When is a Western not a Western? When it is Science Fiction. Back to the Future III (Zemeckis, 1990) is the final film in a series based around the concept of time travel, and the temporal anomalies that can be created by such an act. In this episode, the hero, Marty McFly travels back to the American West of 1885 to rescue his inventor friend, Doc Brown. Using Altman’s definitions (1986) of the semantic and the syntactic, this article identifies the genre to which this text belongs and describes how its syntactic features locate this text within that genre.

Genre at its most basic is a question of categories, but this is not to say it is viable, or even possible with regard to texts of popular culture, to so easily posit any particular text into one single category. A common practice in popular culture texts, and one that Rowley (1998) considers to be the “increasing creative bankruptcy of Hollywood”, is hybridisation or genre-mixing. Just as texts of popular culture can be read as allegorical, in that they can be read at two levels: the ‘literal’ level and the ‘figurative’ level”, so too, it may be beneficial to consider an approach to the generic analysis of a text that is not ‘one-eyed’.

Altman (1986) proposes just such a dualistic approach - that of the semantic and the syntactic. The syntactic approach - a consideration of how the elements are arranged - combined with the semantic approach - a consideration of the actual elements or signs within a text, which may be shared with other texts - “permits a far more accurate description of the numerous intergeneric connections typically suppressed by single-minded approaches” (Altman 1986, p. 33). In a western, one might expect horses, tumbleweeds, six-shooters, black hat for the ‘bad guy’ and the tall, white hat for the ‘good guy’ - a setting in the mid-west of nineteenth century America. Similarly, in science fiction, one might expect a space ship, or cars that fly, perhaps an alien, or humans with computer chips in their heads, a post-nuclear landscape - a setting in the future. These are semantic elements, and certainly, valid indicators of the possible generic home for any text. However, as Altman (1986, p. 33) claims, it is “not possible to describe Hollywood cinema accurately without the ability to account for the numerous films that innovate by combining the syntax of one genre with the semantics of another”. Back to the Future III is one of these films - combining the syntax of science fiction with the semantics of the western.

Although this film begins in 1955, the audience is quickly taken back to 1885 by a time machine, a DeLorean car, that flies through a drive-in theatre screen to the mesa-dotted plains of the American West. Marty is immediately confronted by Indians charging on horse-back. The Indians are being chased by the Cavalry. Marty hides the car in a cave and is chased by a grizzly bear. He escapes, but collapses. He is found by a simple migrant farmer and his wife, who turn out to be Marty’s great-great-grand-parents. When he wakes, he says, “I dreamed I was in a Western”. When asked his name, he replies, “Clint Eastwood”. This text has well and truly arrived in the Hollywood version of the American West of the nineteenth century. But the bombardment of cowboy iconography does not stop there. For the next 50-60 minutes, the audience is served a deluge of Western icons - the town; tombstones; horses; buggies; the stage coach racing through town; the swinging doors of the saloon; the poker players; the whores; the whiskey; and even ‘bad guys’ wearing black. But although the audience has so obviously been taken to a place reminiscent of the classic Eastwood ‘spaghetti’ Westerns or of those equally classic John Wayne ‘kerchief’ sagas, there are syntactic threads that serve to remind the viewer that this text did begin in the future, and that the future is the ultimate intended destination of the heroes.

Throughout the film, there are several references to the writings of Jules Verne, the theories of Einstein and Copernicus, science, physics, and the concept of Time and the Future. A travelling barbed-wire salesman approaches Doc, “You never know what the future might bring.” Doc responds, “Oh, I can tell you about the future.” After a successful round at a town fair shooting-gallery, Marty is asked, “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” His curt reply, “7-Eleven”. Doc falls in love with the town’s new ‘school-marm’, Clara Clayton. They gaze at the stars and passionately discuss the Jules Verne works, From the Earth to the Moon (1866) and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1873). Indeed, the latter, having only been published twelve years previous to this romantic interlude, almost caused a ‘temporal anomaly’ in the scientific perceptions in Clara’s mind, when the sexagenarian Doc said he loved reading that novel as a young lad. Despite an overwhelming amount of semantic elements that could easily lead to the consideration of this text as a Western, these syntactic threads - how these elements interact, the context within which they are written - create the grip and slam of the gavel that allows a judgement that clearly determines that this text is science fiction.

Just as Marty “dreamed” he was in a Western, the Western iconography, so much a major component of this text, is part of the fantasy that provides the foundation for the film - the fantasy of time travel. Rather than being comfortably sited in the category where resides A Fistful of Dollars (1964) or Tall in the Saddle (1944), this text has a far more solid connection with Wells’ classic science fiction novel The Time Machine (1895), or the long-running BBC television science fiction series Doctor Who (1963), and hence more firm a seating in that genre, science fiction.

Science fiction, itself, is a difficult genre. Back to the Future III blends generic elements, and so too do many texts considered science fiction. Total Recall (1990), Alien (1979), The Terminator (1984) could each well be considered a modern ‘classic’ of the science fiction genre. Yet each utilise, to varying degrees, elements of the Western, the spy story, horror, even romance fiction. This hybridisation is a common characteristic of the genre, which, according to Kincaid (2003), is suggested by its very title - “not quite ordinary fiction, not quite science, yet partaking of both”. Kincaid (2003) argues that “science fiction, rather than being one genre, is actually a series of sub-genres … strands … braided together”. An equally “defining characteristic” of the science fiction genre is the presentation of “subjects almost unthinkable as other than fantastic … presented as potential … reality” (Abrash 2004). Although the concept of space travel may be realistic, to travel through time is surely fantastic, and a braiding of the fantastic is surely the case with Back to the Future III. Indeed, the braiding is quite tightly bound and becomes comically evident in the closing scene, when Doc Brown, his wife, Clara, and their two children, Jules and Verne, visit 1985 in the Doc’s new ‘Iron Horse’ steam train flying time machine. Now that is fantastic. That is science fiction.

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