Why Future Generations Will Obsess Over 'Back to the Future II'
This may be the most Hideo Kojimacore post I've ever done...but your kids are gonna love it.
“It makes you wonder if Trump didn’t go back in time and write himself into the screenplay.” - The Guardian: ‘From Back to the Future’s Biff to Donald Trump: How Pop Culture Can Make a President’
In a truly decadent society, such as our own, broad comedic satire quickly becomes prophecy. In fact, satirists and comedians are made redundant because the absurdities of tomorrow outpace the satirist’s imagination today.
In the classic Robert Zemeckis time-travel movie Back to the Future, the scientist Doc Brown cannot believe the absurdity that 1950s Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan becomes president in the 1980s. (Reagan famously thought the joke was hilarious.)
In the film’s 1989 meta-movie sequel, Back to the Future II (originally titled Paradox), the bully Biff gets his hands on a sports almanac from the future (2015!) that enables him to make a fortune gambling on sports over the next forty-five years. Biff becomes a casino magnate and eventually a successful politician who lords over everyone in a dystopian future that can only be undone with more time travel.
What makes the story strange is that it is well known that BttF’s screenwriter, Bob Gale, based Biff Tannen’s time-traveling 2015 version of the character on mid-’80s Donald Trump.
The 1989 film, some believe, predicted or influenced our political future.
But Back to the Future II’s strangeness runs much deeper than Biff-Trump, and I think future generations will be even more fascinated by the movie, and specifically its relationship to real-life scientists and figures, than we currently are. I’d go so far as to say that future generations will read secret significance into Back to the Future II, and call it “predictive programming,” the way people today still read into Eyes Wide Shut.
Some will say the film was some H.P. Lovecraft-style channeled work, like the plot of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness, or like that 1800s book some think “predicted” Trump (Did an 1800s Book Series About ‘Baron Trump’ Predict Donald Trump’s Rise to Power?)
So, in the spirit of a bonkers Hideo Kojima video game, let me tell you why they’ll obsess, Butthead.
Sometimes, pop culture can seem truly prophetic. People get hung up on The Simpsons predicting the future (including a President Trump), which goes back to my earliest point: satire soon becomes prophecy in a backwards age that takes cultural decline for granted.
Although it was reasonable to assume in 1988, when BttF:2 was made, that Donald Trump would one day be a successful politician.
Richard Nixon’s wife, Pat, believed Trump would eventually excel in politics, and Richard Nixon informed Trump of her prediction…right around the time Back to the Future II was being written, actually.
“As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics, and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner!” is what former President Nixon wrote to Donald.
There is, however, a stranger history involving the Trump Family and, uh, time-travel. As always, make of all this what you will.
In real life, when the galaxy-brained inventor Nikola Tesla died in 1943, the FBI immediately confiscated Tesla’s papers to make sure none of the technology Tesla invented or was designing was a threat to the country. They didn’t want Tesla’s avant-garde tech, especially weapon designs, to fall into “the wrong hands,” as it were.
So the FBI turned all material over to MIT scientist John G. Trump—uncle to the current American president. From PBS:
Dr. John G. Trump, an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was called in to analyze the Tesla papers in OAP custody. Following a three-day investigation, Dr. Trump concluded:
His [Tesla’s] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.
It’s hilarious to see a Trump accuse Nikola Tesla of having thoughts of a “somewhat promotional character.”
So Trump’s uncle, Dr. Trump, didn’t find anything of Tesla’s to be too dangerous or important—or so he said.
Incidentally, Tesla did claim to have some sort of time-traveling divination device—what he called the Temporisoscope—that Tesla believed could transmit and receive info from the future to itself as long as the machine existed in the future.
Nikola Tesla knew full well that Marconi had stolen his invention (something which would later be acknowledged in 1943 by the American courts). That was one of the reasons why Tesla registered fewer and fewer official patents.
So, feeling resentful and keen to exact revenge, Tesla travelled to the Brussels World’s Fair to present his unique invention: the time travel machine.
Historian Rick Spence talks about Tesla’s machine here on his podcast.
From the transcript of Rick’s podcast, the story of Tesla’s time-traveling/techno-divination device:
The story behind it is that at the World’s Fair in Brussels in 1910—which Tesla apparently was there—he unveiled a model of the Temporisoscope. And the way that I understand it, which may not be correct, but my image of what’s being discussed here is a kind of transtemporal fax machine.
So the idea is that the machine in 1910 could communicate with itself. It could send information back and forth to itself at any point in the future so long as it existed. It couldn’t go back in time because there wasn’t anything there. But from 1910, assuming that a machine or a machine like it existed in 2025, they could communicate. And in 1910, apparently, it was only capable of sending very, very it only had could get the energy to sort of send small messages written on cigarette paper, you know, something very light…
And as the story goes, of course, the device there was a fire. The device was destroyed. Actually, that was a form of sabotage, but there was another version of it. And that uh there may in fact be more of these machines that that were created that that the the technology may have gotten away from him. And that this is according to one version of the story, not the certain story, but another is that this is what caused all of Tesla’s miseries thereafter because this machine was extremely important to people because you have to imagine the advantages. You know, you just have to look if it can communicate with itself, you can get uh the results of sports events. Yeah. Okay. the amount of money well the influencing of the future in general right I mean that’s the whole surveillance you could essentially have your sort of people in the future could send you information back about what stocks had done well who’d won the whatever it was and you could get that information you could use it to your advantage but the other idea was that then if there was more than one of these machines in different hands you now had people attempting to manipulate the future to undo what other ones were doing, but then also apparently had something to do with the way that the energy and and one description of it is that what what somehow Tesla was manifesting in this was sort of like a mini black hole. Uhhuh. That that every time you somehow use this machine, it was it was unleashing energy and it was distorting the whole time matrix. All right? You were creating some sort of of a void. So that if you were in close proximity to it or in any way involved in this, it was going to mess with everything, you know, you would become increasingly ill. You would begin to have you would lose touch with reality.
What I don’t understand about the Temporisoscope is what makes the device ultimately different from any other tool of divination (besides the futuristic H.G. Wells-core backstory).
From the I Ching to the tarot to even Biblically sanctioned (at the time) devices such as the Urim and Thummim, or even the casting of lots…couldn’t any device that could hypothetically predict the future or reveal fate be given the same backstory as the Temporisoscope?
So if Tesla did have a time-traveling oracle (btw, I’m well aware this is all a big “if”), the first person to have seen it or its design again after his death would’ve been Trump’s MIT scientist uncle.
John Trump was given access to Tesla’s papers after his death, so the almanac, in a metaphorical way, may have fallen into the hands of Biff’s family after all.
In 1943, after the enigmatic Nikola Tesla’s death, the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked Trump to examine Tesla’s papers to determine whether he had been working on anything that might have relevance to the war. Trump found he had not. - Physics Today
John Trump worked with the eminent scientist Robert Van de Graaff. Dr. Trump was actually Van de Graaf’s first student, before later helping him develop his famous high-voltage electrostatic generators. (And, yes, of course, the prog-rock band Van der Graaf Generator is named after all this. There’s Trump’s connection to Prog for you.)
Nikola Tesla actually wrote about the Van de Graaf generator, which, again, was worked on with the help of his scientific assistant John Trump, in a 1934 article of Scientific American.
Weird, huh?
Things are profoundly strange when the appearance of David Bowie represents a return to grounded reality.
Wernher von Braun and BttF
As with Trump’s political success being foreshadowed in the 1989 BttF sequel, and Trump’s uncle being given the papers of a scientist who allegedly created time-travel technology, we have another case of a Back to the Future-related character having the future leak into the past. In this next example, it is the inspiration for Doc Brown being the German scientist Wernher von Braun.
In Back to the Future III (the Western that nobody hates but also that nobody really wants to watch again, either), it is revealed that Doc Brown is actually related to the famous scientist Wernher von Braun. Doc explains that the family changed their name a few decades earlier upon coming to America, and so Doc Brown is really “Doc von Braun.”
In real life, Wernher von Braun, who had famously been given a blank check to do space stuff by the late Mr. Adolph Hitler, wrote a fictional sci-fi book called Project Mars: A Technical Tale in 1953. People believe the book famously “predicts” the Mars-obsessed career of Elon Musk.
“Speaking about destiny, did you know that Von Braun's 1953 book "Mars Project," referenced a person named Elon that would bring humans to Mars? Pretty nuts.” - X link
This is considered historically prescient because Elon Musk’s mission in life, among many questionable side quests, is, of course, to conquer Mars. (It should be noted that Elon Musk is allegedly not named after that character in the book, but after a relative on his mother’s side of the family.)
Classic Con Digression: Elon Musk & Technocracy
Speaking of Elon, and the future leaking into the past, look at this birthday card from the 1930s that’s a joke on the then-trendy Technocracy movement.
Elon’s grandfather was arrested around this time for being a leading member of the Technocracy Party in Canada (the technical charge was for attempting to overthrow the government). The idea of Howard Scott’s technocracy was that society should transcend capitalism and communism and instead be led by engineers and computer algorithms. Government by technocrats and their little robots.
The robot in this 1930 birthday card is “tweet-ing,” about 90 years before Elon Musk (the richest man in the world, the grandson of a leading technocrat, and the builder of robot armies) would buy Twitter, which, remember, lets you…tweet.
Look at how similar technocracy’s aims were to Elon’s current ideas.
In this brave new world, the Technate of North America, a caste of scientists and engineers would manage a conscripted labour force paid in “energy certificates”, a form of universal basic income. In the meantime, prospective members could join for $5. They were encouraged to wear grey doublebreasted suits and paint their cars the same colour. The most enthusiastic supporters renounced their given names and adopted serial numbers – one Californian adherent became 1x1809x56.
Elon’s son with Grimes, born in 2020, is named “X Æ A-12 Musk.”
Classic Con Digression END
This next part may be apocryphal, but the story goes that in the 1920s, as a teenager, the real Wernher von Braun would rack up an expensive, long-distance telephone bill talking to another teen fascinated with rocketry, the legendary scientist-occultist Jack Parsons.
Jack Parsons grew up on 1071 S. Orange Grove and 537 S. Orange Grove Ave, about a mile from—and even on the same street, Orange Grove—where Doc Brown would live in Back to the Future (Doc lives in the Gamble House on Orange Grove).
Jack Parsons was like Doc Brown: a mad scientist from Pasadena.
Doc Brown, as I mentioned earlier, was named after the other teenage boy Parsons supposedly talked with on the phone from across the world. [Note: even if Parsons and von Braun didn’t talk on the phone then, they likely met each other in Alabama decades later via Theodore von Kármán.]
To sum it up a bit, and hurt our brains some more:
You have, IRL, the eventual basis for time-traveler Doc Brown (Braun) writing a book that seemingly “predicts” Elon Musk. You have Musk’s company, Tesla, being named after the scientist whose papers (which could include the “time-traveling device” the Temporisoscope) are turned over upon his death to the uncle (John Trump) of the man who inspired Casino 2015 Biff (Donald Trump).
And you have teenager Marty McFly befriending a mad scientist who lives on Orange Grove named “Doc” Brown/Braun, when, irl, Jack Parsons was a teenage mad scientist who lived on Orange Grove who talked to the IRL Wernher von Braun over the phone, or at least worked with him at some point.
My prediction is that Back to the Future II will ultimately become the great 20th-century conspiracy or “secret connections” movie. Up there with Eyes Wide Shut.
Another funny connection, this one involving BttF’s producer Steven Spielberg:
In the latest entry from Steven Spielberg’s other 1980s blockbuster franchise, 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, it is revealed that one of the villains is also inspired by…Wernher von Braun.
Enter Mads Mikkelsen’s villainous Voller – see above – inspired partly by real-life Nazi-turned-NASA-engineer Wernher von Braun. “He’s a man who would like to correct some of the mistakes of the past,” teases Mikkelsen of Voller. “There is something that could make the world a much better place to live in. He would love to get his hands on it. Indiana Jones wants to get his hands on it as well. And so, we have a story.” - Empire Magazine
So Steven Spielberg has twice used a time-traveling Braun-inspired character.
In Back to the Future: Von Braun/Doc Brown uses time travel to send the hero, Marty McFly, back in time to make the future better in eighties suburban America.
In Indiana Jones: Von Braun/Voller uses time-travel to return to 1939 and correct the strategic mistakes Hitler made, enabling Nazi Germany to win World War II.
Spielberg’s next movie, Disclosure Day, appears to be the ultimate conspiracy-theory film…
But I think that future generations will see all these historical connections in Spielberg’s Back to the Future II, and that will be considered the ultimate conspiracy or ‘mysteries of history’ movie.
It is the film’s density.
Notes:
I noticed years ago that Biff’s sports almanac is from 1950-2000.
So Biff’s gambling empire likely ends when he doesn’t foresee the rise of Tom Brady (drafted in 2000, 6th round, 199th overall pick) coming.
But maybe the great Tom Brady was in on the whole time-traveling Trump family racket, too.
After all…
I’m not finished reading the article; however, I’m trying to think about Trump in the 80s and what he did that was, in any way, futuristic or prophetic. To me, he was always a wealthy, but practical someone who lived in the present. Trump’s still that same guy. People talk about him playing 5-D chess, but he’s not. He’s dealing with the problems we currently have that are holding us back from a “better” future. Our problems may end up being few, but huge - way more parasitically connected than we could ever have imagined. Trump is about the truth - as much truth as we handle, withstand, and survive. We live in 3 time frames - past, present, and future, but truth can only exist in the past and the present. There isn’t a future truth - I hope that truth still exists when we get to the future.
Wild. We need a deep dive on Tesla next.
JK Rowling and the Kaballah in Harry Potter would be something else to look into 👀