best endtimes ever

A lot of Back To The Future is about creative frustration. In the beginning of the movie, Marty McFly fails an audition with his band the Pinheads. (Huey Lewis, in a great cameo, tells him, “I’m afraid you’re just too damned loud”): 

His girlfriend Jennifer tries to cheer him up, and tells him his demo tape is really good and he should send it to the record company. He replies:

What if I send in the tape and they don’t like it? I mean, what if they say I’m no good? What if they say, “Get outta here, kid. You got no future”? I mean, I just don’t think I can take that kind of rejection. Jesus, I’m starting to sound like my old man!

When he goes back in time, he discovers that his father, George McFly, is actually a writer of sci-fi short stories. (”Get out of town! I didn’t know you did anything creative.”)

But his father has the same fear of rejection, which includes asking Lorraine — his mother — out to the dance. Marty uses some of Doc Brown’s words to try to persuade him: “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”

When that doesn’t work, he dresses up like “Darth Vader” and threatens to melt his brain:

When Marty meets Doc Brown in the past, he’s a failed inventor: 

When Marty shows him the time machine, he says, in absolute surprise, “It works! I finally invented something that works!”

Then he shows Marty the flux capacitor diagram and tells a story about falling off his toilet and seeing an image: 

The rest of the movie is all about problem-solving (with science!) — they have to get Marty back to the future, and they have to make do with what they have (pretty much the definition of creativity.)

Later on, there’s the goofy scene with Marvin Berry, cousin to Chuck, who says, “You know that new sound you’ve been looking for? Listen to this!”

Of course, this is ridiculous, and most of this is an outlandish depiction of the actual creative process, but I think one reason people like me adore Back To The Future is that it’s essentially positive — maybe even naively so — about creativity: there are problems in life, and if you work on them long enough, you can solve them. 

If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.

(via cavanaugh - screen play prod. open mike eagle by Open Mike Eagle)

I just wanted to let you know that we had a blast talking about the whole “placelessness” concept in my class last Friday, and the hotels video was the perfect example to build that discussion around.

In short, it’s the beginning of the term and we’ve spent the first few classes talking about “space” and “place” as scholarly terms, using writings by Yi-Fu Tuan and Tim Creswell to understand the differences between space and place, talk about how one makes a space into a place (and how one might want to make a place into a space, in certain situations), and what human geographers mean when they say “sense of place.” The general class consensus was that places are good (I’m simplifying), and the process of transforming a space to a place can be a meaningful, identity-building experience, and, at the end, you might even end up with something you’d be comfortable calling a “home.” But, one student mentioned during last Wednesday’s class that there are potential advantages to having places that aren’t unique, like having access to what is essentially the same McDonald’s or Walmart no matter what state or country you’re in. Discussional chaos ensued, and I knew I had to show this video in the next class.

I paired it with this short reading, and then we spent most of the rest of the time talking about why hotels and airports are so weird. One thing I found really interesting was that most of the class said that they leave the “Do Not Disturb” sign up when they leave their rooms, because they find it discomfiting to return to a room where the signs of their sort-of “place” have been reset to hotel-default in their absence. This was neat, because I do that, and always sort of thought it made me some kind of weird deviant. Interestingly, the students who don’t leave the sign up said they don’t because typically the room is such a mess because of all of their disorganized travel paraphernalia and they prefer to have a clean slate when they come back to it later. Basically, it seemed like those people who didn’t put up the sign never attempted to make the place feel like their place in the first place, so they lost nothing when the room was reset. In short, they dodged your “Where is a hotel room?” question by never attempting to make it anywhere (their words, not mine).

We also got off on a semi-related tangent regarding the degree to which you can take “home” with you, and if somewhere becoming a “home” is time-dependent, with many students having experiences where they’d lived, say, five years in a place without ever feeling like it was home, but found other places “homey” after a few months. They seemed to come collectively to the conclusion that “home” or even “sense of place” is symbiotic: there needs to be something about the person that finds a particular space appealing, but there also needs to be something about that particular space that allows for…umm…place-ing by that person. If that makes any sense.

Also, nobody had ever heard the term “liminal space” before, but as soon as I explained it to them in the context of cross-country travel, they all knew exactly what I was talking about. There’s another entire class discussion or paper or something there in how quickly everyone bonded over the crappiness of liminal spaces, but that’s for another day.

Steve Wozniak, Apple Disk II Drive, 1978. USA. Exhibition Interface, Powerhouse Museum