Whatever Happened to the Present Tense? Paranoid Ramblings on the Revisionist '80s

It's not often a film comes along with a title that neatly sums up an entire decade, but Back to the Future seems to have done just that for the 1980s. Admittedly, 'Forward to the Past' might have done just as well (if not at the box office). But any way you slice it, what with the production of a myriad of futuristic and nostalgic films, it took no expert in such quaintly outmoded disciplines as the social sciences to see that the present tense, for a while at least, was lying low.