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Day One Hundred and Sixty-Six:  MY Paper on E.T.

If it is unknown to anyone I am in two summer courses this summer semester.  They run until the beginning of August and I am taking one contemporary cinema and one philosophy of literary art.  I did well on my E.T. paper and am giving myself the week off on Back to the Future because I deserve it.  I’ll write on the Lion King next week and everything will be back to normal.  I write this here to stick to it and so I have witnesses.  This was a conscious decision, I will not regret this in the future. 

My summer courses have been relatively painless, despite the small amount of readings and watching movies I feel like I can draw on my previous academic experience and expand on new idea’s.  The philosophy course has got me thinking and studying Existentialism, and with an upcoming paper analysisng a short story I think I’d better get a grasp on it.  As for right now I’m going to have a go at analysing Back to the Future through the existentialist view of indulging in the intricacies of one’s own self.

Back to the Future is based on the premis that Marty McFly “accidentally” goes back in time and “accidentally” confuses his parents’ meeting and ends up changing his fate and potentially ruining any chances of his own birth.  At this moment in the film I would argue that he is interacting with his own relationship with himself.  He is invested in the well-being of his own self and doing so interrupts the conscious route of “fate.”  Throughout the film Marty struggles to save his own being, while in itself creating a new persona for both of his parents and ultimately his life’s path. 

While being obsessed with his own self he affects his father’s life path as well as his mother’s, but also Doc, who in turn involves his future self in order to remain obsorbed in the time travel phenomenon.  If anything Marty makes selfish decisions after his own stupidity, but by fighting for his own life through encouragement to his father he unites his parents whose happiness he realises is greater than his own.  Although this “existential crisis” of identity becomes a blip on the radar in Marty Mfflu’s new life I am sure that the following films are just as involved with his own self as the first one is

Not aying McFly  is self-absorbed or anything.

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