4DX, Top Gun: Maverick and The Myth Of the Male Project
This is much longer than a usual piece, dealing with multiple themes and issues. It comes in at around 8,000 words.
“If you think you can, well, come on man
I was a Green Beret in Vietnam
I said, no more of your fairy stories
'Cause I got my other worries”
“Then I took out my razor blade
Then I did what God forbade
Now the cops are after me
But I proved that I'm no sissy”
- lyrics from 53rd and 3rd, The Ramones
At the end of the 10-minute silent film The Great Train Robbery, considered one of the earliest narrative breakthroughs with respect to the development of film editing, the director who was one of the pioneers of the medium, Edwin Stanton Porter, cuts to a frontal shot of a man firing a gun at the audience. The movie had already been a landmark in its use of location shooting, camera movement and sudden eruptions of violence.
It depicts Butch Cassidy’s Hole in the Wall gang as they hijack a train on the Union Pacific railroad, tying up station agents, robbing passengers and blowing up a safe in the process. Porter (a fascinating American citizen if ever you get to read up on him) rewrote history by having the gang get tracked by a posse of locals to a hideout in the woods and then killed in a shootout, when in real life the gang evaded capture that day.
But he ended his film with a radical and shocking image that is perhaps Cinema’s first breaking of the fourth wall. The bandit faces the camera square on as if framed for a wanted poster and fires six shots at the audience. His gun runs out of bullets but he continues to squeeze the trigger. It may be that he’s desperate or careless, but the impassive, cold look on his face suggests an impulse towards killing that is deranged and zealous.
It’s at this moment that all narrative momentum in the film is dispensed with and a direct connection is formed between the medium and the spectator. It could have been delivered countless other ways but at this moment, the originary use of direct address to the audience at the dawn of this new artistic medium is brought to us by violence. According to a sales catalog made for the film at the time, which would be the closest thing we have to a screenplay or a press kit for a film from this early period, the bandit is firing, “point-blank at each individual in the audience.”
This is cinema’s baptism by fire. The idea would be violent on or off screen. It tells us that even after these killers are vanquished, the violence will continue. There will be others. The world is a scary and dangerous place, and those things which threaten our lives are not the mythic figures of historical fiction but real threats that we must all face as a society. Thus is this specific functionary threadline of cinema as a purveyor and expounder of the vicarious thrill of violence first sewn into the fabric of the medium.
Perhaps this is why Martin Scorsese borrowed this shot for the final minutes of Goodfellas, understanding the place of gangsters as the natural descendants of wild west outlaws for continuing the glamourization of violence in American movies - a violence that seems exclusively the domain of men. The message comes full circle as Scorsese, like Porter, is addressing the audience, distancing himself from the internal logic of his film.
The camera is the exact same distance from Joe Pesci as Porter’s was from his actor, Justus T. Barnes. In Goodfellas, the image could be the abstract memory of an assisination, or the nightmare of protagonist Henry Hill as he’s reflecting on his life as a gangster following his placement in the FBI’s witness protection program. Interestingly enough, Hill mentions in his closing narration that gangsters were “treated like movie stars with muscle.”
* * *
On May 14th of 2022, ten people were murdered and three more were injured in a supermarket by an 18 year-old shooter in Buffalo, New York. The killer livestreamed his actions in real time on the streaming service Twitch. He was comfortable enough to demonstrate his capacity for the mass murder of innocent people online. I won’t and can’t speculate on that decision of letting the entire world experience what he was experiencing before he was taken down. Whether he wanted his fellow far-right white supremacists to be there in solidarity as he was targeting black people or he was merely performing his monstrous act because he thought it would be captivating or instructive for others to see - frankly, I don’t care. I don’t care about his motivations or what was “going through his head.” What explanation would suffice? What would it satisfy?
Aftermath of the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York in 2022 and Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019
In 2019, a white supremacist gunman went on armed rampages in two Muslim mosques in Chirstchurch, New Zealand. This shooter, who’d killed 51 people and injured 40 others, also livestreamed his first shooting spree on Facebook. Again, while I refuse to so much as name the shooters let alone speculate about their motivations, I think it’s worth noting that in a culture so saturated with violent imagery in media, individuals who kill large numbers of people with guns in public places are now choosing to show everyone and anyone with a screen what they’re doing as they’re doing it.
They are not ashamed of their actions. They write manifestos explaining and justifying themselves. In these manifestos, they almost always posit or perceive themselves as instruments of divine will, righteously carrying out a mission to transcend the physical. A project designed to move ever further away from that which is human toward what they feel is a sublime manifestation of their sacred charge as threatened, white, heterosexual, Christian males.
* * *
On May 27th of 2022, two weeks after the Buffalo mass shooting, Top Gun: Maverick was released in theaters in the US, the UK, and in numerous other countries around the world. The movie, which has gone on to break box office records, is of course a sequel to Top Gun(1986), one of the tackiest and most telling articulations of consumerist American values to come out of Reagan-era Hollywood. A camp exercise we’re meant to feel (but not think) deeply about.
The sequel retains much of what characterized the original Top Gun. There are no real people in it. The characters are tropes and cyphers, filling in the requirements of a mechanical script in which F-14 Navy fighter pilots are cast as gods among mortals, having a kickass time carrying out the work of warring nations.
Theaters in America offered Top Gun: Maverick in 4DX format. The seats in the theaters are attached to pneumatic machinery and fitted with special internal devices. These seats shake, rock back and forth, tilt forwards and backwards and shoot sharp little streams of air or water. Smoke machines spray vapor into the air (in a movie theater). Ceiling-mounted lights flash wildly. Huge fans blast air at the viewers. All this is intended to immerse the viewer in the movie, provided that movie plays like a theme park ride. Since franchise blockbusters (and now “serious” award-winners like Gravity) are being filmed to play as theme park rides anyway, this works handily. I imagine it’s someone’s job to make sure these scripts (after they’re approved by the State Department) include settings and plot elements that employ each feature of 4DX by checking off a list.
4DX is basically airplane turbulence. You can now pay to watch a whole movie like that. Next time you’re on a plane and you hit turbulence, you may as well just pretend you’re watching Top Gun: Maverick.
I saw Top Gun: Maverick in 4DX because it seemed like the first time a movie with distracting political undertones had played in this format and I was correct in thinking the experience would be both instructive and depressing. Marvel entries and other fantasy and action features seem at home here in 4DX. These are most often not the cream of their genres, as the most beloved and enduring popcorn fare tends to be too innovative and different to work in a format that depends on predictability.
So 4DX has the effect of highlighting the nature of the titles that utilize it as disposable experiences. Just like theme park rides, they’re not meant to be thought about too much after they’re over. They’re movies that can be reduced to a summation of simplistic, unreflective sensations, which the theater chain is happy to simulate for an upcharge.
I was fed up with 4DX at about the half-hour mark. I kept having to adjust my body in the seat after it jerked me around, which took me out of the movie. Good luck to you if you’re elderly and need to get up to use the bathroom. The seat could knock you over or its plastic stirrup footrest could come down on your leg. It goes without saying: If the theater needs to provide you with these effects and sensations, then the makers of the movies they’re showing haven’t done their job.
Honestly, the whole thing is so silly. Too noticeable to be immersive, too jarring to be pleasurable. I’m reminded of the sketch in the Landis/Zucker Brothers Kentucky Fried Movie where a man goes to see a movie in “Feel-Around,” a format that involves a theater employee standing in the row behind the viewer and visiting every sensation depicted the movie on the viewer including spraying the guy with perfume, blowing cigarette smoke in his face, burning him with a torch and kissing him on the cheek.
In livestreaming a shooting spree, a mass killer is doing exactly what major studios do in advertising their products: “I am proud of the experience I am about to present to you. I want you to lose yourself in this world. See what I see. Feel what I feel.” We would never watch a serious film like Schindler’s List in 4DX, as it would show up the emptiness of the gimmick. The format is saved for superhero movies, Star Wars ventures and all other products coming out of the IP Industrial Complex. The lack of either risk, brains or consequence is what deems these features worthier of this treatment and the technology to make them more immersive, provided of course, we’re limiting our definition of “immersive” to the external sensory jolts of 4DX.
So some movies are just rides getting ride-ier. Fine. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, despite how uncomfortable I found the experience. But there’s something about watching this particular movie in 4DX, a movie about the men who fly planes that travel thousands of miles to drop fire and radiation on people, that sets it aside from other features released in this format. The fighter pilots of Top Gun: Maverick are playing - in the truest sense of that word - with their war weapons and with the rise of mass shooters imploring us on the internet to ride their adventures in murder and desolation happening simultaneously in American culture, this feels obscene.
The stunt-laden thrills of this fun summer blockbuster gloss over the nature of what an elite national fighting force does. Not what they metaphorically or hypothetically may do (serve our country, protect our way of life, etc.) but what they actually do (kill). The task that is the task. Inviting us to experience this as fun is a progandaistic exercise that’s nothing new in culture. Modern wars are, after all, sold to us by the news media as if they were Tinseltown mega-productions.
But the act of 4DX making us feel as if we were there, the way mass shooters are now doing in their own capacity, is a chilling similarity that the media (which includes the world of movies) seem uninterested in exploring. Just like Hollywood producers and their high-concept blockbusters, angry young men are creating, out of their spiritual, emotional and intellectual impotence, what they see as the ultimate Youtube video. The ultimate thrill ride.
The barriers between real and cinematic violence are being dismantled. The provocations of Porter and Scorsese felt cautionary in confronting spectators with the idea of real world violence. When hit movies appropriate the experience of being a killer (which is a fighter pilot’s job, regardless of the pretenses of the so-called nobility of warfare) and killers screen their wretched deeds as if they were first-person movies and nobody stops to think more deeply about this, then there’s something seriously wrong with the capacity of the American public for distinguishing fiction from reality.
* * *
I used to believe that blaming movies in part for American violence was BS - that all entertainment does is channel violence more creatively. That government and religion in their repression and regulation of natural human impulses like sex and self-gratification are much more substantial contributors to violence, which is one reason they try to scapegoat movies, television, video games and other forms of media. It was bred in the stateside bone as I saw it, considering that the spate of violent American action movies in the 80’s, which included Die Hard, Terminator, Lethal Weapon, Black Rain, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Predator, Escape from New York, and the Indiana Jones features did very in places like Japan, Europe and Canada and the civilian populations of those countries didn’t and still don’t have nearly the violence of the United States.
Hair, guns, leather, muscles, attitude. Let me be clear: I haven’t taught myself to hate the stuff I once loved. I just look at it much differently.
But I don’t believe movies exist independently of reality and in light of what could surely be called a very serious problem in America with easy access to military-grade firearms and the will to mass violence, I’m fairly disappointed in action movies at the moment. I’ve changed my mind somewhat about the influence that American screen violence has on male audiences.
I’m more skeptical these days about the motives of these products as it seems that for all of Hollywood’s newfound conspicuous displays of its dubious notion of wokeness, it has yet to rethink its attitudes about depicting violence. I thought the industry’s skewing of its output towards the tastes of teen and pre-teen boys as the demographic that drives DVD and Blu-Ray sales would begin to wane in the wake of home streaming’s supposed democratizing of “content”. I was wrong.
There’s an FBI division that tries to identify patterns in individuals that display the kinds of sociopathic tendencies characteristic of mass shooters before they carry out their deeds. It sounds like a scary form of profiling that can be used to justify mass surveillance until one notes how this analytical system is shown to be effective in preventing this specific form of social violence. One of the tendencies identified is, “a fascination with violence-filled entertainment,” which is not surprising for a country that sees war as a glorified form of kicking ass.
A study conducted by the FBI in 2018 looked at 63 mass shootings between 2000 and 2013 and found that mental illness played a very small role in the actual motivations of the killers. According to their findings - which found that only 3 of the roughly 25% of shooters studied had a psychotic disorder associated with targeted acts of violence - the notion that mass shooters are mentally ill is “misleading and unhelpful”. And personal insanity is often the excuse shoved out by the media and by high-profile media henchmen as deflections from the more damning implications in the stories of the killers.
from Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film, Elephant
Instead, “social and contextual factors,” are stated as the prime factors associated with socially violent behavior. These factors include but are not limited to interpersonal interactions, recklessness, physical aggression and consumption of violent media. In other words, the condition of being violent and aggressive, suppressing all emotions except anger, the condition of furnishing oneself in a culture of violence. Not an overflowing of emotion but an emotionlessness and detachment, a form of spiritual impotence, in which the internally deadlocked see no other way to express themselves. They know they’re hurting their victims. This is the point. They seek a kind of violent catharsis for this deadlock, which is often framed by the extreme ideology of the far right. It seeks through this catharsis to reassert the cruel hierarchical structures purported by religious extremism and white supremacy. In America, this has become a modern sacrament.
* * *
If Travis Bickle’s killing spree at the end of Taxi Driver has a power that remains undiminished in a culture where targeted mass violence is as prevalent in our lives as ever, it hurts to think of this view of killing as an enduring kind of American purification rite. It hurts to think we’ve not been able to evolve past the mass-killing, loner white male and his pathetic, unwinnable quest to redeem his manhood with the purification of society and self through violence as his misbegotten attempt at transcendence.
A mass shooter is telling us he’s alone when in his iconic monologue, he says, “I don’t see anyone else here.”
The script by Paul Schrader, whose own occasional fascist leanings always find his characters’ denouement culminated in a bloodbath, has Bickle laying out his arsenal from inside a rolled up cloth that’s unfurled from the middle out to the ends like a priest’s laying out of his implements for Mass on the altar. Scorsese’s cut to a “priest’s-eye-view,” used numerous times in the film, establishes the inner state of a lonely, alienated man who views killing as a sanctimonious ritual of social cleansing.
It’s interesting to note that both Bickle and the character in the Ramones song quoted at the top of this piece are Vietnam veterans. 53rd and 3rd is a crucial track on The Ramones self-titled debut album, its lyrics reflecting a broke Joey Ramone’s time prostituting himself on dirty New York street corners, indulging a murder fantasy not unlike Bickle’s with its roots in sexual shame, guilt and impotence.
The album - released the same year as Taxi Driver - hit the culture like a bullet through a plate glass window. The monochrome record cover pictured the group in a graffitied Bowery back alley looking like the delinquent hustler refugees of a forgotten 50’s biker gang. The album photography by Roberta Bayley paints as explicit a picture of the grimy desolation of this setting as cinematographer Michael Chapman’s work in Taxi Driver.
The war was supposed to have given Bickle direction and discipline but the lies and deceit surrounding the war saw a generation of men come back defeated, unable to measure themselves in the traditional way that men once did. Debased, devoid of purpose, living in a state of longing for a kind of oblivion that can only be achieved by violence. There was real anger at the failed promise of the hippie movement (“Beat on the brat with a baseball bat!”), and other populist uprisings that were sold and snuffed out before they had a chance to build anything in place of what they dismantled.
The Ramones were the first wave of American punk. Their lyrics blended extremist rhetoric, cartoony black humor, totalitarian imagery and horror and disgust with society at large. Travis Bickle, with his full blown Mohawk - the ceremonial Native American war cut - could, in casting himself as both a warrior and an outcast, stand as a kind of mascot for The Ramones imagery.
DeNiro’s Bickle character was dressed and cropped for the burgeoning punk scene. He might have found the scene a useful outlet for his rage if he didn’t hate them too.
Contextualizing this period is important because it helps expose The Male Project at its most desperate and ugly. Richard Nixon’s resignation from office in 1974 following the Watergate scandal cemented a permanent culture of public opposition to all government activity - benevolent or not - that is very much still with us today. Saigon fell in April 1975 and two assassination attempts were made on President Ford by Charles Manson acolytes in September of that year. In a speech, Ford said he would refuse to allow federal assistance to spare New York from bankruptcy. “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” read the Daily News headline the following day. A nation went into its head. Some citizens stayed there.
Shooters live in their own worlds - like movie fictions. Their violence is like a kind of intervention into reality to cover up this impotence. It seeks the transcendent characteristic of maleness and its primordial will to destruction. But it lacks the cognitive mapping to channel this will away from the destructive towards the creative, away from the fantasies of The Self towards the realities of The Other. The impenetrability and confusion of a harmonious society in the minds of these men is what leads them on an all-or-nothing quest to penetrate with their bullets what they can’t with their minds, bodies and souls.
Some films, like Taxi Driver, try to depict this process. Most just go along with it.
* * *
If the mass shooter is the nadir of The Male Project, its antithesis in this sphere would be the development of the atomic bomb as its apex or zenith. The most perfect realization of (or resort to, depending on how you look at it) this mythology that exists in each culture. For cinematic evidence of this cosmology at its most highbrow, I would submit two post-WWII Hollywood movies - The Beginning or the End (1947) and Above and Beyond (1952).
Both movies offer themselves as apologetics for the atomic bombing of Japan, for which it was revealed there was no need. The war was won and the Japanese were attempting to surrender. But the movies take this event - perhaps the most monstrous human act in recorded history, visited no less on civilians in a supreme act of terrorism if ever there was one - and use it to depict an atomic puncturing of mundane existence.
Nobody in either film wants to deploy this weapon. But they have to. It is one more womb from which to be reborn. Mother Nature can no longer contain man, who uses his science to propel himself still further into a more expansive dimension. This is in his nature, this need for rebirth. The marrow in his bones commands him. When it happens, it is unthinkable, otherworldly. Nothing is the same. A celestial demigod is brought to its full arousal, in contempt for the feminine sphere implied by “Mother Nature,” it brings incalculable energy into this dimension. Energy erupts at a magnitude beyond anything known to ordinary people. And of course, nobody has any idea where it’ll go or what’ll happen next.
Above and Beyond’s Captain Paul Tibbits, played by Robert Taylor, is charged with overseeing the development of the B-29s that will carry the bombs, while flying the Enola Gay on its fateful mission in August of 1945. His wife and children are kept in the dark. Drained of his humanity and wound tightly with macho self-pity and paranoia, Paul is incensed that his wife Lucey (Eleanor Parker) could want to be treated like a human being rather than a doormat who cooks, cleans, and raises the kids. Despite the fact that she serves as the film’s narrator in viewing all this from the outside, no indication is given of the existence of her own needs and desires beyond tending to the house and the babies.
Her ability to appraise her own life is measured solely by her husband’s autonomy, as he’s sanctified by the military brass for preparing to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent people from the air by pressing a button. The very existence of her femaleness, which within The Male Project serves only as a broodmare for replenishing the supply of males, is considered a threat to the entire large-scale project. Her pregnancy, which culminates in driving herself to the hospital while in labor, is nothing compared to what he is about to birth unto the world.
The Beginning or the End on the other hand is concerned not with the predicament of the man dropping the bomb but the logistics required to bring the mission to fruition. The necessity for America to preempt the use of the bomb is shown to be a heavenly engine for a great revival of the American spirit of ingenuity. The federal government’s unprecedented allocation of funding and its engagement of military advisors, engineers, scientists and air force personnel allows for a cooperation between organizations across party lines and at all branches of government to be united in purpose. From the processing of “mountains of uranium ore,” to the building of an entire makeshift wartime community for an Egyptian Pyramid-scale amassing of manpower, it’s all carried out with the most closely guarded secrecy of any project in American history.
All the major players involved in the process are depicted in The Beginning or the End (which is free on Youtube) as having fear and doubts about the grave implications of what they’re carrying out. As long as the movie keeps reiterating this point, the excusal of their use of the weapon remains intact. Our country feels just awful about this. But we have to do it. As long as we go about it all long-faced and remorseful, it’s okay that we do it. It was for everyone’s own good.
Both movies climax with the dropping of the bomb as the rupturing of the fabirc of existance, as if by some superstud bull from out of this world. Both movies, interestingly enough, posit the dropping of the bomb as the catalyst for bridging the distance between the men serving and their hapless female companions. In Above and Beyond, Tibbits embraces Lucey following the bombing, and then a deeply offensive and irresponsible conclusion in which we’re meant to view the Bomb itself as the catalyst for reigniting their love and their view of each other as human beings rather than functions. The nature of the mission was kept a secret from her and the broken silence allows for healing. In effect, the A-bomb saves their relationships.
In both bombings, it’s acknowledged that this creation, rather than the wrath of the Creator, is now the prime human cause for awe and fear. The men involved know its name, as The Male Project has manifested it. Captain Paul Tibbets sees an entire society disintegrated as a white light fills the screen. He looks at the mushroom cloud and utters the word, “God.”
* * *
Critic Pauline Kael made an assessment in The New Yorker regarding Top Gun in 1986 as a movie that is selling nothing. “It’s just selling. It’s a commercial for itself.” To this day, I can’t even appreciate Top Gun as a good piece of camp, despite its frothing campiness. I’m even suspicious of the film’s lionization by gay men in some circles that sites a homoerotic subtext.
The camp values comes in the way the men in Top Gun utilize sexual innuendo when addressing each other (though never to women, who in this world would take it in stride like good girls): “I’d like to bust your butt but I can’t”; “Nail him, nail him!”; “Stay on my wing, I’ll take you all the way in”; “I want somebody’s butt and I want it now!” But watch the movie closely and you’ll see it’s done less in the spirit of homosexual provocation and more as a kind of in-code for a game everyone is playing with each other, serving the purpose of greasing the thematic wheels.
If anything is being subtextually sexualized or fetishized in a gaudy item like Top Gun, it’s not the relation of the men serving in the Top Gun unit to their brothers in arms. It’s their relationships to their machines and this is part of The Male Project. The squadron of men in this movie can only be what we would call today their “Whole Selves” - emotional, vulnerable, selfless - while they’re in the seat of their planes. Their ability to suppress their humanity and individuality - a requirement for military service the movies routinely lie about - has made the machines they operate the only entities with which (or through which) they can have a loving relationship.
Why do I think this? Because this is the way director Tony Scott filmed it. Scott had numerous cinematic fetishes; smoky light, ceiling fans, sensitive machismo, Venetian blinds. But the most prevalent would be his obsession with men in love with the non-human. I don’t entirely agree with Kael’s assessment because I think Top Gun, though listless and mechanical, is actually selling something. But she’s onto something in tracing the film's aesthetics to those of commercials. As a director, Tony Scott started in the business directing television commercials for the production company headed by his father, Ridley. He came from the world of advertising, and his work reeks of advertising’s overheated style.
I’ve never been able to warm up to Scott’s pearl-toothed world of sexless, inhuman male torsos and their fetishes for hardware. I suspect my general aversion to jock culture is only partially to blame. Scott did fit in nicely with the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer aesthetic, which bathed blockbusters in macho glamor. Moreso, it’s the emptiness of this world, the sense of self-pity in the pathos of the wounded warrior who won’t let anyone else into his emotional sphere that I find so dull and overly familiar.
These are men who can’t really express themselves to the women in their lives (those actresses lucky enough to get speaking parts as concerned wives) outside of the contexts of the operations of their machines. Separate Tony Scott’s cool professionals from their jet engines, submarines, Formula One racers and snazzy convertibles, and they seem emotionally confused, out of place.
Any time Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is in crisis, he takes his motorcycle on a ride down a palm tree-lined road in a hazy sunset. Charlie (Kelly McGillis) catches up to him in her red convertible, driving recklessly along those roads in movies that contain no other cars. She pulls him out of his shell in asking him about his knowledge of the thrust-to-weight ratio of the MiG-28. The bond they start to form in this scene is only possible because the two of them are in high-performance vehicles talking tradecraft.
It’s all so corny. Long stretches where nothing of consequence happens. The vacuousness of the script is always noticeable. This placing of macho seriousness within camp trappings made Scott’s Top Gun an item destined for parody within the pages of Mad Magazine. It’s a movie that was born with the merciless deflations of the Zucker Brothers nipping at its heels (and honestly, thank god for 1991’s Hot Shots!).
Hot Shots! (1991)
But such is The Male Project. It’s a thing that exists independently of and in opposition to the female world and what it feels are a woman’s occupations (nest and offspring). The Male cannot give birth, so he seeks mechanical transcendence in war and destruction, forms of organized violence which must become ever more large-scale and glamorous. Having jettisoned morality, The Project furnishes itself in style, cultivating a mythology that can be used to market its self-worship.
The point is transcendence and it is Men’s work. He is part of a special brotherhood. A kind of techno-priesthood barred to women, who are not allowed in the clubhouse. Their means of transcendence, the acting out of what they are unable to put into words, involves secret rituals and techniques handed down exclusively to younger men. The point of this warped cosmology is to manifest God - like creating the Bomb or killing perceived inferiors enmasse. In propelling itself further and further from The Female, abandoning the hearth (and the Earth) in the process, it must engender Mother Nature to cross some extra-physical Rubicon into a more expansive dimension and be reborn. Further. Wider.
* * *
The members of the elite training academy in Top Gun: Maverick are part of this Project. In 2022, the Top Gun program faces the prospect of being replaced with unmanned drone craft, wasting their training in “the lost art of aerial combat” (apparently for all those dogfights we’re always getting into with ISIS). Mass shooters who believe white Christian Americans are being “replaced,” might identify with this in spirit. In constant crisis over their manhood, they’re resentful of not having a specific Great War in which to test themselves. Here they’re pointed to an example of a breakthrough more dignified than a mass shooting, which can provide, in the midst of a media culture produced by and for rich, white liberals, a reassurance of the rightness of their fears, impulses, tastes, values and fetishes.
Yes, there are female pilots in Top Gun: Maverick. This changes nothing. Progressions are made over time in the fabric, but the Project’s cloth remains the same. The women also strut and preen. They throw their weight around, behave like alphas, are as ready to kill for their country. One doesn’t need a penis to measure dicks. I suppose this is equality. Three and a half decades after the first movie, it’s depressing to see that the corny 80’s way in which the squadron one-up and pull rank on each other hasn’t evolved a bit.
The infantile nature of this world - which extends to its politics - goes to sick lengths. Maverick even gets a pass for stealing the SR-72 to break the airspeed record because his CO is impressed with the childish chutzpah it took to do so. “You got balls, stick jockey. I’ll give you that,” says Ed Harris. It’s the 21st century, with a more progessive and enlightened armed forces, and yet you still get a pass for these wreckless manifestations of macho swagger if you’re good enough complete with all the same adolescent sexual language that seems baked into military culture. Jokes about sex, the creation of life and love, compensating for the impotence that fosters the will to destruction.
Not that it matters. The process of military training is to turn a human being into a gun barrel. Since characters like Jennifer Connelly’s Penny are not in the armed forces, they remain comfortably out of the way. So women are free to participate in The Male Project, provided they do so as men: sterile and robotlike in military service for the cause of exercising American power. It’s a pastime portrayed by Hollywood as it flatters the public with the idea of an entire world out to dismantle and weaken America, thereby stopping it from being the greatest place ever, which is undoubtedly what we’re made to believe everyone else in the world must think.
I have no idea which Top Gun this is from.
The missing link between the supposed harrowing nobility of the A-Bomb and the ugliness of mass shootings is what both Top Gun ventures are selling: Fun, in the most basic sense. The Male Project - the work of carrying on with the endless cycle of destruction - looks fun when articulated this way. These wafer-thin characters keep up the tradition of cracking jokes, impromptu beach sports that show off their hunkiness and camaraderie and the practice of relentless competitive showboating that the training program seems to encourage.
The boys-will-be-boys nature of their interactions slickens the effect of this package as an excuse for the perpetuation of The Male Project, as we can’t blame the recruits for taking pleasure in their work. Though they can die up there in those F-18s, their hijinks look akin to college hazing. This is not propaganda for war, but rather for combat as a kind of game.
Marvel movies dole this out constantly. Bloodless, breathless, slick, consequence-free violence enacted by sleek, photogenic bodies, endowed with a kind of joyousness and glamor. Until the public forgets the realities of actual violence and children are conditioned to love and accept aggression and fighting as part of life. An incisive critique of The Male Project in the manner of 2008’s The Hurt Locker would be a useful and welcome addition to the cultural space. But the IP Industrial Complex to which the Top Gun franchise is now yoked would never allow it to take that kind of risk.
The Sun’s best performance since its role in the last Top Gun movie.
The original Top Gun was not the first piece of propaganda to make combat look fun, though it’s perhaps the most successful and influential. Never forget that military recruiters in 1988 had great success in recruiting new pilots literally outside the movie theaters showing the first Top Gun. Imagine immediately making a decision that changed the entire course of your life upon seeing a movie that’s mostly about the fun of having macho pissing contests in the sky, with much of the unpleasant realities of their jobs as government-sanctioned killers withheld from any place in such a decision.
It's questionable whether Top Gun: Maverick will encourage the same level of recruitment that its predecessor did. This is surprising because the movie is a far better piece of propaganda than the original Top Gun; more inclusive and less cheesy. It retains some of Tony Scott's mixture of smoky light, synth music and slow motion airplane preparations softly lit in shallow focus. But added to this new version is the emphasis on the importance of passing the hunger for destructive transcendence on to the younger generation.
Here, Maverick’s oversight of his team allows him to take on a paternal role, fostering a loving atmosphere that instead of negating all the bluster on display, serves to strengthen a recruit’s conditioned obeisance. Any alternatives to the jingoist dogma that might be found outside this world, with its get-em-before-they-get-us justifications, are, as suggested by Penny’s bar where verbal disrespect of the Navy is penalized with the purchasing of a round for everyone, nonexistent.
In training the son of a pilot nicknamed Goose, over whose death in the first film Maverick feels guilty, Maverick can redeem himself in the male-to-male mentorship that’s a major facet of The Male Project. In teaching the brash Rooster (Miles Teller), furious with Maverick for holding him back in an effort to protect him, to now become a good steward in continuing The Fight, he can allow the object of both his guilt and his fatherly aims to vindicate him. Maverick even gets to fly the mission as a bonus reward.
His teaching, while illustrating an element of the dehumanization required (and perhaps necessary) for military service, bears a striking resemblance to that of Yoda: Don’t think. Just do. In execution of the mission, Rooster is an apt pupil to internalize this caveat. He has his father figure’s reckless habits, namely learning to ignore data and strategy and trust his gut feelings - Hollywood’s stock-in-trade.
There is perhaps no better actor to propel The Male Project forward on film than Tom Cruise. The arrested development nature of The Project as being a perpetual chrysalis that seeks to mature and come out of its shell fits with the Peter Pan persona he’s cultivated over his forty years in moviemaking. Having long abandoned the goal of deepening his ability to build rich, intricate characters as he ages (or appears not to), he’s resigned himself to taking roles that enable him to engage in a grown up form of Play. It’s a movie career in being a big kid, with each new role presented as an opportunity for test-driving a new set of grown up toys. Thrilling, real stunt work in high-octane entertainments. Admittedly, what he does as a stuntman on screen in these features time after time is often extraordinary, even for a public that still refuses to forgive his brand of kookiness.
It’s not a question of whether or not he’s skilled or resourceful as an actor, as this type of assessment is often at a right angle to the kind of roles he chooses. Or that he’s one note. Quite the opposite. In fact, he plays against type so much that playing against type has become one more professional pastime that further prevents him from approaching any semblance of orthodoxy with respect to the development of an actor’s craft. So being cast in roles that deny his good-natured, leading man status like Magnolia, Collateral or Tropic Thunder feel like a continuation of this form of Play.
His commitment to this Play on screen appears earnest. As an entertainer, I can think of no better poster child for The Male Project. In a filmed introduction for Top Gun: Maverick, he touts the film’s authenticity in its use of, “real F-18s, real Gs and real speed.” Like Cecil B DeMille’s introduction that precedes The Ten Commandments, something demonstrating the personal conviction of the maker with equal parts pride and showmanship helps package and sell the movie as a thing that can be enjoyed in a pure way, without an agenda. I don’t doubt Cruise’s honesty. I just don’t buy it as that type of movie. We can look within the movie itself for evidence of this.
After learning the government is shutting down the SR-72 program, Maverick flies the test run before the military brass arrive to pull the plug, effectively stealing the aircraft because the prospect of hitting Mach 10 is too good to pass up. Though irrelevant to the plot, this is perhaps the most revealing sequence in the movie. The fact that we’re told nothing about what the plane is supposed to actually do (Bombing? Reconnaissance?) mirrors the fact that we’re told nothing about the enemy forces that the Top Gun pilots are up against. It’s just the screen debut of a piece of machinery that we’ll be seeing in real life in the coming years - the next evolutionary link in the succession of murdercraft that needed to star in a Hollywood feature in order to ease its transition onto the world stage.
It’s also Tom Cruise’s next big, shiny onscreen toy. In simultaneously breaking the airspeed record and doing PR for an already inflated military budget by promoting the plane, both Maverick the character and Tom Cruise the actor achieve transcendence in the eyes of The Male Project. The people in the diner he wanders into after landing the plane act as if he’s an alien from another world. Or a God.
The resemblance in Top Gun: Maverick of the mission itself to the aerial Death Star assaults in Star Wars has been repeatedly mentioned in reviews of the movie. It’s fairly egregious: the navigation of a narrow trench, flying low to avoid detection and defense systems, deferring from missile-targeting technology to a manual bull’s eyeing aided by “letting go”, a meters-wide shot into an underground target that sets up a chain reaction, followed by a drastic escape. This connection seems appropriate and consistent with the exalted status afforded Star Wars in popular culture, such that Ronald Reagan’s nonfunctioning space-based, missile defense system in the 1980’s was named after it, further Hollywoodizing real life in a dangerous way.
I won’t deny The Empire is bad, but the sexual release of this moment always bothered me
I see no harm - even for diehard fans - in admitting that Star Wars could really be called a lodestone in the evolution of faceless, bloodless annihilation in cinema as a form of gleeful escapism. What started as a cultural symptom for coping with post-Vietnam guilt - assuring viewers that genocide in a more abstract and less recognizable form can be a fun, energizing thing to watch - could be called the first step in establishing the conservative, reactionary underpinnings that would define 80’s action and fantasy movies.
If the unprecedented success and influence of the entertainments of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have made the deep social conservatism of their work impossible to reconcile, we can at least examine some of the processes that make them possible. There is a link between the unambiguously malignant forces getting mowed down in Star Wars and the fact that we know nothing whatsoever about the enemy forces in the finales of Top Gun or Top Gun: Maverick. Having seen the new film a second time in a normal format, I’m still at a loss to tell who or where the antagonists with their secret nuclear bunker were, even without the seats bouncing and jiggling like a theme park ride. Just Russians? That’s supposed to be enough?
Robin Wood’s essential book, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan, makes some excellent points that could be usefully applied to the high-profile reboots of all the 80’s fantasy outings that glossed over the ideological crisis of the 70’s. He posits that lazy screenwriting or not, there’s a nihilism at the heart of this withholding of human detail that’s both alarming and unsurprising, given that it’s not without precedent.
The scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones just shoots the fancy, scimitar-wielding Arab could be called the most Reaganist moment in American movies. It makes for a more satisfying and glamorous expression of that nihilism than the poorly channeled nihilism of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver or the dumb-smart satirical nihilism of The Ramones. The ease of taking that act in - in effect, its “Disneyfication” - is what makes it all the more troubling.
That movies like Top Gun: Maverick still draw from the callousness of moments like that and from so much of the sub-psychology of Star Wars and its cheerful celebration of limitless warfare feels like an irony so deliberate, it's a wonder whether the writers were joking. Is Top Gun: Maverick honoring its spiritual predecessors in mayhem? Maybe this sort of delusional self-mythologizing that movies do about the nature of military operation and warfare just continues until we question whether America even has actual patriots or it simply has movie fans, who wouldn’t know the real America if it fell on them. Again, I want to say it’s all fictional hokum and that we, the audience, know better. But look around you. Do we really?
I can’t imagine a world where we’re expected to take military operations seriously if the experience is reduced to the feeling of going on a ride. I don’t want to ride Top Gun: Maverick any more than I want to watch a mass shooter’s livestream in real time. If the Naval Air Fleet was hoping for recruitment numbers because of this movie, it may stop to think that audiences are aware that the experience of being a fighter pilot consists of more than the fleeting, simplistic sensations offered by 4DX. This movie does a disservice. It wants to compose an elegy for the planned obsolescence of the analog fighter pilot. But its cliche platitudes and mawkish presentation make it elegy an written in crocodile tears.
* * *
Jean-Luc Godard, who passed away last month after a brilliant and revolutionary career, said that filmmakers should be free to arrange the beginning, middle and end of their scenarios. In 1903, Edwin Stanton Porter did just that. According to the sales catalog for The Great Train Robbery, his instructions included a provision for projectionists stipulating that Scene 14 with the bandit shooting the audience, “can be used to either begin the subject or end it, as the operator may choose.”
Placed at the beginning, the scene introduces The Cassidy Gang, jolting the audience with a preview of what to expect. Placed at the end, it takes on cautionary artistic stance about real life danger and the power of enduring myths. What we lose in narrative set up, we gain in social relevance in a larger sense. In American movies and American culture, the thrill of action in the moment is always privileged over the need for narrative to convey social significance or make objective sense, a lesson well learned in the news media’s sensationalization of mass shootings, or any event that promises to spill a lot of blood. In other words: shoot first, ask questions later.
Support Lee with Planet Nine below:
