Biff, donnie and Potter

Amazing – I said – early in the movie.

The movie was Back To The Future II.

Early on there is a scene in Biff’s high rise residence, with Marty McFly’s mother, that is so much like what one would expect from donnie, that one wonders if the people who made Back To The Future II might have had it in for president dildo donnie.

But the movie was made in the last century.

The makers were just making a scene featuring a dildo.

They couldn’t have possibly known that all that glitter, gold and macho Biff misogyny was going to be – not far in the  future, the present.

And that donnie the dildo was going to be president.

A little later in the movie the full homage to an earlier movie, It’s A Wonderful Life becomes apparent.

Marty gets to go back to the town that he grew up in  and see that it has become Biff Town.

It looks like, except in color, a lot like Potters Ville.

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The first time I ever saw It’s A Wonderful Life was in a condominium  on the Oregon coast.

Tom, Ellen, Mysti and I had reservations at Harrah's in Seaside for dinner and we were each in various stages of getting ready to depart for the restaurant.

I was ready and had come out of Mysti’s and my part of the property.

Tom and Ellen had already gotten ready and were sitting on the communal couch watching something on the TV.

I sat down because to do otherwise seemed to me to be anti-social.

After a moment or two I started paying attention to what was on the tube.

It was, I found out later, It’s A Wonderful Life.

I could not believe that that good a movie had been made in 1947, and that I had never heard of it.

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In the years between then and now I have no idea how many times I have watched that movie.

But it is a lot of times.

In fact it has been so many times that I quit watching it several years ago: watching a movie that you have memorized is really not very entertaining or interesting.

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A few days ago I heard an NPR interview of two young women who had never heard of It’s A Wonderful Life, but who had agreed to watch it and be interviewed about what they thought.

What they thought was pretty much what I have always thought about the movie, but with some new stuff I had never thought about.

So I bought it on iTunes.

And I watched it.

And, like the Back To The Future II Biff in the tower and Biff Town scenes, I was mesmerized by the sociology of the movie: how could Frank Capra known about an orange blivet who takes over the presidency of the United States of America and puts everybody into Pottersville?

George Orwell saw it coming, so I guess that a movie director also did, shouldn’t be too surprising.