Study Guide

Back to the Future Lorraine Baines/McFly (Lea Thompson)

Lorraine Baines/McFly (Lea Thompson)

"[It's] over there on my hope chest."


Ew. An unenviable predicament, to be sure. Perhaps the only thing worse than being stuck in a time period thirty years prior to your own is discovering that your mother, after seeing you in your Fruit of the Looms, has fallen madly in love with the fruit of her loins.

There's some definite Oedipus stuff going on here. Maybe Marty is lucky he didn't have to end up gouging out his own eyes.

Of course, the truly sucky part is that Marty can't just run and hide. He actually has to spend some quality time with dear old mom, because he has to make sure she gets back together with his father-to-be. What complicates matters is that she's a cutie pie, maybe even someone Marty would have been crushing on if he'd been a teen in the 50's. This is going to provide some (gross) conflicting feelings, and probably more than a couple hefty therapy bills.

Then comes the topper—in order to make George out to be a hero, Marty has to…"take advantage" of Lorraine in the car so that he hopefully falls out of her favor at the same time George dramatically rides up on his metaphorical white steed.

He ends up not having to go through with the plan (thanks to Biff), but isn't interrupted before his mom attacks him with her mouth agape (there had to be some tongue there). She claims that kissing Marty is like "kissing [her] brother." Blegh.

A Mom with a Past

It's one of the saddest realities: there are no time machines. Because of this, it's difficult to go back in time and, like Marty, get an accurate sense of what our mother was like when she was younger.

Maybe that's a good thing.

In 1985, Lorraine claims that she never "chased a boy, or called a boy, or sat in a parked car with a boy." You want to raise your right hand in a court of law and say that, missy?

Now…maybe she really was as pure as she claimed (after all, we only see her acting this way around Marty, so maybe he was the one who got her to loosen up), but somehow we doubt it. She claimed to have "parked" before, and she was certainly chugging away on that booze like an old pro.

So… are our parents really as we picture them based on their own descriptions, or when they're telling us stories about the good old days, do they tend to leave out the juicy bits?

Well, think about it. Suppose you have kids someday. You want them to grow up to be good, decent, moral human beings. Are you going to tell them about all the stuff you've done?

We rest our case.

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