The comedian John Mulaney in 2017 released a standup special containing a viral rant about “Back to the Future,” explaining how weird the movie now seems, given its reputation as a family classic.
He imagines two guys pitching the idea for the 1985 sci-fi comedy and struggling to explain why the hero, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is best friends with a disgraced nuclear physicist (Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown) who is “either 40 or 80 — even we don’t know how old this guy’s supposed to be.”
Or why instead of, say, preventing the Kennedy assassination, Marty’s time-travel adventure instigates a twisted Freudian plot in which he has to make sure his parents get together, thus ensuring he’s still conceived, and in the process nearly hooks up with a teenaged version of his mom (Lea Thompson as Lorraine).
Then Mulaney adds in passing: “And also, we’re gonna imply that a white man wrote ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ So, we’re gonna take that away from ’em.”
He’s referring to the classic Chuck Berry song, which Marty famously performs with the band at his parents’ high-school dance, prompting a musician named “Marvin Berry” to call his cousin, Chuck, to tip him off to a new sound.
And so, the film would have us believe, “Johnny B. Goode” was born, thanks to a time-surfing, guitar-shredding suburban white kid, not the pioneering Black artist from Missouri who helped fuse rhythm and blues with country into the energetic brew from which early rock music emerged.
The scene creates what in time travel stories is known as the “bootstrap paradox,” named for the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” (a popular idiom about self-sufficiency that is literally impossible to accomplish.)
In this scenario, the origin of a piece of information is obscured within a temporal loop that makes it appear as if it created itself. Thus it violates our understanding of cause and effect, while overloading college-freshman mind circuitry with its implications on the opposing concepts of determinism and free will.
“Back to the Future” — which turns 40 years old this month — suggests Marty heard “Johnny B. Goode” as a kid who loved rock and roll. He then traveled back in time and performed the song. Its original author heard this stranger play it, then recorded it himself.
Who really wrote “Johnny B. Goode,” then? Marty could not have written it because he already knew the song. Berry (according to the film) didn’t write it because was looking for ideas and heard it being performed by a kid who assumed it had already been written by Berry. The song, essentially, was incepted into the space-time continuum of its own volition.
Other versions of the paradox occur in “Back to the Future,” primarily involving the question of how Marty still exists. In the updated version of 1985 to which Marty returns at the end, he is alive because of a marriage that, itself, only happened thanks to a son the couple did not yet have (and somehow do not recognize when he actually appears).
Questions like these often cause time-travel stories to unravel. But the brilliant thing about “Back to the Future” is how little the mechanics of time travel matter to the viewing experience.
The script, by director Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, is so tight and quotable, and the performances are so indelible that viewers probably aren’t dwelling on the metaphysical details. (The sequels are another story.)
But the “Johnny B. Goode” moment, as Mulaney says, is a little more fraught. There was a lot of cultural cross-pollination involved in the birth of rock and roll, but most credible histories recognize it as a fundamentally Black art form.
Its journey from a teen-marketed fad to a revolutionary social catalyst to a self-serious art form to, by the 1980s, the sound of the centrist mainstream, involved a complicated mixture of inspiration, assimilation and, yes, theft.
Through that lens, the “Johnny B. Goode” paradox can be seen as an offensive rewrite of history (a white guy claiming credit for a Black artist’s work). That, or it’s an inadvertently sophisticated meta-commentary on the process of attribution in popular music.
Of all the things about “Back to the Future“ that have aged strangely, its ideas about the authorship of rock and roll seem less alarming than, for instance, its whimsical mother-son incest subplot. But what it suggests is still, as Marty would say, pretty heavy.