• by Greg Peverill-Conti , Columnist, October 22, 2015

Yesterday — 10/21/15 — was a big day in pop culture. It was the day Marty McFly traveled to in “Back to the Future Part II.” A lot has been written about what the movie got right about today’s technology. Movies, books and video games can all tell the story of the future. Thinking about what story they are telling, and how that might shape the way people think, is an interesting exercise.

The future, as imagined in 1989, was a pretty cool place. Flying cars, hoverboards, self-tying shoes — the whole nine yards. Looking at some of the teen films (or at least the PG-13 ones) over last five years, we had better hope they’re not prescient. Here are just a few of the movies that present different views of the future:

• 2011 – “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” 

• 2012 – “The Hunger Games”

• 2013 – “World War Z,” Catching Fire”

• 2014 – “The Maze Runner,” “Divergent,” “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” “Mocking Jay”

• 2015 – “Insurgent”

All of them are pretty dystopian. Most of them present a post-apocalyptic future with characters doing their best to survive in a bad situation. These futures are neither fun nor hopeful places. Let’s see, in the future we’ll be up against a) rampant intelligent apes bent on our destruction, b) totalitarian states that will force us to hunt and kill each other, c) hordes of brain-eating zombies or d) all of the above. Not much of a choice, is it?

There have always been dark visions of the future, that’s nothing new. What seems new, at least based on a cursory look at recent movie releases, is the fact that there are few films that present a counterbalancing view. 

Past visions of the future seem to have been additive, showing or describing new things that we would have access to, new social structures, etc. The future now being described is one where things are taken away. They paint a world of scarcity and one where things we take for granted in the present are no longer available. Rather than setting before viewers an image of uninterrupted progress, the state of our future world seems to be the result of gradual or cataclysmic decline.

One of the most obvious things about the future is that imagining it is limited, in most cases, to what we know as a starting point. In utopian visions of the future, everyday items and events are re-imagined and polished and presented as new and exciting. Flying cars have been a popular element of the future for more than 100 years. They’re still cars but they fly! The same is true of video calls, which have been imagined since the 1930s. You can talk — and see!

Dystopian futures present dirt, scarcity and squalor. Today’s common items are often presented as sources of poignant nostalgia. Photographs serve this role frequently, with characters fingering faded images of themselves (or parents, children, vacation scenes, pets, etc.). What is interesting is that many of the items are actually from a further past than today’s present. They are used as signals of past better days – even if those days are not familiar to the viewer’s contemporary time. (How many of today’s teens have hard copies of photographs?)

What can marketers do about the way the future is presented and understood? For the most part, not much, unless you’re lucky enough to be making and marketing popular culture content. What we can do is to be aware of how the future is shown and how that reflects our contemporary time. It’s safe to say that the negative view of the future is probably not reflective of a really optimistic view of the present. Maybe a sign of hope here or there wouldn’t be a bad thing.