Back to the Future Breakdown: Why Doc Brown, Not George McFly, Is the Father Marty Really Saves

Back to the Future presents itself as the story of a boy saving his father, but the father Marty McFly really saves is Doc Brown, not George McFly. That is the key to the question the film never answers: why a 17 year old high school student's best friend is a disgraced nuclear physicist.

There is a literal answer. In a 2015 Back to the Future comic, Doc hires Marty as his assistant after Marty tries to steal audio gear, which is why Marty uses the amp. No one reads the comics, though, and the deeper answer is hidden at the core of the film itself. I'll get to it at the end of this piece.

Back to the Future's casting chaos began before the first scene

Super fans will know that the familiar ending of the 1985 film was reshot for the opening of Back to the Future Part II, replacing Claudia Wells with Elisabeth Shue. Before we feel bad for Wells, she was herself a recast from Melora Hardin, Jan from The Office. Marty was originally played by Eric Stoltz, who had replaced the first choice, Michael J. Fox.

The film was directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Zemeckis and Bob Gale. It is the seminal time travel film that gave us Avengers: Endgame, Rick and Morty, theme park rides, a stage musical, stand up bits, and an unauthorized fourquel screenplay I wrote that will never get produced while the original filmmakers are alive. Despite some goofy 80s camp, incest played for laughs included, it remains a perfectly structured thrill ride. It holds up not in spite of its cringe but because the filmmakers knew exactly how weird and sexually charged it is. Exposing the buried moral filth of the 50s and 80s is the entire point.

Back to the Future is a father and son story, not a time travel movie

Despite its reputation as the best time travel movie, Back to the Future uses time travel as a device for a simpler story in which a boy saves his father. Break it down with the DeLorean's time circuits: in Act 1, in 1985, Marty's dad ruins his weekend. In Act 2, in 1955, Marty befriends his dad so he can return home. In Act 3, back in 1985, Marty saves his dad. Yet truly behind the wheel is Marty's weird relationship with Doc.

The opening shot in Doc's lab sets the tone. The clocks are synchronized to 7:53, except the one on the floor, set to 8:18, the correct time, since the others are 25 minutes slow. The hour hand on that floor clock isn't where it should be. Maybe it's simply broken, but either way Doc has broken time. Everything in this opening foreshadows what follows: a clock recreating Harold Lloyd's famous hanging scene from the 1923 silent film Safety Last, which Christopher Lloyd, no relation, recreates in the climax; Lea Thompson's name appearing alongside a drink, since Lorraine's drinking problem starts in her teens; a newspaper saying Doc's mansion burned down and his estate was sold, explaining his insurance money; the JVC camcorder; and a report about plutonium stolen by a Libyan terrorist group.

Michael J. Fox's Family Ties schedule shaped the film

In that opening we only see Marty's feet and close ups from behind, all Fox's stand in. Fox isn't actually on screen until he sits up in the rubble. He was Zemeckis and Gale's first choice: a gifted physical comedian, but more importantly Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties, a teenage conservative with liberal parents and the face of the right's resurgence as Ronald Reagan brought 1950s style values back. Zemeckis and Gale came of age in the late 60s and felt a disconnect from their parents. Gale saw his dad's old yearbook photo and wondered if they would have been friends, and Zemeckis always suspected his mom's moral scolding hid a more adventurous youth. Their goal was to throw the icon of 80s neoconservatism back to the 50s and expose that era as a scary, violent time.

Fox was tied up with Family Ties, so they cast Stoltz, a more dramatic actor. After five weeks they realized he wasn't fitting their vision, went back to the studio, increased the budget by 5 million dollars and reshot with Fox. Because Fox was shorter, Hardin was replaced by Wells. Fox shot Family Ties every weekday, then slept on a mattress in a station wagon on the way to the Back to the Future set for nighttime exteriors, with daytime exteriors on weekends. When he looks exhausted, or commits to pratfalls and hood slides with heavy eyelids, remember that. The costly reshoots also forced savings, like confining the action to the Universal backlot and opening on a stand in.

Act 1 plants Marty's want, his fear, and the props that pay off

Marty tours the town square so we can compare it later: it's a parking lot now but a grassy park in the 50s, storefronts are closing, and the cinema has become a church as the 80s saw the rise of the evangelical Christian right. Strickland tells Marty he's as hopeless as his old man, giving us Marty's want, to play music at the dance, and his fear, ending up like his dad. His band, The Pinheads, plays Huey Lewis and the News' The Power of Love, one of two songs Lewis wrote for the film. The other guitarist is Fox's guitar instructor, and the grumpy judge who stops Marty's song ruining solo is Huey Lewis himself. Outside, Marty swats a branch on the same tree that will snag the cable later, "a tree that hates Marty McFly for all time."

Marty fears creative rejection, inherited from his father, but also something deeper, having no future, and by the end of Act 2 he will both bomb on stage and face erasure. The Save the Clock Tower plea reads as a comedic distraction, yet saving the clock tower is exactly what Marty does, and the flyer with Jennifer's grandmother's number becomes a key prop. At home, you can hear the grease in George's hair when Biff knocks on his head. In the altered ending George's hair is gray, so he was greasing it to look younger. George clenches his fist as if to hit Biff, then releases it on the word confrontations. In the next scene Crispin Glover has a red scrape on his finger, making me wonder if George punched a wall, or if the actor hit something to get into character. The peanut brittle comes from a deleted scene in which a neighbor pressures pushover George into buying some. The board game Life sits behind George as Lorraine feels stuck with him, and he's watching the Honeymooners rerun whose original airing Lorraine's family watches in 1955.

The DeLorean was a joke because the car was a flop

Doc's truck carries a bumper sticker reading one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. Originally Marty was going to drive into a nuclear test site, back when the time machine was a government invention and a refrigerator. Executive producer Steven Spielberg later used that idea of nuking the fridge in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. A DeLorean was equally silly in the 80s: sales were lagging and John DeLorean was on the news every night for drug charges. That's the inside joke when the car won't start in Act 3 and when Marty asks if Doc built a time machine out of a DeLorean. It's funny because the car was bad.

When Einstein travels, the fire trails show unfinished effects, left in even in remastered versions. The editors had only nine weeks to cut the film because a rough cut tested around mid May 1985, so successfully that Universal moved the release up to July 3. Einstein returns at 1:21 a.m., as in 1.21 gigawatts, a pronunciation that apparently came from one expert the filmmakers consulted. The film is full of goofy choices, but it embraces them so they feel intentional.

The time travel rules stay simple so the stakes can stay high

The best known time travel stories treated history as unchangeable, but Zemeckis and Gale wanted the past to alter history through the butterfly effect, which Gale cited from Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder. I sort time travel stories into eight categories, and this film falls in the first, one malleable timeline where changes echo forward and produce playful storybook endings. Part II expands into branching timelines, the multiverse logic of Avengers: Endgame. Here there is no grandfather paradox, no bootstrap paradox and no multiverse, which gives it the most dramatic stakes: if Marty is erased, he is gone for good.

Time travel here is the simple act of driving through your hometown and seeing what has changed, and changes appear as a fading photograph, the way faces fade from memory. The one futuristic element, a nuclear reactor, makes the film a veiled commentary on how 80s nuclear brinkmanship took us back to the 50s. Doc's plutonium vials look a lot like Marvel's Pym Particle vials in Endgame. When the Libyans shoot Doc, Fox keeps his arms raised, which reads as intensity but was because he was crammed in by the time circuit gear. Doc's body lies to Marty's right as he hits 88, just as it will in 1955. There are no glowing wormholes, just a flash of light.

1955 Hill Valley plays like Marty's dream

The Peabody farm's father and son, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, are named after the time traveling duo from the Rocky and Bullwinkle shorts. Sherman's comic is Tales from Space. Universal head Sid Sheinberg proposed Spaceman from Pluto as the film's title, but Spielberg replied to his memos as if it were a hilarious joke, and Sheinberg reportedly dropped it in shame. Marty takes out one of Peabody's pines, turning Twin Pines Mall into Lone Pine Mall. The Lyon Estates billboard shows the McFly house painted seafoam instead of yellow, and the Chordettes' 1954 Mr. Sandman frames it all as a possible dream, which makes Fox's sleep deprivation a happy accident.

In my theory that every American film is trying to be either The Wizard of Oz or Citizen Kane, a dream escape or a puzzle mystery, this is definitely Oz: Doc is the wizard and Marty is Dorothy entering Technicolor. Marty passes a sign for Cattle Queen of Montana, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan, and the campaign car says re elect Mayor Red Thomas. Red is the homeless man in the altered 1985.

Act 2 reveals the uncomfortable truth behind the legend

Behind Lorraine's romantic meet cute legend is a lecherous truth: Marty realizes his dad was a pervert. Lorraine's father even calls Marty another one of these kids jumping in front of his car. My single favorite shot is the simple bedroom scene, where the blocking is perfect: Fox falls out of bed, Thompson spins, tosses the jeans from her hope chest, Lorraine sneaks a smiling peek in the mirror, and Fox buttons the single take with a probably painful pratfall. Marty shows Doc a photo of himself and his siblings, and the top of Dave's head is already fading off. Does it make sense for history to erase the siblings slowly? Maybe, maybe not, but it's more fun, because "it's not a list of rules spoken to each other by robots."

Doc's crack about Jane Wyman as first lady is wrong, since she divorced Reagan in 1949 and he married Nancy Reagan in 1952, but it shows Doc is buried in his work. His line that the president has to look good on television echoes the JFK debate against Nixon, which many historians credit for his 1960 win, and Reagan's telegenic charm. A redhead puts a kick me sign on George, and he's the same guy who cuts in at the dance, so George's whole world bullies him. Zemeckis uses a recurring two shot, Marty facing forward, focused on the future, while Doc paces back and forth thinking about the ramifications, and it frames Marty and George later too. In the cafeteria, George vanishes the moment Biff touches Lorraine.

The Walkman tape reads Edward above Van Halen because the band didn't want to be associated with the film, although Eddie Van Halen contributed a guitar riff. Marty's hair dryer is from Doc's suitcase, and a deleted scene had him threaten George with it, while another had 1955 Doc find a Playboy in that suitcase. When Marty punches Biff from a higher angle, that's Eric Stoltz, one of his few surviving shots. Stoltz was closer to Thomas F. Wilson's height, and reportedly Wilson didn't like how physical Stoltz got. The town square chase is just two laps around the block and borrows from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it's a false victory: Marty inserts himself where history doesn't need him and creates an enemy.

The dance tests George, and Marty too

Marty's punching bag ties to a deleted scene of boxing lessons implying George was a lefty forced to use his right hand, which might explain his awkward scribbling, and why his punch on Biff comes with his left. In another deleted scene Doc bribes a cop, a reminder the 50s weren't so wholesome. George's watch is late, but Lorraine wanted Marty to make a move anyway, so fate intervened, punishing Marty for creating an enemy while righting history. Biff appears in Marty's blind spot, becoming an eternal evil across the sequels, comics and animated series, all because Marty showed off. His cut lip is solid continuity. The 50s cruelty runs deep: 3D uses a racial slur against Marvin Berry and the Starlighters, and Match, played by Billy Zane, doesn't stop it.

George's rehearsed line gives him the courage to land the left hook, yet the photo isn't fixed because George hasn't really proven it yet and Marty hasn't overcome his fears yet. On stage he feels his future being erased, a pain beyond any dusted Avenger. George, overcoming the redhead, proves his courage wasn't a fluke. Zemeckis and Gale considered cutting Johnny B. Goode, but the test audience loved it. The joke of a white kid inspiring Chuck Berry inverts history, and that is the point; Berry was fine with it. Within the film's logic, Marty shifts into a Van Halen solo seconds later, so Chuck would have heard distorted chaos. George still smiles supportively in the crowd.

The clock tower finale makes Doc the hero of his own loop

Zemeckis made Lloyd and Fox scream their argument, justified by wind, giving a slow scene insane stakes. Alan Silvestri's score here is his best work, withholding the full main theme until it's earned. Doc slipping from the ledge circles back to the fall that inspired the flux capacitor, and the sequence is edited like the Star Wars trench run. Doc patches the timeline using his own body as a conduit. The theater shows The Atomic Kid, another nod to the nuclear draft. Then we stay with Doc, who will spend 30 years building a time machine out of fated determination.

Back in 1985, the clock tower ledge stays broken and Red is homeless, played by George Buck Flower, an adult film actor. Doc survives with a bulletproof vest, the film shrugging off its own rules. But George is kind of a jerk, the materialistic yuppie Glover reportedly hated, and Doc storms back to disrupt that storybook ending. George's wisdom about putting your mind to it came from Doc first. George and Doc share parallel compositions but never meet, because Doc is the father Marty saves. Gale has described a neighbor who showed him a darkroom: "he was a real Doc Brown." To Be Continued was added later for home video, so originally it ended on that cliffhanger, father and son saving each other.

Do you think Doc Brown is Marty's true father figure, or is George the dad who really changes?