Q: HOW LONG SHOULD YOU WAIT BEFORE SHUTTING DOWN SOMEONE'S FACEBOOK ACCOUNT AFTER THEY DIE?

摘要

A: "This is for all you lovers out there." That's how it begins- one of the most existentially horrifying moments in American cinema. I'm talking about the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future, in which we see a temporally displaced Marty McFly onstage, sitting in with the band on "Earth Angel" with a guitar, while his teenage parents, George and Lorraine, move toward their first kiss. This is it: the precise, excruciatingly brief moment in which the cosmos will offer up the possibility for them to fall in love-a doorway they can step through or not step through. But if they do, it's a straight shot from here through the sinews of the spacetime continuum to marriage, and to Marty's birth, and to all the circumstances of life that Marty had always mistaken for the one and only, inviolable reality. But he's wising up now. While traveling through time, he's learning that his life, like all of our lives, is only an exquisite and provisional fluke-a haphazard product of so many collisions and coincidences that were never guaranteed. Up on the stage, he's about to be confronted with this truth in a deep and terrible way.