Page 216 - 217

There’s a lot happening on these two pages so this is a long one! 

One of the things I love about Back to the Future (AND AS YOU MAY HAVE GUESSED THERE ARE A LOT OF THESE THINGS) is that at the end of the story you get, like, five different climaxes one after another after another and we even get a musical scene where everybody dances and has a great time.  It’s so satisfying!  And this is the very first one, resolving the “George is a wimp” thread!  

It gets resolved with punches!!

So in movieland George finally gets a spine when Biff tells him to beat it, so he says “No, Biff.  You leave her alone.” but here in booktopia George says “You let her alone” which IS an old-fashioned way of putting it but I think I give this a pass since we are in the 50s after all and maybe George is the sort of guy who draws the fading grammatical distinction between the two phrases (leave alone = leave in solitude, let alone = stop interfering with)!  OH SNAP YOU WANTED LAFFS BUT INSTEAD LEARNT GRAMMAR FACTS, HOW’S THAT TASTE??  

Lorraine sighed.  At last someone had come to her assistance.  He wasn’t Marty, but in some ways he was even better.  Her lips started to form the words “Thank you” even as Biff removed his hands from her body and started to get out of the car.

In the movie George throws a weak punch, Biff grabs it and starts twisting George’s arm, Lorraine tries to help, Biff throws her to the ground and laughs at her, and George is SO MAD AT HOW SHE’S BEING TREATED that he curls his fist, throws a punch, and knocks Biff out in a really great shot that cheats so we can see him spin around more than once!   Yay!

This really dramatic scene is totally deflated by Gipe’s hilariously wordy and robotic prose.  Check out this action-packed description!

[Biff] moved towards George, one large hand reaching out to grab any part of the interloper’s body.  It brought back a large section of sleeve with George’s arm enclosed.

Turns out BIFF SHOT FIRST.  George tries to punch but his “flailing fist”  hits Biff “causing no damage or pain at all”.

“Help!” Lorraine shouted.

George wanted to yell the same thing, but managed to grit his teeth and choke off the cowardly word.

In this book Lorraine stays in the car, so that means Biff doesn’t push her down and doesn’t laugh at how helpless she is, so what gives George his chance to punch?  Oh shoot, it’s just that Biff hears something that he thinks might be someone working with metal and gets really interested in that.  Not even joking:

[Biff] applied more pressure.  Then, far on the periphery of his circle of awareness, he heard a sound… like a faraway riveting… or was it running footsteps?  Partly distracted, he allowed his grip to relax.

SPOILER ALERT: nobody is metalworking here at High Valley High, and that really just the sound of Marty running up to watch.  This is awful, just awful, because it robs George of his one truly-earned emotional moment in the movie (getting sincerely furious at how Biff treats the woman he loves and punching his way through those feelings) and instead puts Marty there in the scene instead, still helping George out because I guess the poor guy can’t do anything on his own after all.

George throws his climax punch at Biff and “delightfully reminiscent of the duffel bag” (no surprises here, thanks book) Biff’s head gets knocked up and back “like it had been struck by a flying two-by-four” and he drops to the ground and lays there so long “that a referee could have counted to at least a hundred before there was the slightest movement of his body.”  Is Lorraine into this?  UM YEP:

Lorraine’s sparkling eyes stared at George’s, projecting a message of total adoration.

And OF COURSE you have my permission to take that “eyes projecting a message” part TOTALLY AND CYBERNETICALLY LITERALLY.  

Marty and the five musicians (Gipe is reminding us that they are black again, nobody forget how black these people are okay) are watching this.  Marty can’t believe what he’s seeing because everything’s so perfect, and one of the elements of this perfection is the evidence of Lorraine’s sexual assault:

…Marty, who, followed by the five black musicians, had just arrived on the scene.  But the picture was clear and perfect, with every detail in place - Lorraine’s torn dress, the prostrate form of the bully and nervously grinning face of the unlikely hero.   

I feel like here Gipe realized that mayyyyyyyyyybe his writing wasn’t getting across the mood he was going for, so he decided to pull that classic Really Really Good Writing Trick of having other unnamed characters show up and be amazed at how awesome everything is.  This is the very next sentence he writes, still in the same paragraph:

Others arriving on the scene immediately grasped the significance of the scene and were touched by it.

I hope you are glad that others arriving on the scene immediately grasped the significance of the scene and were touched by the scene.