Late last month, American pop culture celebrated “Back to the Future Day” — marking the date, 10/21/2015, to which Marty McFly leaps forward from the Reagan ’80s in Back to the Future Part II.
It was a slightly daft commemoration of a pleasant but hardly memorable sequel, and it felt almost like a way for people not to come to grips with the most striking thing about Back to the Future’s 30th anniversary: that we’re now as far from the Reagan 1980s as the teenage Marty was from his parents’ 1950s, and yet the gulf of years separating us from 1985 feels far narrower than the distance from the Eisenhower era that the original film used to such great effect.
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