Things I Learned While Watching: Back To The Future 2 on October 19, 2015
Fbombers,
We’re only a subject-able matter of hours away from the arrival of Marty and Doc and an occasionally conscious version of Elizabeth Shue. She plays Marty’s girlfriend/2015 mother of their kids in Back To The Future 2, but in the 1st movie that role was played by Claudia Wells, which really confused me when I watched these things in the 80’s as a kid. I hadn’t been divorced twice yet like I am now, so I didn’t get it.
In 1985 I thought people were irreplaceable. If you loved somebody you always loved them and when somebody loved you they always loved you. That’s how I thought it worked. I didn’t understand that somebody who loves you can actually stop loving you and instead of loving they can get downright sick of you to the point where their sickness becomes reactionary and decides to replace you with somebody else. In the 1st movie MJF loved Claudia Wells. Everybody knows that! All he wanted to do in that first one was: not fuck his mom, avoid fading away into non-existence, play Eddie Van Halen licks at the prom, and get back to 1985 so he could take Claudia to the dance in his new monster truck. Those were his goals.
But something happened between parts 1 and 2 and all of a sudden MJF isn’t taking Claudia to the dance anymore. He’s taking Elizabeth Shue. And everyone involved just went around acting like everything was business as usual. Claudia’s absence isn’t acknowledged. They just fucking replaced the shit out of her and we’re just supposed to accept it? Why?! Because Elizabeth Shue’s wearing the same white shirt/blue sweater combo that Claudia’d last been seen wearing and Shue’s got Claudia Wells 1980’s teen mom hair and Marty calls her Jennifer like he called Claudia Jennifer? Jennifer was Marty’s nickname for Claudia Wells. Not Elizabeth Shue’s! You can’t have the same nickname for two different girls! Everyone knows that! Everyone knows that Elizabeth Shue’s nickname is Adventures In Babysitting. Or Pudding. Don’t Google it! Just, shut the fuck up! Everyone knows this!
So 1985 me didn’t get it. MJF loved Claudia! But now he loves Elizabeth Shue?! Elizabeth Shue’s great and all, I mean I loved E S back then so it wasn’t that I thought she was unlovable it was just that MJF wasn’t supposed to love her because he was supposed to love Claudia because we’d already seen him love her at the end of the 1st fucking movie! But here we are at the very beginning of part 2, which is basically the exact scene from the end of the first movie played out again, but now instead of loving Claudia like we were used to he’s just, fuck, he’s loving Elizabeth Shue?!
My 1985 self could not accept this. But this 2015 version of me unfortunately gets it. Love is transferable and people get replaced because of it. That’s how it is, right? Is that how shit works now, Helen?! Shit works that way?! Well that’s just terrible! Right?! That’s how it works now?! Shit!
Helen, you made a cock ring, out of a Delorean?! That wasn’t fair. How am I supposed to fit a Delorean around my dick?! What do you mean you didn’t make it for my dick?! Who’s dick did you make it for?! That guy’s dick?! Are you serious?! That guy can’t even play an F chord! How the fuck’s he expect to play guitar at the prom and save the world if he can’t even play a proper F chord?! You went and gave your Delorean to that guy?! His dick gets terrible gas mileage! No I don’t know that for a fact. But I believe it. And applying today’s Republican Presidential Campaign logic, if you believe it, that makes it true!
Anyway…………..Marty and Jennifer’s kids look exactly like MJF. It’s like they’ve got zero Shue in them. They’re simply flat out doppleganged versions of Fox. Which poses the question: does this mean that their kids will get Parkinsons too? And if yes, maybe Doc can invent a cure using old banana peels and the backwash left in the bottom of beer cans and a borrowed sample of Claudia Well’s stool. And if he can do that maybe he could go back and cure MJF too. The ripple effects of such things could be astronomical. If Doc cured his Parkinsons MJF wouldn’t have had to leave Spin City. Which means Charlie Sheen would’ve never been brought in to replace him and maybe if that never happened Sheen would’ve never become the overpaid sitcom actor that he became and if he never became overpaid he wouldn’t have been able to afford all that cocaine and if he couldn’t afford cocaine maybe that poor porn star would’ve never ended up locked in his closet and if that never happened maybe all that time she spent in Charlie Sheen’s closet, maybe she would’ve spent that time more productively. Maybe she’d have spent the time sorting her life out. Or volunteering at an abused animal store. Maybe she would’ve decided to go back to school to get her massage therapy degree. Maybe she would’ve become a famous massage therapist and used her skills to fix an old scientist’s bad shoulder, and with that shoulder maybe the scientist would’ve went on to invent a cure for World War 3!
Ripples, Helen. Goddamn it. It all goes back to ripples.
And on the subject of ripples,
Fun Fact: For a little while there I was sorta almost related to Christopher Loyd. He was my Step-Uncle-In-Law, or something like that. Like I was once married to Helen, Christopher Loyd was once married to Helen’s Aunt. And like my marriage to Helen bombed at the box office, his marriage to Helen’s Aunt ended in sequel-less disappointment too.
They were already divorced by the time I married Helen but I met the Aunt at our wedding. On August 16, 2003 she lived an extravagant life as a New York City socialite, her lifestyle funded by alimony payments that she received from The Doc. For our wedding gift she wrote us a check and the check had her name on it and I noticed she was still using the Doc’s last name even though they were divorced and she was still using his money even though they were divorced so it was almost like Christopher Loyd had given me a wedding present because the cash, however briefly, had at one point belonged to him. A recent royalty check from Taxi maybe. Or maybe the cash had been pulled from his Back to The Future 2 savings. I don’t know.
All I know is that at the time I thanked Helen’s Aunt for the money but the whole time I was thanking her what I was really doing was thinking stuff like “Wow, this is weird. She’s shaking my hand with the same hand that most likely at one point in the days when she still loved him madly had been used to palm Christopher Loyd’s manhood, which means right now at this very moment I’m only five fingers and 2 degrees separated from Christopher Loyd’s dick.”
postscript: With Christopher Loyd’s money I bought a jug of Canadian Mist and a brown leather jacket. The whiskey’s gone now, me and Helen drank it. But I’ve still got that fucking jacket.
Last night I was fucked up and writing jokes about Helen Keller’s clit. At some point I stopped and thought, is this wrong? Is it wrong to write jokes about Helen Keller’s clit. And then because her name’s Helen, I started thinking about Helen and that night she called me chicken. Don’t call me chicken, Helen! You know how much I don’t hate that but MJF hate’s it so tonight I hate it too! Don’t call me chicken! When you told me you didn’t love me anymore that was our chicken. The way Marty loses his mind when someone calls him chicken, I lost my mind like that when Helen told me she didn’t love me. But I don’t take it personally anymore, Helen! I’m over that, Pudding! Fuck that. I don’t take it personally. It took me.
Here’s something that also pisses me off: I was only a few years younger than Marty was in the first movie and I’m only a few years younger than Marty is in 2015 so when I watched Back To The Future 2 tonight, naturally I got a little pissed. What’s up with that crazy old people makeup?! They look like shit. And they’re basically supposed to be my age and I mean, fuck, do I look like that? I’d like to think I’ve aged better than that. It’s like in 1989 everyone walked around thinking that people in their mid forties in 2015 were gonna look like they were 60. I don’t look 60, do I Helen? Wait. Don’t answer that. You don’t know what I look like. I look great goddamn it, Helen! I look great! I’m almost got abs you know. In the proper light with my shirt off you can almost see one! Yes, one. Maybe I don’t have abs exactly. But I’ve got an ab, at the very least of it. I’ve aged better than MJF anyway. That’s all I’m saying. I’ve got ab, Helen. So you know, suck it.
Helen probably isn’t watching Back To The Future 2 right now. She’s probably watching her weight or her boyfriend’s mad attempts to mount her with his dick wrapped in used Delorean or Ted 2.
There are no owls in Back To The Future 2, but maybe there should be. Owls don’t need hover boards in order to avoid the bullying of hoodlums. Owls don’t frown at anal. Owls can tell the goddamn difference between Claudia Wells and Elizabeth Shue.
(written for last night’s F Bomb reading at the Mercury Cafe, Denver CO)
Tags: abs, anal, Back To The Future, Christopher Loyd, Claudia Wells, cock rings, Deloreans, Eddie Van Halen, Elizabeth Shue, Get in the car Helen, love, middle age, movies, October 21 2015, owls, prom, pudding, time travel, writing
