Back to the Future IV

FRIDAY, MARCH 21, 2014
The Weekly Screed (#668)

Back to the Future IV

by David Benjamin

“You ain’t nothin’ but a gutless yellow turd.” — Mad Dog Tannen

MADISON, Wis. — Have you noticed how it’s downright freakish sometimes the way foreign affairs imitate art? I mean, I know I’m not the first to observe the turmoil in Ukraine and think to myself, “Holy flux capacitor, Einstein! I’ve seen this before!” Once I experienced this epiphany, I had to fire up my DVD player and watch Back to the Future III all over again.

Because, obviously, if ever there existed a real-life version of Mad Dog Tannen (played by Thomas F. Wilson in the movie), it’s got to be Vladimir Putin, especially in the climactic gunfight sequence, where Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) eerily foreshadows the dilemma of President Barack Obama in the Ukrainian crisis.

I’m not sure why I was so dim, but the parallel didn’t hit me ‘til I saw that bare-chested horseback photo of Hopalong Putin. Clearly, Mad Dog Tannen is a lot hairier than Putin, but the resemblance — in physique, personal style and sheer brazen ugliness — is just uncanny.

Even more uncanny are the near-identical circumstances. As you recall, in the movie, it’s almost 8 o’clock on the morning that Marty (whose nom de guerre in the movie is “Clint Eastwood”) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) are due to go back to the future. But they have to get past Mad Dog Tannen, who’s out in the street, raving and foaming at the mouth. Mad Dog is fresh from robbing the Pine City Stage — which is, of course, the metaphorical equivalent of seizing Crimea.

Mad Dog demands that Marty step out of the saloon and shoot it out on the dusty main street of Hill Valley — the metaphorical equivalent of eastern Ukraine. Marty can’t call on Doc Brown for help, because the usually resourceful scientist is smitten with love for Clara (Mary Steenburgen) and too drunk to get up off the floor of the saloon.

This poses another uncanny parallel: the real-life Marty — Barack Obama — can’t rely on the assistance of his trusty Secretary of State John Kerry, because Kerry has flitted off to, of all places, Kiev. And while he’s there, Kerry is citing cinematic analogies to the wrong movie. (OMG, John! Rocky IV?)

So, it’s up to Marty “Clint Eastwood” Obama to stand up, by his lonesome, to Mad Dog Putin. True to his character, Marty hesitates on the brink of armed conflict. He knows that gunplay tends to solve nothing while prolonging a crisis. Likewise, Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has a habit of hesitating — and pondering alternatives — before yanking his forty-four and blasting away.

But both Marty and Barack have a fatal flaw. Neither can stand it if you call him “chicken.” As any movie fan knows, Marty got himself into deep doo-doo through three iterations of Back to the Future by reacting impetuously to this provocation. Likewise, by agreeing to the useless and costly troop “surge” in Afghanistan, by threatening missile strikes in Syria, by his heavy use of drone attacks on terrorist targets in civilian areas, Obama has repeatedly succumbed to criticism from the right wing that he’s a big fat sissified Foghorn Leghorn.

Meanwhile, back at the saloon, a chorus of warmongering conservatives is egging Marty into battle against Mad Dog Tannen. The lead oldtimers — played by three of the great character actors in Western movie history, Pat Buttram, Dub Taylor and Harry Carey, Jr. — are telling Marty what Senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Newt Gingrich have been harping at Obama ever since Wild Bill Putin mounted his hayburner and tore off his t-shirt. They keep calling him “chicken.”

The last straw comes from Pat Buttram, who predicts what will happen if Marty backs down from his manhood-defining duel in the sun: “Everybody everywhere will say that Clint Eastwood is the biggest yellowbelly in the West.”

Thenceforth ensues a long moment of suspense, during which Doc Brown remains prostrate and director Robert Zemeckis provides valedictory close-ups of Graham, McCain and Newt. Out in the street, finishing his countdown, Mad Dog roars, “I said that’s ‘ten,’ you gutless yellow pie-slinger!”

At which Marty Obama provides the perfect squelch to the elderly chicken-hawks everywhere who sit comfortably at a safe distance, rattling their empty scabbards and flapping their jowls as they goad surrogates into holy wars against blowhards, bullies and self-elected presidents-for-life.

Marty surveys the saloon. He sees a crowd of name-callers too cowardly to strap on a holster and face Mad Dog themselves. He peers through the window at Mad Dog, a drooling psychopath with the intellectual depth of a russet potato. Then, in a flash of inspired reason, he says what every foreign policy expert and international diplomat knows — but dares not say — about Vladimir Putin.

(Thankfully, you can say these things in movies.)

“He’s an asshole!”

Then, on behalf of his metaphorical alter ego, Barack Obama, Marty continues: “I don’t care what Tannen says. Or what anybody else (Putin, Graham, McCain, Gingrich, Pat Buttram, Harry Carey, Jr. or Dub Taylor) says!”

Alas, in the movie, events overtake Marty and he has to deal with Mad Dog anyway. But he triumphs not with the speed of his draw nor by giving in to ruthlessness, but by summoning his knowledge of film history. Mad Dog ends up eating manure and going to jail for holding up the stagecoach.

This being real life, Mad Dog Putin’s comeuppance might not come quite so neatly — if it comes at all. More likely, when Barack Obama leaves the White House, Putin will still be on top of that Russian horse, still no shirt, still an asshole, galloping unstoppably — like the wind on the steppes… back to the past.