Paradigm

… Back to the Future is not only a prime illustration of a new narrative genre, it is also a commercial event and a narrative commodity constructed at a uniquely regressive moment in American history, very much entertaining a nostalgic revival of that earlier conservative period that was the American 1950s. Something in the time-travel narrative seems pre-eminently suitable for its use in ideological interpellation, in ways that the high literary narrative, itself scarcely exempt from ideological investment, is nonetheless formally intent on eschewing. Literature also has its equivalent of the philosophical distinction between episteme and doxa, knowledge and opinion – which does not mean that its versions of ‘knowledge’ are any less ideological at some deeper level. In Back to the Future we find a kind of Freudo-Marxian perspective in which the various social and ultimately political connotations are managed by way of an Oedipal situation (the protagonist returns to the moment of his own parents’ courtship, which he is, in effect, able to arrange). The 1980s family is thereby restored (and even improved) by this excursion to the Eisenhower era, at the same time as the anxious apprenticeship of the neo-conservatism of the Reagan era is assuaged and reassured by the emergent consumer culture of the earlier period …