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Midway through Zemeckis's film Back to the Future: Part II (referred to as Back II throughout this article), a bewildered, disoriented Marty MacFly stumbles down a dark street littered with refuse and debris. Marty has just returned from the year 2015, only to discover that a hellish alternative timeline has destroyed the world of 1985 as he has both known and reconstructed it (in the first film of the series). As he will learn, his heroic father has been murdered; his mentor, the scientist “Doc,” has been declared insane; he “himself has been banished to a boarding school in Switzerland; and, worst of all, his mother Lorraine has remarried his father's enemy and rival Biff Tanner, who has transformed Hill Valley into a seething mass of vice, filth, and perversity. Not only has Marty lost his newly synthesized family, but Marty's own “alienness” is pointedly underscored when, vaulting through the window of what was once his home, Marty encounters a literal reversal of circumstance. It is like the difference of night and day: Marty discovers a black girl in his bed, is accused by the girl's outraged, bat-wielding father of being a perverted rapist, and is finally chased out of the house. As Marty runs down the street, shots and screams are heard in the distance, sirens wail, and Marty slows to stare unbelievingly at the mangled heap of a police squad car crumpled against the wreck of another automobile. Nearby the chalked outlines of two figures, the street they encircle stained with blood, attest to the death and chaos that reigns around them.
This episode is the paradigm against which Back II is constructed. The law of 1985 has degenerated into a new, chaotic