Close Enough to 2015

The second Back to the Future film is basically a document of everything we wanted the future to be: hoverboards, self-drying jackets, and those Nike shoes that lace themselves while Marty gapes at his own feet. The shoes especially lodged themselves in the collective fantasy—Nike even released a real self-lacing version years later, limited edition, gone in minutes, listed on resale sites for what a used car costs.

What you could actually buy, back in 2014, were Nike Air Mag replicas—not made by Nike, made by a Halloween costume company, but officially licensed by Universal Studios, which puts them in a strange category just above knockoff and well below the real thing. They light up in multiple colors. They have a USB port. They come in a collector’s box. They do not lace themselves. They do not make you capable of skateboarding away from Biff Tannen. They cost a hundred dollars and they are, fundamentally, a costume prop.

And yet I find them hard to completely dismiss. There’s something about the object—the shape of it, the light-up sole, the box it comes in—that scratches at something earnest in me. I was the right age for those films. The future they promised felt genuinely possible, which is maybe why the actual future we got—the one where you can buy a glowing plastic replica of a movie shoe and call it a day—feels like such a precise kind of disappointment. Not crushing. Just exact.