How "Back to the Future" Made Me an Engineer
Notes from My Hundredth Rewatch of Back to the Future
A fair warning, this is a major nerd out on the movie Back to the Future.
Recently, I took some days off to slow down and re-watched my all time favorite. I quite literally know every line of it, and yet it keeps me in tension every time, guessing if Doc will manage in time to put the wires together before the lightning strikes, if George will have the courage to stand up for himself and if Marty will make it in time, every single time. I shed a tear when Marty’s parents are about to kiss on that dance and I can’t help myself but to sing and try-not-to-break something along to the Johnny B. Goode.
This time I noticed that not only did it possibly shape my secret admiration for those full-skirted, cinched-waist 1950s prom dresses, as well as heavily influenced my early years taste in music towards Rock ’n’ Roll, but it is also pretty much one of the reasons I pursued math and eventually became an engineer.
You can get out of any situation as long as you apply critical thinking
Marty is being constantly put into tricky situations and he always finds creative and engineered ways to get out of them. Numerous improvisations with skateboards, Darth Vader trick with his father, grabbing the Almanac from Beef, Frisbee-ing the gun from Tannen’s hand... there are so many examples of how he gets out of situations that require fast thinking and using what’s at hand.
And when he’s out of his depth, there’s always Doc he can turn to for help, who’ll give scientific structure and systematic approach to the larger issues at hand.
Nothing’s ever easy
When something feels too easy, there’s a catch. Marty thinks he got his hands on the Almanac, only to find out it’s the “oh la la” magazine. In Part III, he thinks he can just gas up the DeLorean and drive home - except the fuel line’s ruptured, gasoline doesn’t exist yet. And poor Emmett Brown from the original 1955 timeline had it the worst: he saved Marty twice without even the context of their friendship, sent him back, then had to meet him all over again and ship him off to the Wild West.
Every time the plan looks like it’s working, the universe reminds you that you missed something.
This one’s a life lesson I’ve leaned on a lot. If something seems suspiciously smooth, slow down and check what you’re not seeing. If the code works the first time - there’s a bug there.
Time travel is trouble
Well, maybe that’s not a practical knowledge, but at least I remember how I struggled with some parts when I watched it the first few times (probably first one being at the age of 3) and how I analyzed it over the years. This was my first encounter with logic and paradoxes, I just didn’t know it yet 😃
Later, after reading sci-fi a lot I learned to “forgive” inconsistencies for the sake of a great story. I think it was one of the authors of The Expanse who said “all it takes is one miracle”.1
Decisions matter
This one I’d say screwed me over a bit. I’ve gone along with my life possibly being too conscious about my choices because well see how disastrous one decision can be. So it took me years to unlearn this. Most decisions are reversible, or at least adjustable. Or at least I hope so...
Perspective on generations
I’ve always been friends with my parents and I love how this movie explores the thought of how that would look like in practice. It teaches you to accept and understand that your parents were once kids too.
It also explores the almost Márquezian idea of “history keeps repeating itself over and over again”. While also giving you the understanding in the end that “everything is still in your hands”.
How people are happy later in life if they have stayed true to themselves
In the original timeline, George is beaten down. He lets Biff push him around at work, he never finishes the science fiction stories he’s been writing in private, and you can see in every scene that some part of him gave up a long time ago. In the new timeline - the one where he stood up for himself, once - he’s still writing. And now he’s a published author. Confident. Happy. Same guy, just one who didn’t fold.
That’s the part that gets me every time. It wasn’t about becoming someone else. He was always a writer. He just needed to stop being afraid of being one.
Building models before production
Doc doesn’t just hope the lightning plan works. He builds a tiny scale model of the town square, with a toy DeLorean on a string, a miniature clock tower, and a literal pyrotechnic stand-in for the lightning bolt. He runs the whole sequence on the model first. He times it. He adjusts. Then they go do it for real.
Probably this made my approaches to coding too scientific. But it definitely made me comprehend science experiments and modelling better.
Oh yeah, and gambling is trouble
I think this was also wired into the fabric of my subconscious - easy wins, gambling - and you end up ruining the universe.
Afterword
Even though sometimes I feel like we’re living in the Biff’s version of reality I still hold onto the hope that one day I’ll make something - build something, write something, design something - that lands on someone the way this movie landed on me. Keep building ;)
I didn’t find the exact reference, I found only a quote attributed to Terence McKenna: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest’, but I vividly remember hearing it from one of The Expanse authors in some interview, when they were talking about the “Epstein Drive”, referring to it as THAT miracle.