Bill and Ted’s Antihistorical, Neoliberal Adventure
The 1989 film Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure shows in compressed form the overlap of digitized information technology and historical memory loss that would characterize the decade of the 1990s in America, and which continues to mark our moment. It also stages a strange, ritualized endorsement of late 80s capitalism by the most significant figures in history. The film's first implicit thesis is that it is no longer necessary to know or understand history; it is enough to master the tools that allow you to pluck decontextualized facts from the past and mash them up into an entertaining spectacle. This anticipation of digital late capitalism and the culture of forgetting that is linked inextricably to information technology - since Wikipedia and other such sources require us to simply type, not to recall - is the prescient, overlooked contribution of the movie. The film's second implicit thesis is that history is a story of constant progress and capitalism is the pinnacle of this progress, as confirmed by the most significant figures in history who fully embrace the Reagan era and its free enterprise phantasmagoria. If history offers its stamp of approval on the total commodification of life, it must be the right trajectory. However, the film ultimately subverts its own narrative since it both refuses history's authority over the present and future and yet requires approbation from the past in order for the utopia to arrive. Abounding with logical paradoxes such as this, the film forecasts the era of anti-logic and anti-memory that would follow.
A brief plot summary: The year is 1988, the place, Southern California. Bill S. Preston, Esquire, and Ted "Theodore" Logan, slackers whose sole interests are babes and their rock band Wyld Stallyns, are failing history at San Dimas High School. If they don't pass, Ted's father will send him to a military academy in Alaska, thus ending their musical collaboration. In the parking lot of a Circle K convenience store, they are visited by their own version of Dante's Virgil, a man named Rufus from the year 2688. He has come to help them pass their final report, as their music is the foundation of all civilization in the future, and if Ted departs, this future will be lost. (The critical viewer wonders: If this future utopia already exists, why does it need to send Rufus to the past to guarantee its existence?) As their guide, he initiates them into the art of time travel, giving instructions on how to use a special phone booth to visit the historical figures they've been asked by their teacher to "know." Bill and Ted not only visit these figures; they abduct them and bring them back to San Dimas in 1988. Their final successful report includes Napoleon, Billy the Kid, Socrates, Freud, Beethoven, Genghis Kahn, Joan of Arc, and Abraham Lincoln. They also visit the future they were responsible for creating, a postracial utopia that lives by their mantras: "Be excellent to each other" and "Party on, dudes." The "historical babes" they met from the Middle Ages are given to them more or less as gifts by Rufus after they pass history. He brings them a pair of guitars on which they finally learn how to play, and the future is thus written.
In a course I regularly teach on French history and civilization from 1789 to present, I ask students a question they've been asked rarely if ever: What is your philosophy of history? I make schematic drawings on the board to illustrate the ways one might think about history. To render the historical philosophy of constant progress, I draw a diagonal line moving upward from left to right. For historical pessimism or the philosophy of decline, the line moves down from left to right. A series of waves illustrates a constant peaking and troughing of culture. A closed, vicious circle. A spiral. A tangled skein of events. The Hegelian dialectic, which somehow always resembles the female reproductive system, with its thetic and antithetic ovaries and its synthetic uterus. To show my own philosophy of history, I lay the chalk on its side and make a vague plane of powdery fog, what Deleuze and Guattari call haecceity. Most of the students opt either for the philosophy of constant progress or the circle, which I'm not sure they see as vicious. Millennials seem much more optimistic than Gen-Xers like myself who likely either opt for the narrative of decline, the vicious version of the circle, or share my penchant for fog.
Bill and Ted's understanding of history is clearly foggy. Before conducting their field research, they believe that Joan of Arc is Noah's wife and they refer to Julius Caesar as that "salad dressing dude." And yet the film has a philosophy of history, albeit a problematic one. The unimpeded market can, if we choose, pave the way for a future of constant and glorious progress. The film maps neo-liberalism onto every single aspect of the past and forces all of the historical visitors to endorse the capitalist excesses of the U.S. in the late 1980s. Genghis Kahn is lured into the time machine with a Twinkie. The travelers are saved by chewing gum and empty pudding cans, which they use to repair a broken antenna. To his military medals of honor, Napoleon adds the Ziggie Piggy badge, the reward for eating an entire bowl of ice cream containing a couple of dozen scoops. His new Waterloo is a paid-entrance water park of the same name, which grants him the satisfaction of athletic triumph - a victory of fun - instead of a military defeat he'd have endured in his own time. Capitalism thus redeems what would have been a fallen emperor. Joan of Arc becomes a Jazzercise junkie; her zeal for Christ is replaced by a zeal for fitness. In Hegelian fashion, Beethoven makes peace with the future, seduced by the synthesizer. Socrates and Billy the Kid try to pick up girls at the mall. Sigmund Freud munches on a corn dog. Genghis Kahn raids Oshman's Sporting Goods. Rufus introduces the medieval princesses to "a place called the mall" and "something called credit cards." All of these figures necessarily love San Dimas because it embodies the pinnacle of history and the perfection of capitalism. The significance of their individual achievements in their own times seems to lie in the fact that they made this sparkling and plastic future possible. If these figures could choose, they would quit their own eras and opt instead for a life in this temple of merchandise. The spectator might even imagine that they would prefer this plastic present to the otherworldly future Bill and Ted are meant to save.
And yet the contemporary viewer realizes that the signature sites of 80s and 90s youth congregation celebrated in the film - the mall, the water park, the garage where rock bands rehearse - have since crumbled. Contemporary photographs of abandoned malls with grass growing through their tile floors underscore the impermanence of capitalist achievements. The invisible warehouse has replaced the mall. The throbbing hardness of rock-and-roll has become flaccid, replaced by the cold clicks of digital music, composed by cognitive science experts and marketers and performed by ephemeral microcelebrities. If the movie emphasizes the cult of personality and the power of a single (male) individual to shape significant events and to build the structures that matter, it does not quite foresee the democratization of space and a certain kind of sociopolitical power that is so integral to the non-place of the Internet. The move to digital capitalism has necessarily demolished the old brick-and-mortar shrines of free enterprise.
The film anticipates this digital turn at several moments. At the end of the film, Rufus gets an autograph for his kids from Bill and Ted, asking them to sign what looks like an iPad, a screen on which their moving avatars strum righteously. Instead of the DeLorean of Back to the Future (1985) fame or the hot tub of the recent franchise Hot Tub Time Machine (2010 and 2015), the filmmakers opted for the phone booth. The telephone must be given credit as the progenitor of the Internet, and the obvious shared technological heritage of telephony and the digital network finds a visual correlative in the "circuits of history," through which the travelers are dispatched. There was a time when many people "dialed information," which allowed the fingertips to access knowledge. Bill means it literally when he says, "Let's reach out and touch someone," referencing AT&T's famous slogan; they will lay their hands on their objects of study. Their telephonic experience will allow for a self-displacement and a direct contact with the remote "information." The past is searchable like the Internet; events and important figures become encylopedic entries that can be cut and pasted into an even more packageable format. In the film, what one has forgotten or never knew in the first place can be accessed in full detail in a few seconds, in a reality that is not yet virtual. The protagonists' time-travelling phone booth works like a rudimentary Wikipedia: They key in an address, they travel through what their guide calls "the circuits of history," and they reach a remote site that will give them the information they need to finish their history report. History takes the form of circuits in empty space, and this choice on the part of the filmmakers imposes a strandular logic on events, depicting the past as a network of discrete wires that serve a conduit function. In this spatialization of time, travel in the past involves speeding through tubes, a special effect allowed through digital animation. The digital preoccupation continues when a jock giving his final report summarizes the present in the following unraveled way: "Everything's different, yet the same. Things are more moderner than before; bigger, and yet smaller. It's computers." The coincidence of digital living and the too-muchness of the world - with its accumulation of events but its failure to grant us more brain power to deal with this accrual - leads to a culture of mumblecore, of approximation, of just barely managing. The film seems to anticipate a future in which not knowing anything about history, not keeping anything inside one's own skull but storing it in some remote cloud or on an external cosmic drive, is the best way to access the past.
Despite its explicit emphasis on history, the movie is hardly a celebration of understanding the past. It praises performance over knowledge, since the glam of the stadium-rock-concert-style final report impresses the audience more than its content. The pantheon of famous figures ends up resembling that of Madame Tussaud's wax museum. Bill and Ted haven't mastered history so much as gathered its architects and made them talk for themselves. They don't cite their sources; their sources simply speak. Plagiarism of Wikipedia and other Internet sources is the common bane of teachers and professors across the planet, who can never be sure that what they're being handed from students is not simply a rephrasing of some sentences gleaned from the web. Knowledge, in the era of standardized tests and PowerPoint presentations, has become granular. Its particulate consistency rejects context and consistency in favor of flexibility and utility. Facts and trivia are amassed into dust piles meant to resemble knowledge or mastered content. In the combinatoric sand box that is the Internet, all eras and their high and low culture become just that: potentially mixable and masterable content. When asked to philosophize with Socrates in ancient Athens, Ted resorts to citing lyrics by the rock band Kansas: "All we are is dust in the wind, dude." Socrates replies in turn with the catchphrase from the soap opera Days of Our Lives: "Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives." Past and present, high philosophy and pop philosophy end up together in the dustbin of time. If anything, the true learners in the film are not Bill and Ted but the figures they entice with life in late-80s SoCal. The pedagogical model is flipped, with the present teaching the past about how to live.
Ultimately, this film is about forgetting. It gives implicit permission for us to slip into our historical dumbness and to engage in happy, guilt-free consumption. Context is corrosive. Since the present is better than the past, and the future is guaranteed to be even better than the present, there is no need to look backward for counsel. The figures of the past are instrumentalized simply as endorserers of free enterprise and to bolster the narrative of inexorable progress. Their approval removes any reservations we may have had about our course toward the most absolute kind of forgetting. It is enough to store our memories off site, in remote storage facilities we can access at will and that hopefully will not share the same fate as our malls, waterparks, phone booths, and wax museums. Bill and Ted's obliviousness to their economic and sociopolitical context and the historical contingencies that made it possible is the movie's hinge. The film secretly hopes to use these dumb and endearing protagonists as the model of a new masculinity and a new humanity: the dull-brained but sweet consumer who shuns context and who knows how to put on a good show.
In its anticipation of a digital dustbin where all of history can be dumped indiscriminately and accessed at will, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure allows us to have our Twinkie and eat it, too. We can remember without recalling. We can travel in time and space without leaving our chairs. In the film, both history and future are simultaneously stable and unstable, in need of our intervention and just fine without us. This weird logic of the film follows that of contemporary consumerism that must create need where there is none, fabricating the very problems it purports to solve. History is mobilized to that end in this case, depicting a utopian present that must be utopianized to an even further degree with some help from the past. Any genuflection to history is merely gestural; the true heroes of time are the purveyors of products.
Christy Wampole is assistant professor of French at Princeton University. Her focus is 20th- and 21st-century French, Italian, and German literature and thought, and she is particularly interested in the essay form, as both a scholar and practitioner.