If my calculations are correct…
“Feces. Everywhere.”
Well, I made it. I watched Back to the Future every week of 2013 and have 52 disturbingly nerdy articles to prove it. How did this experiment affect me, and did I correctly predict these effects in my hypothesis from the beginning of the year? Let’s find out.
1) I predicted I would enjoy the movie less. I was wrong. I still love it, and I appreciate it even more than I already did. I was always a Back to the Future fan, but the experiment allowed me to fill in a few cracks in my fandom over the course of the year, reinforcing my enjoyment of the film. In other words, damn, it feels good to be a fanboy.
A real fanboy-ass Cinemanaut plays his cards right.
2) I predicted I would be happier this year. Nailed that one. And I also correctly predicted that my happiness would decline a few months in. While nothing gets me giddier than thinking about Back to the Future, the act of having to rewatch a film that was practically stored in my head by the age of sixteen became tiresome and felt wholly unnecessary. The thoughts were nice, but the viewings were occasionally painful.
Like a dying marriage, sometimes I had to spice things up.
3) I predicted that I would think about time travel more than usual. Hmm, does obsessively watching and reviewing 156 time travel movies count? Just checking.
This stack represents an awful lot of time that I will never get back.
4) I predicted that it would be irrelevant to track how often I quote the movie because I am always quoting the movie. This was… sort of accurate, as I only recorded moments when I unintentionally uttered a line from Back to the Future. I wish I could be more scientific than, “It felt like I was accidentally quoting more?” We need a staff of people to follow us around.
5) Aww, boo to this last one. I predicted that the amount of dreams in which I own a time-traveling DeLorean (a regular occurrence) would increase… and I didn’t have one. I had plenty of dreams about time travel, DeLoreans, and the film itself during those twelve months, but Doc’s actual functioning time machine never made an appearance. In most of my dreams in 2013, Back to the Future was just a movie; perhaps repeated exposure to it reinforced this idea in my subconscious. This makes me very sad, and if I never dream of owning a DeLorean time machine again, I will truly hate what this project did to me.
Cinema 52: We’ll literally kill your dreams!
Really, though, whereas 52 weeks of Top Gun was tedious monotony, this year felt like an excuse to be me. Save for a few bouts of grumpiness over having to repeat the act of actually watching Back to the Future, I got to rekindle my obsession with the movie in a public forum and learned a lot of things that I’d always been meaning to research. And the best part is that I’m not done. I still have a truckload of questions about this film, and I hopefully always will.
Seriously, I still haven’t proven that the man that plays Red the bum is also in the porno advertised on the marquee behind him. Where are you, Orgy American Style, and why can’t I find you???
As God is my witness, I will watch this man have sex.
