Top Gun: America the rebooted

Sometimes you just feel the need, the need for . . . well, you know.

I began writing this entry on Top Gun and America’s 250^th birthday while on a Greek island. But in a way, that’s fitting. Greece measures time differently. Off the coast of the island, Kythira, where we stayed, Odysseus legendarily sailed, oh, only about 3,400 years ago.

Civilization there thrived during the Bronze Age. The island sat on the sea route between Crete and the Greek mainland and was colonized by the Minoans, those ancient sailors who built a vast trading empire around the Aegean that lasted well over a thousand years.

To put it another way: The historical midpoint between the time of the Odysseus legend and today is roughly the fall of Rome. Homer didn’t even write the narrative of his journey until 400 or 500 years after they supposedly took place. For all we know, Odysseus sounded exactly like Matt Damon.¹

Kythira in many ways is a place rooted in the faraway past. Its rugged coastline and grassy plains make it less traveled and unsuitable for mass tourism. The island carries much of the influence of the Venetians who controlled it for almost 600 years (again, longer than the history of the United States). Driving its narrow, twisting roads can feel like going up someone’s driveway for miles at a time. It’s an island of small villages, almost all of them with Orthodox churches. If you run into someone you know, you’re likely to see them again before you leave. Probably at the town bakery. Or at the farmer’s market, where, if you’re lucky, you’ll catch the island’s brass band.

There is time. And there is deep time.

It might sound fanciful, but it isn’t difficult to stand on a beach or pier in Kythira and feel the passage of deep time, to become fully aware how long humans have lived on this planet and how so much of what we center our lives around is a speck of cosmic dust. Nobody, as they say, lives forever.

Nobody. Except Tom Cruise.

---

Unlike in Homer’s time, we don’t have to wait for the chronicles of our heroes to be written down. They occur in front of us, sometimes in IMAX.

With all apologies to Damon, Christopher Nolan and their upcoming film, Tom Cruise is our Odysseus. He has been on a relentless mission for 40 years now to entertain and thrill us. He is a force of nature—and like Odysseus, we may not see his like again in our lifetimes.

Cruise made his debut when I was a teenager. He is still making movies today, big ones. He has not transitioned to character parts such as those with whom he once competed at the box office – the likes of Russell Crowe or Colin Farrell — or the straight-to-video realm of Mel Gibson and Nic Cage. He is simply Tom Cruise, still doing Tom Cruise things, still with that cocksure grin, that shock of black hair, that almost grim sense of purpose. Send him out to sea and he’ll make it back. Sure, it might take 20 years, but he’ll make it back. And he won’t die, because in his movies, he never does.

Yes, I’m a fan (not of everything; Rock of Ages anyone?) – but plenty of moviegoers aren’t. Maybe it’s the Scientology thing, the Oprah thing, the Nicole Kidman thing, that cocky persona they associate with his earliest films. But I appreciate his drive. He wants – no he needs – to entertain us.

My friend the British journalist Harvey Morris recently wondered in a column who England’s living treasures might be. Richard Attenborough? Judi Dench?

The U.S. answer has to include Cruise. (Among others perhaps: Toni Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, Steven Spielberg). You laugh? His films have grossed more than $13.5 billion internationally, according to estimates. That is a one-man American industry.

And Top Gun is a quintessential American film.

---

Yeah, you heard me. I didn’t say it’s a great American film. Or even a good one. In many ways, it’s not a movie at all – but instead a series of images, a montage of American iconography. The roaring jets, the sunglasses, the motorcycle, the volleyball game. It’s an MTV video set to Kenny Loggins and “Take My Breath Away.” The critic Pauline Kael called it a “a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.”

I think of Top Gun as mainly as movie in which the country tried to get its groove — even its arrogance — back following the disappointments of Vietnam, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, you name it. And while it came five years into Ronald Reagan’s presidency, it might be the movie that best encapsulates that particular era. It could have doubled for one of Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” campaign spots. The film was, essentially, a national reboot.

It is a guileless film. There are no hidden agendas, no subversions. Where just three years earlier, The Right Stuff looked back at the dramas of the U.S. space program with a jaundiced eye, there is no cynicism in Top Gun. The men are courageous. The women are beautiful (and smart). The Russians are bad. Lessons about loyalty and honor are learned. You don’t leave your wingman.

Where a decade earlier, films such as Taxi Driver and Network questioned the very bedrock on which our society was built, there is none of that introspection here. One gets the feeling that whenever Maverick isn’t flying, he’s staring at the ceiling or looking out the window. He certainly isn’t reading.

He’s a throwback in a movie that wants to model the 50s, not the 80s. Maverick is a modern James Dean, but this time the rebel on a motorcycle flies a Tomcat. Even the cultural references in the film are outdated. Maverick and Goose serenade Charlie with a song, “You Lost That Loving Feeling,” that was already 22 years old in 1986. Later, they team up on “Great Balls of Fire.” Someone needed to get Mav a boombox with some Def Leppard cassettes.

That Kelly McGillis, who plays Maverick’s love interest Charlie, was miscast is as old a critique as the movie itself. But she certainly tries her best. As an astrophysicist dolled up like a housewife out of Douglas Sirk movie, Charlie makes no sense as a character. She’s clearly smarter (and taller) than Maverick, who you might worry sometimes confuses the washer with the dryer. Cruise comes off as far younger and less mature, giving their interaction a bit of a Mary Kay Letourenau vibe.

Besides, we know Charlie isn’t high on Maverick’s list of things he loves. That list would be something like:

1) Goose

2) His plane

3) His motorcycle

4) His call sign

5) Iceman (although he’ll deny it)

6) His leather flight jacket

7) Charlie

8) Funyuns

So, when Charlie pops up again at the end of the movie, you can be forgiven for asking whether she has any kind of a life or just likes to stalk callow fighter pilots. Surely her friends are warning her to stay away from this kid.

---

As I noted above, America, when compared to other empires and civilizations, remains a young country. And Top Gun is a young movie. Maverick is unburdened by the weight of history, indifferent to geopolitics. He and his fellow jockeys buzz around the skies like princes without bothering to examine the consequences of their actions. We are told early in the film that the military doesn’t “make policy” – and although by the end Mav may have technically started World War III and taken us down the path toward nuclear annihilation, he’s let off the hook just as easily as he was for killing poor Goose. (You heard me.²)

That feeling of teenage energy is aided immeasurably by the propulsive direction by Tony Scott, who had cut his teeth making commercials. Scott’s pyrotechnical style, the quick cuts and “magic hour” shots set to a pop soundtrack, would be copied by a generation of filmmakers. Thematically it may have felt like the 50s, but the shiny packaging was all modern – right down to Val “Iceman” Kilmer being costumed as if he were a bouncer at a West Berlin nightclub.

All Cruise as Maverick wants to do is be the fastest, the bravest, the best, the Top Gun. He wants to win. What is more American than that? You could argue that this movie is the first time Tom Cruise really played the Tom Cruise character as we have come to know him: The preternaturally talented guy who is a bit too self-satisfied for his own good but eventually gets a (slight) comeuppance and finds his place in the world. See also Days of Thunder, Rain Man, The Color of Money, The Firm, etc.³

I wasn’t immune from the movie’s appeal: Did I have my hair trimmed short and buy a pair of aviators? Quite possibly. Did I rev the engine of my Toyota Tercel a little too high? Most definitely. Highway to the freakin’ Danger Zone, mofos!

Maybe the best way to think of Top Gun is the 1980s equivalent to the muscle car movies that came before it – a story about a guy, a girl, his bestie and his sweet ride. He wins the big race and gets the girl. (The bestie doesn’t make it, but hey, you gotta have stakes.) Its sins are largely forgivable –and it’s hard now to watch it without thinking of myself back when it seemed like all my own skies were blue and endless. When all I had a need for was, well, speed. And beer.

There was something reassuring about spending two weeks on a remote Greek island and then coming home to watch Top Gun. Sort of like coming across your childhood bedroom preserved as you left it. My country may not have Greece’s lifespan, but these have been 250 pretty hard-earned years that have left more than few scars. I worry about it but still love it just the same.

Still, someday, all of this too will be gone. and America will be a fading memory, an eyeblink in the flow of time. But even when all around us has fallen into ruin, one name will be whispered. Like Odysseus, his exploits will live on long after he’s gone.

Maverick. . . . Maverick. .

WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: It’s on Paramount Plus.

HEY ISN’T THAT: Yes, that’s Tim Robbins as Merlin, who plays most of the climax terrified that Mav will get him killed. And of course there’s the legendary James Tolkan, he of sweaty brow and glowing cigar, telling Mav that he’s writing “checks that his body can’t cash.” He was also the principal who told Marty McFly he’s a slacker in Back to the Future.

ARMAGEDDON INDEX: (5/10): “The other side denies the incident,” Tolkan says at the end. Whew! That was a relief. I thought they’d be mad.

DUST CLOUDS: Top Gun’s producers received full cooperation from the U.S. Navy, something that was denied other military-themed films of the era including Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, An Officer and a Gentleman and WarGames — all of which portrayed the armed forces in more critical terms. The Navy’s assistance — they handed over the F-14s and an aircraft carrier among other things — gives the movie its versimilatude. But it also allowed the Pentagon to review the script. That’s the reason the “enemy” in the movie is never identified as the U.S.S.R even though the pilots are flying MiGs. In 1986, relations with the Soviet Union were beginning to thaw, making Top Gun, long viewed as the ultimate 80s Cold War movie, almost a relic of its time. At the same time, given that the U.S. was about to embark on a series of regional wars in the Middle East, the movie was also somewhat presicient about the need for air power in the modern world.

TOP OF THE POPS: The number-one song on the Billboard pop charts when Top Gun was released in May 1986 was “The Greatest Love of All” by Whitney Houston.

WHAT ELSE I’M WATCHING: TV: Widow’s Bay (S1, Apple), Silo (S3, Apple); Movies: Crime 101 (2026, Layton), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Ford, 1962)

LAST ENTRY: Watchmen (2009)

NEXT ENTRY: Panic in Year Zero! (1962)

1. This is likely untrue.

2. After the crash, Viper (Tom Skerritt) tells Maverick that Goose is dead. Then he says, “You gotta let him go.” Jesus, Viper! I know it’s the Navy and all that but you can’t give the kid five minutes to get over losing his best friend?

3. In Cruise’s defense, he was on the way to a slighly different career before his infamous couch jump on Oprah. He had made it a point to stretch himself and work with great directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Michael Mann, Cameron Crowe and Paul Thomas Anderson. But as his reputation suffered and he made a series of flops (Lions for Lambs, Valkyrie), he became more risk averse and turned to churning out high-quality action fare such as the Mission: Impossible series.