I’ve never seen Back to the Future, but dedicating a day to it is ridiculous

I’ve never seen Back to the Future but I know I’d be more entertained riding the entire length of the District Line than watching it. You don’t need to break your arm to know it’s painful.

A cursory speed-read of Back to The Future’s Wikipedia page brings to mind an old Homer Simpson quote: “I’ve seen plays that were more exciting than this. Honest to God… plays!”

I don’t need to watch it to know I’ve seen more interesting plays than Back to the Future. In fact, here’s a quick list of them: Hamlet, Arcadia, The Cherry Orchard.

Who dedicates an entire day too something as cutesy and trivial as Back to the Future? A certain kind of man, with all the sexual charisma of a groaning wheelie bin, with mint condition Han Solo action figures stacked in his closet, who loves nostalgia cringefests like Back to the Future day because it allows him to feel in on a cheesy joke in a cold, harrowing world.

They get to tell work colleagues and strangers on Twitter that they’re “a bit of a geek” who “has an ironic preoccupation with tea, cats and zany films from the 80s”.

Too often these people forget how short life is, how it only ends in one way. We waste our time on dead-end friendships, pursuing people who don’t love us back, in jobs which resemble cul de sacs in their circularity and pointlessness. Above all we waste our time buying and consuming and participating in (no way of putting this politely) complete shit.

Back to the Future, as far as I can make out, is complete shit. A story about a boy with magic shoes and a flying snowboard, he meets a guy with the look of a disgraced clergyman and together they team up to help the boy shag his mother. Or something.

What I’m getting at is that Marty’s story is hardly Pasolini (google him), hell, it’s barely even Paul Thomas Anderson. It takes real mental effort to sit down and wrestle with a film like La Dolce Vita, or to curl up with Mrs Dalloway. But it’s worth it, because the best art really is transcendent, really does make the world feel fresh and raw again.

Life is too short to waste on a film about a car that’s also (wow!) a time machine. Today, on Back to the Future day, I’m watching people waste time and energy they’ll never get back.

There are three full-time professional journalists (three!) currently liveblogging the day over at The Guardian. David Cameron made a joke about it in Parliament – imagine his advisor telling him how well it would play with “Generation Buzzfeed”. Every dire corporate Twitter account in the world is piling in and on the same advice Cameron had.

It’s testament to our lowered sights and diminished expectations that this sugary, watery charade is what passes for fun.