You're Killing Democracy, You Medieval Dickweed
A Genre Approach to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)
[Contains spoilers]
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) – Genre
Our current world feels like Back to the Future 2, but Biff has teamed up with Tim Burton’s Joker, the Nazis from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, and the titular Twister to Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan our country. But standing apart from all those 1989 harbingers of doom, expertly playing the air guitar, are two heroes (and Abe Lincoln), reminding us to be excellent to each other and to always party on, dudes.
This week, I needed a comfort movie, so naturally I turned to one of the helpers Mr. Rogers told us to find in times of crisis: Alex Winter. For those who are unaware, Alex Winter is a voice for our moment, amplifying the #TeslaTakedown protests and anti-Elon Musk sentiments everywhere, most especially on Bluesky. Winter’s organizing efforts and optimism about the power that we the people can wield if we come together in this moment has been downright inspiring to so many across the world and to me personally, so this week, I revisited one of my all-time favorite films, staring the man himself, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989).
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is about two high school students – Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Winter and Keanu Reeves) – who must pass a history oral exam in order to remain together, improve their musical skills, and usher in a peaceful, utopian future of excellence and partying on in which Clarence Clemons is arguably and rightly the most important person in the world. It’s a perfect future, far better than the Idiocracy moment we have Alex Winter fighting in real life, but it can only be secured if the boys trust in Rufus (George Carlin) who delivers them a time-travelling phone booth to help pass the presentation.
Now, I love this movie and I have seen it approximately one million times, so when I put it on for the million-and-first after the Review Roulette wheel landed on Genre as our lens, I was a bit worried I’d have nothing new to say about a film I know so well and with which I have grown as a person, but like Mr. Winter, good art never fails to inspire new ideas, my friends. So, let’s hop in the phone booth and philosophize about how to get out of our Back to the Future 2 ass nightmare.
Time travel stories have a number of mechanisms to play with. There are time travelers who are tourists such as Ray Bradbury’s in A Sound of Thunder or those who are sent back with a warning such as in The Terminator or those who develop the technology to save a loved one as in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. There are time travelers who must learn from their past by reliving it as Ebeneezer Scrooge does in A Christmas Carol, and there are time travelers who have traveled accidentally and must survive in a predestined past in which they were always present and always meant to return such as in the Outlander series. Many time travel stories rely on time paradoxes such as alternate timelines diverging into a multi-verse situation like Marvel definitely started at some point and time loops as in Groundhog Day or Palm Springs. The mechanisms and reasons for time travel can vary but many consider time as mutable and fragile.
The fragility of time as a structure is normally but not exclusively expressed in cultural works as the “butterfly effect”, the concept of chaos theory popularized by Bradbury that if you change anything in the past, even something considered as insignificant as the premature death of a butterfly, the present could be drastically altered. The Back to the Future franchise relies heavily on the butterfly effect with the famous visual from the first one of Marty McFly and his siblings fading from existence in a future family photo as he fails to course correct in the past.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is also an exceptional adventure, because it flips the butterfly effect paradigm into a new dimension and thus prompts a new philosophy that would blow away So-crates himself. The concept of the butterfly effect works laterally on the given that time is a single strand, mutable, and always moving forward; it concerns the past as a primary location and the present as a future of the mutable past (stick with me). Butterfly effect stories hold the philosophy that the past is intimately linked to the present, and that metaphorically going into the past, grappling with the past, can significantly affect one’s present.
Bill & Ted’s abandons that logic about the past and also shifts the paradigm so that the present is the primary location and the future is mutable (please stick with me). When travelling into the past, Bill and Ted are not concerned with any changes that might affect the future; rather, they engage in shenanigans and medieval lightsaber duels in the past before bringing historical figures into the present day. These seeming alterations to the past do not affect their present, but by Rufus’s own logic, time is fragile and alterations of the future are possible. So, we can take from this film that Bill & Ted’s presence in the past, the friendship between Socrates and Billy the Kid, and Napoleon’s adventures at Waterloo (home of excellent water slides) were predetermined, i.e. always meant to happen to lead to the 1988 present.
But time is mutable. Here’s where we get the exceptional and excellent philosophizing of Bill & Ted’s: 1) the past is important to know about, but 2) the present is where butterfly effects matter. The whole film is predicated on the boys passing a history project that asks them to imagine what their historical subjects might think about modern day San Dimas, CA. We have this interplay between past and present framing the film already, and the movie never betrays the fact that history is a vital field to study and consider in the present day. However, in the film’s climax and final moments, it reprioritizes the future as the determining factor of the present (we’re almost there, keep sticking with me).
In key moments in which it would be most fortunate to have particular circumstances, Bill and Ted figure out that, with the time machine, they can go forward and backward in time at will to create the perfect conditions for the outcome they desire. When it would be helpful to have keys to the police station, the two go back in time, steal the keys, and plant them in the precise location they need them in the present. When an errant trash can would be helpful if dropped from the ceiling at a precise moment, the two make it happen. They construct the conditions of change that enable them to act in favor of a better future. None of this time traveling is shown on screen; instead, the results of it are shown helping our heroes as they narrate what they will do after the presentation to make that presentation feasible.
In this way, both the past and future are tools of the present. In the film’s final moments, the two reflect on the meaning of their temporal adventures:
Ted: Well, we traveled through time. I mean, we met lots of great leaders, and we got an A+ on our history report, but look at us, nothing's different.
Bill: Maybe it's time we get Eddie Van Halen.
Ted: Maybe we should start learning how to play.
Bill: Maybe you're right, Ted.
The goal of becoming a legendary rock band that ushers in that utopian future with Clarence Clemons at the helm is still there, and the two realize that it will not simply manifest itself. They still need to actively work in the present to reach the future they were promised and which they promise themselves.
I think this use of the butterfly effect is a profound one that develops a new strand of the philosophy behind it. The past is often seen as in service of the present, and the present is often seen as in service of the future, but what Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure does so well is suggest that past, present, and future can all be in service of one another in that the present is the beneficiary of the promise of tomorrow.
If we act as though the butterfly effect is as potent in the present day as Marty McFly knows it is in the 1950s, then our small actions today have drastic outcomes tomorrow. And if we act as though the promises we make to ourselves of who we will be and what we will do tomorrow are predetermined, then that promise will decide those small actions we take today in service of that better tomorrow.
Alex Winter knows this and that’s why he’s joined the ranks of thousands protesting internationally against Elon Musk, the aforementioned medieval dickweed killing our democracy. If we believe in the power of the present, we can dramatically rattle the future that feels so crushingly inevitable at the moment. But that feeling of inevitability is only an illusion. As Winter wrote in Rolling Stone, “You’d be forgiven for feeling powerless, but you’d be wrong. Believing that you can do something, that together we all can, is the flotation device that can keep you from sinking into the politics of despair, of shock and paralysis.”
Ultimately, I think Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure offers a twist on the time travel genre and develops a more interesting philosophy than I ever really considered before. Prioritizing the future as in service of the present is a powerful shift. It is not simply saying “today’s sacrifices are tomorrow’s gains”; it’s saying “you benefit today by actively investing in the future of yourself, your loved ones, and your world.” In other words: Be excellent to each other and party on, dudes.
It’s subtle and it’s beautiful and it’s a lesson we desperately need to hear right now. We know that I am always an advocate of watching a comfort movie because a function of cinema is to make you feel, and comfort is a feeling that is in short supply at the moment. But we also know that I will always encourage an active, critical lens when escaping into art, and I know that my active rewatch of Bill & Ted’s for the million-and-first time was a most excellent adventure.
Please consider joining a #TeslaTakedown protest at a Tesla showroom near you!
Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am
Actor’s Oeuvre
Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, and George Carlin all deserve your deep dives. Be they Winter’s documentaries, Reeves’s filmography, or Carlin’s comedy, each have worked on projects that comment on significant political themes in various cultural moments. One Carlin bit I would recommend for this particular moment is his bit in defense of politicians that puts the onus of political change on individuals and recontextualizes the power of voting as only one part of being a member of a democracy.