Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the future - the day that Marty McFly stepped into the 2015 version of Hill Valley as envisioned by the creators of Back to the Future Part II in 1989. The same year that Lynch/Frost Productions descended upon the Seattle area to establish Twin Peaks, Robert Zemeckis released the ambitious sequel to his 1985 hit Back to the Future. After spending all of his time travel in 1955 for the original film, Marty zips back and forth across the space/time continuum in this follow-up. He rescues his own son from catastrophe, returns to an alternate version of '85 run by a distinctly Trumpian Biff Tanner and finally winds up returning to the site of the first movie: spying on past events while trying to retrieve an item from the future which could threaten his own present. Got that? If Peaks can be perplexing and maddening due to its ambiguity and surrealism, Part II poses the opposite challenge. Its intricate interplay of meta-narratives and sci-fi concepts may make you either giddy or dizzy depending on your mood. While Marty initially travels to the year that David Lynch would film The Return, and his return to the Potterville-like alt-'85 resonates with Cooper's and Carrie's nocturnal sojourn in the season three finale, it's the third part of Back to the Future Part II that connects with Twin Peaks most strongly: a hero attempts to both alter and maintain the past and a filmmaker returns to his own earlier work, incorporating new and old footage into a new context, presenting the familiar from a skewed perspective.
After exploring the film in its own right as well as its Peaks connections, this podcast also incorporates some bonus material from my Patreon archives: a two-minute quickie capsule review of the original Back to the Future, a clip from my video essay comparing different eras in the town, an early tease for this eventual recording, and some memorable listener feedback which, unusually, scorns rather than praises the subject matter. This episode kicks off a new themed mini-season: "Disordered Stories", in which chronologically skewed films echo, amplify, and contrast with Twin Peaks' own narrative games.
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LINKS FOR EPISODE 18
Crispin Glover on Letterman - 1st Appearance - Full clip, good quality / Crispin Glover on Letterman 8/21/87 (videos)
Welcome to Hill Valley (Back to the Future video essay w/ cross-post intro)
My review of The Big Chill & Return of the Secaucus Seven (+ reading the part discussing eighties films about the sixties on Patreon)
Recently on Twin Peaks Conversations - Ominous Whoosh author John Thorne (public part 1) & ($5/month tier part 2)
Recently on Lost in the Movies podcast - The Shanghai Gesture
Recently on Lost in the Movies patron podcast ($1/month) - Concluding the 80s... Red Dawn, Do the Right Thing & Hail Mary (capsules on Stranger Things, Top Gun: Maverick, The Goonies, Gremlins, Midnight Run, Scarface + feedback/media/work updates including Encanto & more)
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