A WESTERN NARRATIVE: BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III AND THE LANDSCAPE OF 1880s AMERICA

In the wake of the new year-- 2015!-- and its connection to the Back to the Future franchise, I have been at work on a collaborative project in pop/media geography. Myself, along with a group of other academic geographers have been writing scholarly work on the geographies of the Back to the Future trilogy. My proposed contribution abstract can be found below. Look for our panel at the 2015 Association of American Geographers annual meeting! We are being sponsored by the Cultural Geography Affinity Group.

A WESTERN NARRATIVE: BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III

AND THE LANDSCAPE OF 1880s AMERICA

Inhabiting a world grounded in the landscape of the California in 1885, the final film of the Back to the Future trilogy offers a vision of the time and place that reinforces existing geographic imaginaries of the American “Wild West”. Important to appreciating the film’s reinforcement of a Western imaginary is how this imagined place and time has become dislodged from the historical reality of the expansion, politics, and culture of America in the 1880s, specifically within the bounds of the American West. As the film trilogy has developed into an emotive, nostalgic cultural force, this representation of the past of America’s West has also been bestowed a sense of nostalgia, however this is a nostalgia rooted in a place that likely never existed. This placelessness extends past the assumed non-reality that accompanies all works of fiction, but instead additionally works to corroborate a dialogue and imaginary that reinforces visions of Western ideals. Western ideals which have, in-turn, come to represent quintessential American ideologies and are of deep importance to an American sense of identity and continue to influence the nation’s culture, ideals, and politics. Back to the Future Part III is far from alone in developing and perpetuating this dialogue and imaginary around America’s “Wild West”, but rather constitutes a small portion of the pantheon of fictional works that work to envision a constructed narrative about this highly mythologized time and, of particular interest here, place in America’s self-imaginary.