Matthew Modine turned down the starring role over its implicit anti-Russian jingoism, and Navy recruiters infamously lurked outside of theaters showing the film. Like its sequel, it never names the military enemy it depicts, but the Cold War context is obvious. The Top Gun story had all the makings of a Reagan-era blockbuster: California sun, gratuitous sex scenes and male shirtlessness, and a fetishistic attention to military detail, wrapped up in a stylish package by every aesthete’s favorite action director, Tony Scott. The film was based on Ehud Yonay’s article “Top Guns” in California, which recounted the real-life exploits of pilots at the Navy’s San Diego airbase - nicknamed “Fightertown U.S.A.” A draft of a screenplay based on the story eventually made it into the hands of blockbuster producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, who were just at the beginning of a run of iconic, don’t-think-too-much action films including Beverly Hills Cop, Bad Boys and The Rock.
The original Top Gunis profoundly of its era - that is to say, the era when semi-niche print magazines still had the time and budgets to spend on lengthy, meditative reported features.
Who better to give it to them than Tom Cruise, the ultimate icon of pre-irony, can-do Americanism? To understand why Top Gun: Maverick hit, we need to understand the conditions that created his myth - and why, despite its enduring appeal, it’s nearly impossible for our culture to birth a true successor to it, no matter how much we might thirst for one. But the American public has embraced the film so rabidly that it demands a political explanation: After years of Twitter, Trump, Covid, social upheaval, and an ever-more-bland, oppressive pop-cultural sameness, a large number of Americans are desperate for permission to collectively feel good about our life, country and culture, without any of the attendant political baggage. Cruise’s twinkling, weirdly ageless visage conveys a real-life dynamism otherwise absent from mainstream pop culture in our era of sci-fi and superhero domination.Īside from a few feints to the realities of drone warfare and a geopolitical landscape described so vaguely it almost becomes comedic, politics are utterly absent from Top Gun: Maverick. But rather than the hyper-masculine, Reagan-era militarism of Tony Scott’s 1986 original, this film’s appeal comes from the mere fact that it’s about normal people, doing things within the plausible boundaries of reality. No one would mistake Top Gun: Maverick for social realism, or even (maybe especially) a lifelike depiction of Naval air combat. Want to read more stories like this? POLITICO Weekend delivers gripping reads, smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun every Friday.
0 kommentar(er)
