Well, that was fun. The Back to the Future movies are probably better enjoyed one at a time than back to back....
The first and the second each end with a to-be-continued cliffhanger which is supposed to be fun because you have to wait.
I never once felt like leaving and finishing the rest some other time by watching the DVDs I have at home. It was the most enthusiastic movie audience I've ever been part of — people applauded and hooted not only during various climactic moments, but also when the time machine and Doc first appeared, the first time one of the characters said the words "back to the future," and of course, when Doc said "October 21, 2015."
There are some live-theater experiences that cannot be had at home.
At one point, Back to the Future Part III stopped in the middle... Audience members called out things like: "You've disrupted the space-time continuum!" "Not enough jigowatts!"
I love stuff like that... much as I hate the malfunctions. I was once in some little theater in Greenwich Village that was showing the Marlon Brando movie "The Fugitive Kind" — "Val Xavier, a drifter of obscure origins arrives at a small town and... is pursued by Carol Cutere..." Marlon and Carol/Joanne Woodward are tooling along in a sportscar and she's saying: "I'm just a lewd vagrant, and I'm gonna show 'em, and show 'em all, just how lewd a lewd vagrant can be, when she puts her whole heart into it, the way I do mine," and then she suddenly points off screen and says: "Hey, turn off here." Immediately, the film malfunctions and shuts down, as if the projectionist had taken "Hey, turn off here" as an order. I've never been simultaneously so amazed and annoyed.
That's his clever answer in case you're looking for specifics about anything he can't or doesn't want to answer, as stated on "Fox News Sunday" this morning when Chris Wallace asked him about how he'd use the debt limit. Pushed, he used the magic word again: "I do not want to say that because I want to show unpredictability. You have to. You can't just go around and say that." What a concept! It reminded me of Nixon's secret plan to end the Vietnam War back in 1968, but Meade said Nixon never said he had a "secret plan." That was how his opponent's put it, mocking him. So Trump isn't like Nixon in that respect. He's getting out ahead of his opponents. It can't be mockery or he's self-mocking. It's a mockery inoculation, an inmockulation.
Later, in the panel discussion, WaPo's Charles Lane said about exactly what I had been thinking:
... I found myself smiling, and laughing at times at his performance, and feeling very entertained, but when I actually read the transcript of it, right, and looked at the actual words coming out of his mouth, none of it made any sense. He said we have too much predictability in this country. I want to be unpredictable. Well, that is a new campaign slogan, right? Vote for me, who knows what I'll do in the White House? I mean, the next minute after he says how great it is to be unpredictable, he says we absolutely must defund Planned Parenthood. Right? He waffled on affirmative action. That's an issue that has been out there many years. It's a fully digested issue in the political system. Lots of people have a position on that, one way or another. Not Donald Trump, who wants to be the leader of the conservative party in this country. So it is this incredible disconnect between the affect, and the demeanor and the show that he puts on, and the actual substance behind it, which I insist is still lacking....
I guess from Trump's point of view, Lane is lagging, not getting it, thrown off by all that wonderful unpredictability that we need so much. Americans don't want details, we want unpredictability.
What echoed in my head as I wrote that last sentence was: I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic!
I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! – Don’t turn the light on!
