Back to the Future in Real Time

Marty’s about to wake up in Lorraine’s bedroom, and when he does, there’s a Twitter account waiting for it. Someone decided the best use of their time was recreating the entire Back to the Future trilogy on Twitter in real-time, one account per character. The DeLorean gets its own profile. Fifty accounts deep.

This is the kind of thing that only makes sense on Twitter. Some person with obsessive tendencies and too much free time decides to chronologically work through a movie they probably love, turning it into this sprawling, participatory thing. People follow the accounts for the characters they care about, mute Biff if they want, and suddenly the story breaks across their timeline at its own pace. It’s not faster, it’s not better, but it’s different—the film split into pieces and distributed across this weird social network where anything can happen.

I watched Back to the Future growing up like everyone else. It’s a perfectly constructed film, three times over. But there’s something almost more interesting about watching someone else be so obsessed with it that they’ll create fifty accounts and manage this elaborate real-time reenactment. It says something about how we consume stories now, how we want to be inside them, not just watching them. This person is giving that to us, asking for nothing in return except maybe a follow.

The fact that we’re at the moment where Marty’s about to wake up in Lorraine’s room is almost beside the point. What matters is that someone cared enough to do this. That’s worth more than any TV show.