You’ve gotta come with me… back to the future.” This famous sentence begins the science-fiction cinematic classic Back to the Future, one of the most influential pieces of media in the 20th century. Back to the Future is not just a story about young Michael J. Fox hopping in a DeLorean and traveling thirty years into the past. This movie is riddled with understated messages that build a foundation for understanding our past, and what our past should teach us about the future.
Over and over again, the characters in this film make mistakes, as all people do. However, what these characters do differently is they don’t allow themselves to get caught up in the things that have already happened. Instead, they look to what is ahead, living focused on what they can still do rather than what they did.
In the dawn of the new decade, it is more important than ever to think about what happened in the past, and how we are going to learn from that to be different in the present.
A personal interview with the creator of Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis, showed how the director believes the world has changed since the release of the blockbuster 35 years ago. When asked how he believes our focus on what is important has changed over time, Zemeckis answered, “I think people today, especially young, people place more importance on personal freedom than they do on acquiring material things.”
He commented on how much everything else has changed since the beginning of the Back to the Future series, saying that “I think television is getting better and movies are getting worse.”
And finally, when asked where he would go if he had his very own Delorean, Zemeckis said that “If I had the ability to travel in time and return to my present time I would be interested in going anywhere in the past.”
So, when doing into the new decade, we should definitely think about where we come from. But, unlike Marty Mcfly, we don’t have a time machine, and we shouldn’t live as we do. It’s all about learning from the past and living in the present.