- Doc!
- Marty!
- Wait, wait, wait, stop the movie.
Why is this skateboarding, guitar playing,
cute girl dating, 17 year old friends with
an AARP card carrying, plutonium stealing,
flux capacitor creating, crackpot scientist?
Does no one else find it slightly odd
that they're meeting in an empty mall parking lot
at 1:15 in the morning?
I mean, this isn't your normal high school friendship.
They don't copy each other's biology homework.
They don't complain about girls.
They don't go to movies on Friday nights.
No, Marty McFly and Dr. Emmett Brown
have more of a 'bros don't let bros
'steal plutonium from Libyan Nationalists'
kind of thing going on.
- Doc, you don't just walk into a store
and buy plutonium.
- John Mulaney hilariously pointed this out
in his Netflix special 'The Comeback Kid.'
- Who's his best friend?
A disgraced nuclear physicist.
All right, proceed.
- And he's right; it's a little fucking weird.
Not quite 'your mom having the hots for you' weird,
but just
weird.
Bob Gale, the film's co-writer and co-creator
of the entire Back the Future universe,
gave us his reason for Doc and Marty's friendship
back in 2011.
"For years, Marty was told that Doc Brown was dangerous,
"a crackpot, a lunatic.
"So being a red-blooded American teenage boy,
"age 13 or 14, he decided to find out just why
"this guy was so dangerous.
"Marty snuck into Doc's lab and was fascinated by
"all the cool stuff that was there.
"When Doc found him there, he was delighted
"to find that Marty thought he was cool
"and accepted him for what he was."
13 or 14 years old?
Bob, you made it weirder.
First off, pick a year.
Was he 13 or was he 14?
This is your universe.
There is no reason to be vague.
And what cool stuff was Marty fascinated by?
A room full of clocks, an automated can opener,
an overpowered speaker that almost killed him?
At face value, Marty seems like a pretty cool kid.
As I mentioned before, he's in a band.
He can skateboard; he plays guitar,
and he has an attractive girlfriend.
But what other friends does Marty have?
In fact, what friends does Marty make
over the course of three movies?
We see him with his band, but there doesn't seem
to be any camaraderie amongst him and
any of the other Pinheads.
In the future, he still seems like a loner
who's kind of stepped on by all of his superiors.
And in the wild west, his only friends
are his ancestors who suspiciously look a lot like him.
And don't get me started on his incredibly
depressing family life.
His dad's a pushover,
and his mom's an overbearing alcoholic.
But what does Marty truly love?
Music.
The franchise starts with Marty getting blown
away 30 feet by a speaker.
He brainwashes his father with heavy metal music,
and he lives his dream of performing
at the high school dance by playing "Johnny B. Goode."
When we first encounter Doc Brown in the past
on November 5, 1955, you might not notice
a saxophone hanging in the background of his workshop.
So let's say Bob Gale is right,
they met innocently early in the 1980's,
two loners who want so much more from life
bond over their mutual love for music.
One's stuck with a shitty home life
trying to grasp his future.
The other a disgraced scientist struggling
with the constant failures of his past.
It's innocent enough, but still
something just doesn't quite add up.
Which brings me to my next theory:
what else do slacker teenagers love?
Sleep.
Marty is constantly sleeping or passed out
or knocked unconscious over the course of the trilogy,
and every time he wakes up, he's very confused
and disoriented.
But like most slackers, Marty is a kid with big dreams:
getting signed by the record company,
taking Jennifer up to the lake,
and maybe, possibly
of time traveling with an imaginary best friend
who can fix all the problems in his life.
Maybe Marty McFly is a lucid dreamer.
- It's all a dream.
It's just a very intense dream.
- And he dreams up the time traveling DeLorean.
And he dreams up the...
- Good, kind and loyal friend.
- And it makes sense 'cause he's in desperate need of one.
Someone or something to make the pain go away.
His Oedipus complex with his mom...subconscious.
His triumphant strut across
the Hill Valley High School auditorium stage...
pure aspirational imagination.
- If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.
- How else do you explain Mr. Strickland never aging?
Well, it's either that or Marty met Doc
innocently as writer Bob Gale said around
the age of 13 or 14, and he's been hanging around
Doc's workshop for three to four years
and somehow never noticed or heard Doc
talk about his 30 year mission of building a time machine.
Are you kidding me?
In all of this time around his best bud,
Marty never heard one mention of the infamous
flux capacitor?
Never once saw a DeLorean?
Are we really supposed to believe that
the inquisitive Marty McFly never asked
Doc what he was working on?
Or that Doc Brown wouldn't tell his only friend
that he invented time travel?
I call bullshit.
Marty McFly is asleep, dreaming of sweet
Huey Lewis and the News tunes, time traveling
in a dope DeLorean with his kooky best friend, Doc Brown,
fixing the past in an attempt to make his actual
real life lonely present slightly more tolerable.
Too dark?
Okay.
Well, let me go back and touch on that whole thing
with Marty and his mom for one second...
(explosion)
(upbeat music)