I'll be the first to admit a childhood obsession with Top Gun that has lasted well into adulthood. I’ve changed quite a bit since 1986. Top Gun hasn’t, but I still love the movie as much as I did 25 years ago.
Kayla Webley's recent TIME magazine piece about Top Gun has started some interesting conversations for me. She has 10 reasons to share about why Top Gun is "still awesome." I'd have to agree with her.
Bring up Top Gun, and everyone over 30 has an opinion. I say over 30 because my wife had no opinion on it and hadn't even seen it until I insisted that she give it a chance when she was in her late 20s. Now she just rolls her eyes when I mention it.
In 1986, when I was 10 years old, I was visiting my Grandmother in Hawaii and saw Top Gun in the theater. It exploded onto the screen with a velocity of sheer cool I could never have imagined. Remember, I was 10. I didn't think it was possible for anything to approach the level of awe that the Star Wars trilogy had already stamped into my impressionable young brain, and until I walked out of that theatre as a pre-pubescent aspiring naval aviator, Star Wars had been it for me, period.
Yet somehow, going Mach 2 with my hair on fire in an F-14 between motorcycle rides and volleyball with pals seemed like the best way to spend my future adulthood, and Top Gun seemed to tease a legitimate career opportunity, one I knew enough to understand did not await me on Tatooine. Sadly, my nascent dream was soon crushed by a guy my mom used to date who at times referred to me as "Piss Ant." Dick, an engineer or computer programmer or something, pointed out that I was "too tall to be a pilot" and "not good enough at math."
I imagined my neck snapping like Goose's did while ejecting after being caught in a jet-wash (Goose was taller than those other pilots, I worried), and so I gave up on my dreams of being a fighter pilot. I even ceased my pathetic attempts to emulate Ice Man by trying to comb my wavy hair straight up from my forehead. Yet still, my love for Top Gun endured.
Obviously, when I first saw the film, I didn't have much of a concept of sexuality, hetero or otherwise. I only began to understand the sexual undertones of the film years later, as a cynical teenager, and man, was it macho. It celebrated dudes and jocks and machismo to the fullest extent of the word.
I was something of an introvert in high school. I got along with most people but hung around with the artists, musicians and misanthropes. The jocks, macho men and prom queen types were not really a part of my group. Or maybe I was not part of their group. Either way, I always found the outsiders to be a lot more interesting. Despite its unabashed celebration of everything jock, even in high school, I still loved Top Gun.
Yes, the movie is undeniably jingoistic and could still be described fairly as a Reagan-era military recruiting video. Years later in high school I was listening to heavy metal, growing my hair out, discovering punk rock, skateboarding and turning into an angry teenage liberal, eager to expose the evils of the system...but I still loved Top Gun.
Yes, Top Gun was a product of late-stage cold-war paranoia and flag-waving patriotism, but even if I didn't sing America’s praises and was quick to point out its problems, I knew how lucky I was to live here. Despite my outsider teen angst and rage against the machine, I still loved Top Gun. Did I mention the action sequences, which remain some of the best dogfights ever filmed, the magnetic performances of a range of excellent character-actors, the pitch-perfect integration of a cheesy 80s soundtrack that perfectly encapsulates the moment, or the intense drama that centers on friendship, love, loss and the out-sized pressure of familial expectations?
Even though Tom Cruise had literally been an outsider in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film The Outsiders only three years before, this time as Maverick he managed to project a seemingly idealized, mainstream American sense of cool. A hyper-masculine, clean-cut heart-throb who is also a pretty sensitive guy…who cries on camera. In an 80s action movie. Multiple times! Despite his tough-guy posturing, Maverick is an edgy, dark sort of outsider among the other hotshot naval aviators. He is vulnerable and yes, dangerous…until he proves himself in battle and wins the genuine respect of his peers.
After reading Webley's article recently, I passed it along to several friends and family members, most of whom responded positively, agreeing with me that the movie is definitely "still awesome" as she claims. I found the "homoerotic subtext" bit an amusing new way to read the film, but I soon learned it wasn’t exactly new.
I'd never thought of the character as gay, but Webley points to Quentin Tarantino's rant in a little-seen movie from 1994 called Sleep With Me, which was all about how Top Gun was really about Maverick "coming to terms with his homosexuality." Along with that re-cut trailer Webley included that turns the movie into tortured romance between Maverick and Ice Man, I discovered that a lot of people have written about the movie from this perspective, going pretty far back. How had I missed this?
Despite my film studies adventures in higher education, somehow I had never considered the homoerotic subtext in one of my favorite movies and had failed to re-evaluate it in this context. I hadn’t read Pauline Kael’s 1986 review, wherein she calls Top Gun a “shiny homoerotic commercial.” Hmmm…I can remember a certain afternoon in my freshman dorm room involving about six male friends, arm in arm, in white tank tops, singing along with drunken nostalgia to the Top Gun soundtrack at the top of our lungs, but hey, uh...that's not gay, is it?
An old family friend (and ex-marine) who is at least 30 years my senior didn't agree with me at all about the amusing nature of Webley's article and responded with an unexpected homophobic tirade that really caught me off guard when I emailed it to him.
He is also a fan of the film and bristled at Webley's suggestion that there could be any trace of homosexual subtext in the film. He found the notion insulting to the "military ethos" and was eager to let me know that the "marketing of homosexuality as normal" really pissed him off. I told him to lighten up. He went on to call Webley's article "evidence of our society's ever-increasing rate of descent into depravity, marketed as 'sophistication' to suck (no pun intended) in the unwary."
Wow. I can't expect to change his abhorrent viewpoint, but I responded honestly, telling him that I respect the men and women willing to wear the uniform immensely, regardless of sexual orientation. I find his homophobia disgusting and extremely disappointing, but for many other reasons, I also respect this veteran and call him a friend. His stance troubles me still, but we don't have to agree on everything.
I didn't expect the backlash. I just thought Webley's article was entertaining, and let's not forget that the "homoerotic subtext" was only one of her TEN reasons why the movie is STILL AWESOME. If you ask me, it remains supreme entertainment, no matter what you read into it.
I saw Top Gun in the theater at least six times. I revisited it on TV many times. I watched it on VHS and DVD and have yet to watch my blu-ray copy, but hell, it's the 25th anniversary this summer, so I’m sure to.
Happy birthday, Top Gun. I'm starting to feel the need for speed, so let's see if I can get my lovely wife to take one more trip back to Miramar. Show me the way home, baby.