Top Gun Maverick - Nostalgia on steroids. Are the present times really that bad?
A movie review with cultural commentary
I saw Top Gun Maverick yesterday. It was an odd experience. The theater was doing low sensory impact day so the lights were on and the sound was low. Still it was the big screen, I had plenty of space as the theater was nearly empty and I could still enjoy my first time back in the theater since the pandemic began. So sit back and relax as we go on a ride to unpack what this film says about where we are today.
As a thrill ride Top Gun gets A+. The action sequences are superb, a masterclass in film making. And no CGI! It is worth watching again just for this.
The story on the other hand…there isn’t much there.(You knew that didn’t you?) As a student of screenwriting and an (as yet amateur) screenwriter, I can safely say the story breaks many of the ‘rules’ of screenwriting, the plot contrivances are that huge.
However, screenwriters take note, the film is insanely successful. Meaning you don’t have to follow all the rules of screenwriting to write a good script. You do need to know what your script is aiming for. Top Gun Maverick is intended to tap into nostalgia on steroids and in that it succeeds brilliantly.
All the characters are back in some way or form, including Goose via his son. Val Kilmer plays a nice cameo as the Iceman who is now an Admiral. Jennifer Connelly stands in for Kelly McGillis. Only the Berlin song is missing along with the sweaty Tom Cruise wanting to take a shower.
Still, nostalgia alone will only get you so far. The success of the film could also suggests two things - how awful movies currently are and how awful things are in general, nostalgia wouldn’t be so powerful otherwise. Are these true? Let’s try and make the case and see how far we get.
Cinema tastes are subjective but it is true, we have gotten so many bad woke/gender reboots that offer us nothing except cynicism, meanness and angry lectures instead of interesting new perspectives. (Which they could offer with good writing. Screenwriters, take note!) Sorry my friends but the critique of woke movies is spot on. Remember, people go to the movies to be entertained, to lose themselves for a few hours. Not to be told how awful they are in this way or that. There is a time and place for the church lecture and it is not the movie hall. It is that simple.
What about the present times? Let’s take our fighter jet and dive in deeper while inverted to find out. The story in Top Gun Maverick follows reasonably the same path as the original, except that Tom Cruise is now the flight instructor teaching the next-gen of hot shots how to execute the mission against the enemy.
Who is this enemy? The screenwriters don’t even bother to let us know, and that is precisely the point. There isn’t any such enemy as there was in 1985 when the original came out.
What was the state of America and the world then? Globally, America was still locked in a bitter existential struggle with the Soviet Union. While Japan was competing well, the sleeping giants of India and China had not yet woken up.
Locally, the boomers were at their peak and Gen X was just coming of age. The economy was booming and Hollywood was celebrating white middle class America. John Hughes gave us the high school classics of Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club - stories about the children of (relatively) well off people with the luxury of time and space to explore their personalities as they come of age.
Men and women still loved each other(at least in the movies!) Tiffany was singing in malls about being alone with her special someone. There were no cell phones, no internet, no twitter, no swiping left or right.
Fast forward 35 years and where are we? The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 leaving America without its mortal enemy. We got to the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama so cleverly put it.
The rest of the world went through major upheavals too. In 1991 the Indian economy opened itself up after 40 years of failed government controls. In 2001 China entered the WTO. 2 billion plus people, smart, educated, hungry for the success and ready to live on little entered the global workforce, busying themselves with a very American-esque pastime, getting rich. Suddenly America and Japan weren’t the only players and the competition got fierce. (Please note, there is no moral judgement being made here, it is what it is and it was inevitable.) It became easier to make things overseas. American industry was gutted and with it the sense of place and rootedness that made the middle class life what it was.
More seismic changes were happening in other areas. The sixties movements saw the introduction of a whole slew of new ideas into American education, including post modernist deconstructionist thought like the works of Focault and Derrida. As the years passed the students of some of this post modernist thought began entering positions of cultural influence. So America began the great experiment of intellectually deconstructing the institutions that formed the basis of this middle class life and finding them wanting, resulting in what Wesley Yang called the Successor Ideology. This new ideology sees life as a series of power struggles and the world is a dichotomy of oppressor v/s oppressed, with rules of what is acceptable or not changing regularly.
The early 90s also saw the internet explode out. Faster than you could say Amazon, the world of commerce began moving behind the screen. Communication became quicker, the world got a lot smaller really fast. Then came social media and human communication devolved to 140 characters or less of insults.
So it has been quite a tumultuous 35 years. Now, malls are mostly dead and if we sing we do it on TikTok. Also dead is the need for the heroics that the pilots in the movie perform. In real life their tasks would have been done with drones and long range missiles. There would be no reason for pilots to go in on a daredevil mission as they do in the movie.
The age of Heroes is over. We are now in the Aquarian age, the age of experience. The Heroes age was distinctly masculine, the aquarian age is very feminine. This has resulted in what Fukuyama calls the flat chested men.
Nothing captures this flat chested man better than the character of Lester Burnham in American Beauty. American Beauty came out in 1996 as the new age was taking a firm hold on the culture. The film opens with Lester lamenting that he didn’t always feel so sedated. Heroism is no longer required of him, just conformity, following the rules of the office and keeping up appearances at home. Sex with the wife stopped a long time ago, they can’t stand each other. The daughter is no longer the playful teen that we see in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off but an angst ridden, alienated soul.
The office of Lester Burnham’s time is bad enough, a hot bed of posturing and fake-ness. However with the Successor Ideology that has come in the last decade, it can easily become a worse kind of swamp. You have to watch every word you say lest you go afoul of the HR overlords. The latest middle school like squabble among employees at the Washington Post is a glaring example.
We live out squabbles like this on social media that we can’t stop ourselves from consuming. Go read the twitter replies to anything and they are mostly just abuse. For that matter we can’t stop ourselves from consuming sterile, intimacy destroying internet porn. So much of our online life is just toxic.
And so much of the best creative energy is going into playing with Dog Money. The next presidential election may well be a battle between two geriatrics. The two halves of the country can’t stand each other. The issue of abortion threatens to derail everything. Relations between men and women haven’t been worse. You can spend a fortune on a link to a tweety bird jpeg, not even the actual jpeg itself. As the grown Stan and Kyle keep moaning in the South Park Post-Pandemic special, this future sucks so much.
Throw in two years of pandemic driven isolated living, record inflation and you can see why a break full of nostalgia on steroids would be appealing. Wouldn’t it be nice to go back to being a hero and be celebrated, not mocked, deconstructed and hauled up before HR? To see beautiful things in home, hearth and country and not just faults? To taste that wind in the hair while riding the motorcycle and believe in love once more? Love lifts us up where we belong and Jennifer Connelly’s still got it after all these years.
Is this too gloomy? Yes, there are plenty of things to celebrate about our Aquarian age, but this shadow side of our post-modern zeitgeist is there and should be acknowledged.
What is the remedy? For a start, we can cut each other some slack. We will make mistakes, we will say and do stupid things and we can forgive others their mistakes as we ask for forgiveness for ours. It helps to recognize that most of what we have passionate opinions about doesn’t amount to hill of beans and we ourselves can be wrong. Then, stop reading twitter. Better still, log off the internet and don’t recharge your phone.
It is, as Charles Dickens wrote, always the best of times and worst of times. You can still be a hero today, regardless of what the zeitgeist is and the reward is in the doing itself. To quote Joseph Campbell,
“The labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. And where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”
So onwards American soldiers! If you look hard enough you will find plenty of people in this country still doing great work, finding cures for diseases, finding better ways to feed us, to fulfill our energy needs and much more. And if you travel abroad you will find plenty of people who will be grateful for what good you can do for them. You can still be the hero you were born to be. And maybe men and women can learn to love each other again.
Also, go watch the movie. As I wrote at the top, it is film making masterclass.