Ciao, film fans! Welome to episode 11 of The Fansplainers!
This week it’s Retro-splainers as Ian and David go back to 1986, and the movie Top Gun.
What does David make of all those half-naked hunky guys, posing and preening for our delectation? What does Ian think of all those jets with their powerful thrust, roaring across the movie screen? Well, let them fansplain it for you!
Thanks for listening.
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I had never seen Top Gun either, and when I sat down to watch it the other night with Dave, I never made it through – I got to the aircraft carrier scene, and that was enough for me. It is certainly a film of its time.
And its certainly, from the bit I saw, a film of relationships, but the relationships that are of more value are the intertwined social and working relationships of the men. Ian was pretty astute in bringing up Saturday Night Fever as a film with a similar toxic masculine theme; the one the sprung to mind for me even more so was The Pom Pom Girls, but I think that is just me reacting more on a visceral level to the shared sentiment.
Dave brought up an interesting point about the flying scene that makes me think of the four stages of competence: stage 1 is unconscious incompetence (you don’t know how to do something and are unaware of your deficit); stage 2 is conscious incompetence (you’re aware of what you don’t know); stage 3 is conscious competence (you know what you have to do and how to do it); stage 4, unconscious competence, is what these characters are trying to achieve – the ability to react, rather than have to think through a situation.
I was also one of the few, the proud who never saw Top Gun before. My feeling in 1986 was, if a movie had the U.S. Navy’s participation and story approval, it had to be pro-military propaganda, right? The movie never says who was flying those MIGs, but it would’ve been Russians or their allies, right? With the USSR moving towards glasnost, the idea of a movie about fighter pilots seemed all warmongery and backward-looking…a slick recruiting film for the MTV generation who never saw the Vietnam War on the evening news or Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now in theatres.
I was planning to finally watch it before the sequel came out so I’m glad you chose it to fansplain! As I was watching it yesterday, it seemed liked I’d already seen it from all the clips and parodies I’d seen of it over the years! And I’d heard about Quentin Tarantino’s gay subtext theory. To me, those jock-ular half-naked locker room/volleyball scenes brought to mind those exaggeratedly-muscled versions of comic superheroes, steroid-enhanced WWE wrestlers and Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary on Olympic athletes. For whatever reason, hyper-masculinity sells to guys, straight or gay. And I have encountered guys in the industry who do that we’re so-manly-we-can-pretend-to-be-gay thing. I assumed they bonding through testing each other’s masculinity and/or establishing a pecking order rather than expressing a secret gay attraction, but who knows?
Did I like the movie? The scenes with real fighter jets, not CGI, were pretty cool. Not knowing who they were fighting and why? Not so much. Did Tom Cruise do a good job playing a cocky guy that needs to be taken down a peg before he can realize his full potential and do the right thing? Sure. That’s practically every role on his resume. But I think a better “conquering your inner demons through military training, the death of a buddy and the love of a good woman” movie is An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). After all, love lifts us up where we belong…it doesn’t just take our breath away.
Kelly McGillis’ character: at least they let her be a smart older career-driven woman. The producers met this mathematician named Christine “Legs” Fox who worked with the navy at the Top Gun place in San Diego. She did wear high heels to work and inspired the character. Under Obama, she rose to Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense. Which would’ve been interesting if they’d worked something like that into Top Gun: Maverick, except they didn’t. I wonder if they didn’t even give the character a cameo because McGillis came out later in her career and the producers didn’t want to deal with that on the PR circuit. Or maybe it’s that they didn’t want a sixty-something ex-lover character aging up Tom Cruise’s character. Jennifer Connelly, the female lead in the sequel, is in her forties and hey, a pilot’s got to trade in their old ride for a more up-to-date model at some point, right?
I tried watching Top Gun last year, but couldn’t get past the Indian Ocean part. I enjoyed it much more when I watched it at a Gentlemen Hecklers show this spring. Like I think I said in a previous comment here, I kinda “got it” that time — and Ian’s right, it’s basically porn, but with machismo and the military instead of sex. It’s not a good movie, but it’s dumb and entertaining and kinda enjoyable if you don’t think about it or take it seriously at all. Watching the Hecklers make fun of it was probably the best way to watch it.
The first Hot Shots movie is basically Top Gun in spoof form, and it’s much better in every way. Even the aerial scenes make more sense in it than Top Gun.
Cheers!