The Genius of Back to the Future's Opening Shot
Back to the Future. Image courtesy of Universal.
There is no mystery about why Back to the Future is a classic of modern cinema that has endured through the decades. It has iconic acting and likable characters, most of whom have some kind of pretty satisfying arc; tremendous special effects woven into the narrative seamlessly; quotable dialogue that echoes through the ages; production design that is both quintessentially 1980s and also somehow timeless; the absolute madness of making a DeLorean into an indispenable plot element. It is just, from start to finish, a nearly flawless film.
Speaking of which, I think the start of the film - a nearly 3 minute opening shot - deserves a bit of attention. While watching Back to the Future the other day I was struck by the opening shot for a number of reasons. One is that it’s very patient, thoughtful and confident - something you don’t see very often in contemporary films. They conceived of this shot, thought very hard about the information it should contain and how to convey it in an economical way, and then they went about doing it confident that the audience would follow along.
In case you don’t remember the opening shot of Back to the Future is a long unbroken take that basically moves around Doc Brown’s lab in a slow and methodical way. Why does it do that? To give us a huge dump of expository information in a way that’s easy to swallow. As the camera slowly pans through Doc’s lab it passes numerous clocks, shows all of these Rube Goldberg devices for pouring coffee and opening dog food, establishes Doc’s back-story in a single split second shot of a newspaper clipping, passes by a television broadcast announcing that some plutonium has been stolen, shows that the lab is empty and has been for some time, and finally introduces us to Marty’s sneakers before finally coming back to rest on the very plutonium we just learned had gone missing.
Like most science fiction, the plot of Back to the Future requires the audience to get up to speed on a lot of information very quickly. It is actually a pretty intricate narrative structure, with almost every bit of information set up in the first fifteen minutes becoming the focal point of a callback later on in the film. There is so much exposition during the set-up and preamble of Back to the Future, that if not done skillfully it would completely weigh down the movie. It needs to be effortless, so that the audience receives the information almost without knowing it. That way, when for instance you see the future mayor of Hill Valley show up as a waiter in a diner giving a speech about standing up for yourself, you appreciate the vision of the screenplay since you probably weren’t expecting a poster that showed up in the first ten minutes to actually payoff later in the narrative.
It is actually quite difficult to do exposition well, as any rushed or un-thoughtful film can attest. There is always a temptation on the screenwriter’s part to just have a character say the information, for example: “Hey you are Detective Hammond, the guy who accidentally killed his wife after being abudcted by aliens aren’t you?” This commits the cardinal sin of Telling, Not Showing but when writers are lazy, bad or simply have backed themselves into a corner they will happily take it. And there are a few points in Back to the Future where the dialogue gets a bit too on the nose, which is pretty much unavoidable in a film with such a complex and dense structure.
But that opening shot proves, if nothing else, the filmmakers’ commitment to elegant, economical and visual exposition and story-telling in Back to the Future. It conveys the whole plutonium subplot, hammers the theme of time right on the head and gets across Doc Brown’s entire back-story and the nature of his character (wacky absent-minded inventor) in under 3 minutes. So when Doc finally enters the picture in the parking lot, and he’s this eccentric ball of cinematic glory, the audience is already primed for it thanks to the heavy lifting done in the first few minutes while the credits are rolling.
And this is especially noteworthy this day in age, when long shots that go on for more than a few seconds have really fallen out of fashion. To see that Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale took the time to plan out that scene, to think hard about the information it should contain and how to convey that wordlessly, it goes a long way I think to explaining why this film is such an enduring classic. Because the narrative structure is doing these subtle things from start to finish that make the whole thing stick together, and the genius of it is that unless you look closely you might not even have noticed.
