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.
Friday, March 21, 2014
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