Top Gun and other guilty pleasures
Top Gun: Maverick is propaganda for hypermasculinity, but I loved it anyway.
I just went to a movie theater for the first time in years. The film that brought me back, COVID notwithstanding, was Top Gun: Maverick. I couldn’t resist a nostalgia-piece action film with a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and I had a blast watching it.
Sure, Top Gun was the film equivalent of particularly tasty junk food. But the movie executed that role to perfection. At every turn, the movie had the potential to derail itself with cheesiness, but it seemed like the filmmakers were aware of and deftly managed that risk.
I decided to scroll through the Rotten Tomatoes ratings to see what critics were saying about the movie, and my eyes naturally landed on the party pooper in the room, the sole negative reviewer — Jeffrey Overstreet, who concluded:
Top Gun: Maverick is a shiny, well-executed barrage of clichés. And it ends up reinforcing archetypes and values that I see as root causes of destructive afflictions in our culture. As much fun as it is when a familiar formula is well-executed, this movie is also an altar to America’s obsession with youthfulness, its exaltation of white super-men (showing people of color as inferior), its worship of heavy artillery, its insistence that we not think much about the consequences of violence, its permissiveness toward what we now wisely call “toxic masculinity,” its adoration for recklessness rather than integrity, and (sigh) its objectification of women as trophies.
Damn it, he is right. But should we allow that to ruin the fun?
When I look back on the experience of watching the movie, I recall fleeting experiences of unease at the film’s glorification of war and hypermasculinity — in which the ideal man is represented as a tall, muscled bro who lives for outdoor thrills, spends his free time at the gym or beach, welcomes physical combat and roughhousing, and doesn’t do much reading or thinking. That’s an archetype that excludes me (a bisexual who reads poetry and won’t ride a roller coaster) and caused me discomfort for most of my life as I tried to reconcile my preferences with those of the men around me. There is no place for me in Top Gun’s world.
I still had a hell of a lot of fun watching the movie, however. Many of our escapist pastimes can’t stand up to critical scrutiny, and some totter on the edge of being indefensible. The first example that comes to mind is American football. It’s hard to defend a sport that beats the brains out of young men — most often young men who come from low-income communities and lack access to educational opportunities. Nevertheless, I’ll watch every Michigan football game this fall, just as I have every fall since my infancy in Ann Arbor when I was carried to games in a backpack.
One approach to dealing with such dissonance is to hold fast to one’s values and abstain. Another is to compartmentalize, putting intellectual and political considerations out of one’s mind for long enough to have fun and participate in the community spectacle. The remaining options — of not thinking about these difficulties at all, or (much worse) of belittling those who do — are forms of weakness that should be rejected.