I remember seeing “Top Gun” with my buddy Steve when it first hit the theaters in ‘86. We took Steve’s 17-year-old cousin Joshua: a classic, insouciant, gum-snapping, hyper-critical, too-cool-for-school, and definitely too cool for “Top Gun” (or so he thought), typical American teen ingrate.
Two hours later—that is, two hours of dizzying fighter jet barrel rolls, violent aircraft carrier landings, Sidewinder missile and Vulcan Gatling cannon blasting, and insane levels of fighter jock testosterone later—the kid walked out of the theater with a mile-wide grin on his face. You couldn’t shut him up for the entire trip home. A happy, happy boy was Josh.
That’s what a good war movie does for the male gender who were born with normal levels of God-given testosterone. Young, warrior-talented alphas, with elevated levels of testosterone, go sign up to learn to fly dangerous jets so they can keep America safe. “Top Gun” was a game-changer when it came out. Does the military count on that and occasionally fund movies as recruitment ads? Sure. It’s called marketing. Why do we need it? America’s grown soft. Military service is largely no longer seen as honorable. But we still need the military.
36 Years Later
What kind of rating does “Top Gun” have on Rotten Tomatoes today? Critics: 58 percent, audiences: 83 percent. The phrase “toxic masculinity” comes up. Critics of any kind have never been in danger of being suspected of having abundant testosterone, but now, with Marxism-generated feminism winning the war of the sexes, and some female critics suggesting that the job of film criticism no longer be open to the male gender due to our “systemic toxicity,” what audiences clearly have a preference for is no longer being accurately reflected in, or addressed by, the critic community.The Original ‘Top Gun’
“Top Gun” kicks off with a hotshot Navy pilot flying inverted, canopy-to-canopy, two feet above a Russian MiG jet. The American pilot’s radio intercept officer (the guy in the backseat) snaps a Polaroid of the bogey (enemy pilot) and then extends his middle finger. His pilot then barrel-rolls right-side-up, and vamooses, supersonically.This highly frowned-upon cowboy stunt affords pilot Lt. Pete Mitchell (Tom Cruise) a level of notoriety among his Navy flyboy brethren, as well as in the extended community of Navy personnel with elevated enough clearance levels to be privy to such classified showdowns with enemy aircraft.
The upshot is that due to this dust-up, this pilot, call-sign Maverick, and his RIO, call-sign Goose (Anthony Edwards) are selected for the Navy’s elite Fighter Weapons School, Top Gun, which is dedicated to honing the aerial dog-fighting skill set, and producing a group that is basically the SEAL team 6 of Navy pilots: the best of the best. The flyboys will compete with each other to win the trophy of becoming the “top gun.”
Legacy Fighter Jock
There are 7 different types of Navy SEAL: 1) Smurf SEAL 2) Rough-upbringing SEAL 3) Brawler SEAL 4) Proto-SEAL 5) Gamer SEAL 6) Ivy League SEAL 7) Legacy SEALMaverick’s a legacy Navy fighter pilot. His father was a top-notch F-4 Phantom pilot during the Vietnam War, until he and his plane mysteriously disappeared deep in Indian Country, never to be seen or heard from again. And this is the source of the movie’s tension: Maverick’s deceased dad had gotten a bad rep in the military and had been branded a coward.
Maverick’s need to prove himself, stand out, and not be lumped in with his father’s apparent loser-status is why he has that call-sign: he refuses to fit in. While a brilliant stick jockey, he’s unpredictable, unreliable, hot-headed, and dangerous.
His toughest competitor, “Iceman” (Val Kilmer in his most iconic role), is his polar opposite: cool-headed and highly efficient. These two are at immediate loggerheads. But Maverick’s reckless hot-dogging stunts also scare Goose, and deeply concern Top Gun’s commanding officer Mike “Viper” Metcalfe (Tom Skerritt).
Romance
“Top Gun” settles quickly into alternating ground and air scenes. The dogfight scenes are brilliant, the earthbound scenes between the pilots are lots of fun, and the romance is fairly abysmal. Let’s address the romance right now and get it out of the way.One of the instructors at the flying school is Charlie, an attractive civilian aeronautics expert (Kelly McGillis) whose initial interest in Maverick is how he and Goose snapped that MiG pilot’s picture. Their romance kicks off with the now legendary bar karaoke scene (long before karaoke was invented) where Mav and Goose serenade Charlie with the Righteous Brother’s “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.”
Flight and Dogfight Portrayal
Director Tony Scott (now deceased) and Gary Gutierrez, his supervisor of photographic special effects gave audiences the ultimate, “you are there” experience. The special challenge aerial scenes always present in movies is that audiences will become spatially disoriented. Normally we’re acclimated to seeing things within a frame that clearly delineates up, down, left, and right, but fighter pilots live in a roller coaster world of 360-degree turns known as pitch, yaw, and roll.
Interesting factoid: “Some animals are really good at dealing with hypergravity though. When flying in a straight line, dragonflies can accelerate with up to 4G of force. When they turn corners, this increases to 9G. And they don’t even need to wear a flight suit.”
The remarkable achievement of “Top Gun” was that it gave us close to 10 aerial encounters that were so well choreographed we can actually follow them. This was “Top Gun’s” crowning achievement: putting us in the cockpit for the first time and giving us a mind-blowing vicarious experience of being in an actual fighter plane dogfight. That, and the macho, high testosterone jockeying of flyboys, and the joys of alpha-male camaraderie which always has an element of the kid game “King of the Hill.”
One note: my memory of Ice Man was that he was completely out for himself. He’s not. He’s cocky and supremely competitive, but he’s also simply more mature and careful than Maverick. On a few occasions he goes out of his way to compliment Maverick. That’s a King move—he attempts to foster teamwork and safety.
Ultimately we need movies like “Top Gun” and we still need pilots and we still need the military. We need pilots with brain gyroscope talent who identify as having an overabundance of testosterone. Probably anyone of the cake gender won’t want that job anyhow.
