The Hotdog Laserhouse

btothef:

CLIFFHANGER ENDING RESOLVED: Yes, he does it.

Marty decided to make a lunge for her.

Stay classy, Marty!  As he’s lunging, the car door opens, he’s grabbed, and he’s pulled out not by George but by… BIFF TANNEN.  Marty caused $300 worth of damage to his car and Biff’s gonna take it out of his ass!  And in case you were wondering in the middle of this dramatic scene just how it was Biff knew to find Marty here, Biff stops everything so he can explain it to us:

“Good work, guys,” Biff said.  “Skinhead thought that was you, sneaking out to the parking lot.  We might never have got you alone otherwise.”

It’s just like that scene in Star Wars where Darth Vader has Luke in his Force Choke!  Remember?  But then he stops the choking to explain to Luke that it’s a good thing his engineers built the Death Star with sensors capable of tracking his position inside of it, otherwise he would never have gotten this chance to do this?  It’s in the Special Editions; I don’t know what you’re talking about.

ANYWAY, Lorraine yells at him to stop (and that he’s drunk) and Biff does his sinister “Well, lookee what we have here” line, and then continues talking to Lorraine and makes it EVEN CREEPIER:

“Maybe I’ll take a part of it outa your ass.”

Biff gets in the car with her, Lorraine yells “Let go of me!”, Biff says “Oh, no, baby, you’re staying right here with me”, Marty yells “Take your filthy hands off her, you bastard!” and Biff orders his goons to take him away.  Then he closes the door on him and Lorraine.

I kinda feel like I should put a trigger warning here?  And I’m kinda mad that my jokey jokey fun times Back To The Future tumblr needs to have one but that’s what the book has forced me to do?

So I keep saying how the PG-rated movie does all that it can to make this scene as PG as possible, and while Lorraine does end up briefly stuck in the car with Biff in the movie, and it’s a scary scene, it never explicitly gets past the “Biff is trying to kiss her and she’s pushing back” stage.  And that’s good, because the more you think that Marty came up with a plan that boils down to “sexually assault my mom so that she’ll fall in love with someone else” the more it seems like MAYBE Marty and/or George and/or Doc should’ve kept brainstorming just a little longer.

This book has already been going the opposite way by making things as explicit as possible, using words like “assault” to describe what Marty intends to do, but it gets worse here.  In fact, we have what may be the worst sentence in the book so far:

If it hadn’t been for Marty, Lorraine would be enjoying the dance instead of having to fight to avoid being raped.

Not only does Gipe use the word “rape”, but he blames this rape on Marty, which is an interesting choice for a character that I’m PRETTY SURE we’re supposed to like?  But it’s also 100% accurate, since it totally was Marty’s plan that led to this situation!  Marty, in turn, blames George for the rape:

If that simpering chicken hadn’t reverted to form at the last moment -

But the time for recriminations was short.

I’m mostly interested in Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s (they’re the dude’s that wrote the movie) thought process that led to this.  We know Lorraine originally fell in love with George because he was hurt and she nursed him back to health, so to make her fall in love with George in this timeline, we - trap her in a car, sexually assault her, and then have George beat Marty up?  Really, there’s no solution to the “Make Lorraine get interested in George” problem that doesn’t end rapey?  This scene is in the first draft of the movie, so it was part of the plan from the beginning.  That first draft also has Lorraine (then named “Eileen”) even more into Marty:

…she lunged at Marty, nearly knocking him over, starting to kiss him passionately. Eileen climbed all over him, her skirt everywhere. She reached out and took Marty’s hand, lying limp at his side, and placed it on the top of her bare breasts. Marty couldn’t move, paralyzed in shock that this promiscuous teenager was his mother!

Oh Back to the Future, what will we do with you

I’m glad he caught it because this is one of those things where the movie trying to be - as he puts it - “as PG as possible” never really registered in my eyes the fact that literally Marty’s plan was to sexually assault his own mother so she’d hate him and fall in love with somebody else. That’s super dark!