You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Following in the wake of the immensely more financially and critically successful film Back to the Future (Universal; Zemeckis, ), the reception of Francis Ford Coppola's 1986 film Peggy Sue Got Married (TriStar) was muted at best. In a decade where the time travel romance was clearly in ascendance, only Peggy Sue posited a female protagonist — and, moreover, a grown woman with children. As I have argued elsewhere (1990), Back, the decade's prototype, is developmentally an adolescent film. Although there are many other themes, the film's psychodynamic impetus involves Marty McFly's replacement of the weakened paternal introject with the prohibitive father of oedipal fantasy and reconstruction of a mature superego in order to facilitate the emergence of genital sexuality. In my consideration of Back, I noted that Peggy Sue appeared to be developmentally dissimilar and perhaps more advanced in its acceptance of reality-imposed limitations. I further conjectured that this particular film within the subgenre of time travel cinema owed its uniqueness to its positing a female protagonist.
It is to this apparent uniqueness that I wish to draw attention. What is so intriguing about this film is the fact that, while personal historical and intrapsychic concerns are addressed (Peggy Sue's reconsideration of her past), the film may also be considered within a larger historical context. There exists a curious tension in Peggy Sue, one which oscillates between the wish-fulfillment so evident in Back and a bittersweet resignation to the inevitable. I believe that this tension is partially referable to Peggy Sue's blend of genres, specifically the substructures of the fantasy film, typified by 1939's The