal. It is to fill the world with our self-consciousness, not necessarily because it makes the world better, but simply because our technologies allow us to. It’s not as scary as an ‘80s sci-fi movie but it’s weirder.

This is one future none of our sci-fi forefathers could’ve predicted. But as Back to the Future II points out, the future is already now. Our fears have finally caught up with us.

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