Top Gun: Maverick: An ode to the '80s white guy
On my cultural and personal history of military and action movies
Last Friday, I saw Top Gun: Maverick. The 1986 Top Gun is one of my favorite white guy’s favorite white guy movies (or…rather just his favorite movie), so I’d already been introduced to the ~franchise~ with a degree of adoration. But boy, I was not expecting to like it so much.
I should be unsurprised: it’s the kind of white guy movie they don’t make anymore, the kind I’ve always loved. The 80s were the best time for white guys, at least in terms of action movies. God, I love a good action movie. I haven’t been impressed by lots of action movies lately – James Bond was stultifying and boring, and the MCU hasn’t put out a good action movie since Thor: Ragnorak – and even that was more of a mythological sci-fi opera. Maybe their last true action movie was Captain America: The Winter Soldier? I loved Black Panther, but that movie was just plain good, not a good action movie.
Anyway, I went because of a TikTok that has now been deleted, probably because the notifications scorched the creator’s phone from the burning horniness of the comments. Here’s an approximation:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdcuFWVB/
Whew! I knew exactly when that scene would appear when I watched the movie. I recognized every single one of those action beats. The storyline is a bit like Pacific Rim, my favorite 2010s movie that evokes every bit of an 80s action movie like I should. (spoiler1)
The movie had a lot of its own merits – it’s a perfect ‘80s throwback/sequel/reincarnation, but I teared up seeing Val Kilmer in his natural state; the planes are so technically and adoringly presented the movie feels like a military contracting engineer’s fever dream more than a straightforward recruiting video, and the main character’s love story has a sex scene that’s mostly just talking. And all the new characters! Just like people I’ve actually met in the military. Let’s just say…you know Bob? That guy fucks:
The one weird spot is Jennifer Connelly as Penny. Oh, so everyone else gets to age but not white women! Whatever. I like how she charged Tom Cruise thousands of dollars — twice.
Anyway I digress. I love 80s action movies. Man! Back in the 80s, when if you wanted to have a personality on screen…you had to be a white guy.
I’ve been thinking a lot of the cultural erosion of white supremacy and how white guys have suffered because of that. Now now, don’t call it sympathy for the oppressor. We all suffer under gender conformity and cultural hegemony. But I can’t help but think white guys in movies nowadays are so depressing. They’ve gone from having personalities and their own particular pains and a sense of true charisma to becoming strange, empty statues, paragons of paternalism, martyrish try-hards that don’t actually stand for anything but whiteness being the American way. I mean, Chris Pratt is such a joke, but that’s exactly what I think when I see him. An empty void.2
But white guys from the 80s (and a bit from the 90s)! Man! They had personality and freshness and snark. (Even when they were suffering from boneitis.) They were an important part of our household because my parents moved to North America in the 80s. Michael J. Fox, John Candy, and Harrison Ford were among our patron saints. Whether it was The Fugitive or Back to the Future or Brewster’s Millions,3 white guys had a special place in our household simply because they were the ones having adventures. (That doesn’t mean they were the only saints we adored. Marisa Tomei commanded the hearts of both my parents, thanks to My Cousin Vinny and A Different World, and Girlfriends was played at my house as much as Golden Girls.)
For my friend who loves Top Gun, his patron saint is Tom Cruise, naturally. I also insist he looks like him, but that could be because they’re both white guys.
I know what you’re thinking, if you know me at all: Sulagna? Turning to a military movie in a time of strife?? Quelle surprise.
It’s true. If you don’t know me, I’m a huge military history buff, especially when it comes to depictions of the military in media. In high school it was Band of Brothers, which I wrote about for my senior honors thesis in college. (The guy who chose The Pacific asked me out, which should make the Tom Hanks/Spielberg people happy.) During my first miserable job, it was Captain America: The Winter Soldier; during the pandemic it was M*A*S*H*; and now, after getting laid off a few weeks ago, it’s Top Gun: Maverick. At this rate, I might actually end up watching all of JAG before the next presidential election.4
Unlike Marvel, which has descended so fully into military propaganda that it’s like NATO doesn’t even exist5, these movies and shows are deeply researched and aware of their presence in the deep waters of military media history. I adore military history, which I believe Americans ignore at their own peril. Understanding that an American war or American participation or “police action” in a war never lasted longer than 4 years before the Vietnam War explains so much, as does the fact that WWII effectively industrialized the United States ten times faster than any of the social programs FDR introduced to solve the Great Depression. And that’s not even going granular, like how the GI Bill covered white servicemen but ignored Black ones.
Is knowing that “Jumping out of an airplane was better than sex,” (as a veteran at the VA hospital I volunteered at in high school told me) just as important? Maybe! I know that when I told my first boss at my first job out of grad school that of course I knew June 6 was D-Day before diving into a discussion of Dwight Eisenhower’s military machinations6, I earned his respect faster than any PR win on any account could.
There’s a reason every boomer dude and your dad knows so much about military history. It’s honestly the best lens to understand and examine the United States, a country forged in war and violence and genocide and suffering, that always seems to need a crisis to grow.
But then, don’t we all. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, our overwhelming sadness and suffering, what we can’t help but carry if we long for a better tomorrow. I’m proud to be hurting, to be deep in the throes of reckoning. The pain means we’re alive, awake.
Remember before the pandemic? Perhaps not. Remember how I said this year was the third act of the pandemic? As we turn the corner to another pandemic summer, this one sadder and madder and more passionate than the past two, I wonder. I wonder what a third act looks like.
One reason I think Top Gun: Maverick was such a delicious movie is because it was just a very good action movie. Like Top Gun before it, it was wild with feeling, with suffering, with loss, with triumph. It took us through three acts of emotions; Tom Cruise lovingly touches every human he comes across; friends fight it out with their bodies and brains and planes and become true family. But like the first of the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens (when the franchise was heavy with hope), it’s also about what every white guy movie of the 2010s and 2020s is about: daddy issues.
Oh sorry, did you not know that? Let me explain: every millennial man – the white man especially – has the most roiling daddy issues ever.7 You can see it in anything you watch made by a millennial man, from every sitcom like New Girl to Sons of Anarchy to the new Cobra Kai. It’s not a big deal; you get used to it after a while. Immigrant families suffer the intergenerational traumas and matriarch issues of Encanto, Turning Red8, and Everything Everywhere All At Once9; white male millennials are sad about their dads.
Bo Burnham even has a song about it on his new album of songs he didn’t include in his INSIDE special last year. “1985” is about how he wishes he was a white guy in the 1980s…before he realizes he just wants to be his dad in the 80s. “I wanna be my daaaaaad,” he trills mournfully, which is why I simply had to make it the first song on my Ultimate White Guy Playlist.
Please enjoy this playlist as much as I did making it. I want so much to explain every single choice I made, but let’s be honest – a good mixtape benefits from a little mystery. I will say that I included every song or artist that made me think of specific white guys – friends, crushes, whatever the space in between might be. I won’t act like those 80s saints didn’t lead me to have a fascination with 80s style white guys. It’s the same way a lot of my femininity is tied up in ‘90s women like Marisa Tomei’s crossed arms and tapping foot and the many ways The Nanny’s Fran Fine coyly crows “Oh, Mr Sheffieeeeld!”:
Okay, I will also say that I’m not necessarily attracted to Zac Efron (his eyes are too blue for someone that tan), but his prancing and jumping around a golf course singing in the second High School Musical movie is the energy I can feel radiating off any straight white man struggling with their feelings. And that I hope Tom Morello and Ramin Djawadi don’t mind being on this list; I didn’t know Tom Morello was mixed when I was a teenager and heard the words “Rage Against the Machine.”
Do me a favor: send this to all the white guys you know. Your dad, your boyfriend, your friends, I don’t know. Ask them what they think. Ask them about their dads! I’m sure they’ll love it. And if they don’t get every reference I’ve made…are they even a true white 80s white guy?
Oh, and one more thing…Bob is played by Lewis Pullman, Bill Pullman’s son. Because of course he is.
Goose and Maverick were drift compatible, and so are Rooster and Mav! The parallels, I’m not imagining them!
John Krasinski is a close second. Oh no! Not Jim from The Office! But let’s be honest, the most interesting thing about him since he was on that show is the fact that he’s married to Emily Blunt.
You’ll notice each of these also has prominent Black male background characters. Can I just say, BOY, has Warlock aged well. Every time the camera switched from him to Tom Cruise, I’ll admit to disappointment. That man is a masterpiece…I have been thinking about getting back into gouache…I love to paint a crush…
The joke here is I actually know what JAG is. It ran for ten seasons and my guess is it would just make me angry. I can’t handle the truth!
And that’s if I give them a pass for their ridiculous usage of so-called “realism” in a speech about international relations. Gramsci would argue that the proper definition is important here! Of course, starring 70s white guy Robert Redford.
Let’s just say when Ed Harris tells Maverick he should be a senator, I felt that.
Creed, directed by Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, is the exception that proves the rule.
As someone who dressed like an extra from Miami Vice when I went to see this movie, and whose dad, when watching Turning Red, simply said: “She draws like you did as a kid!” I do not have this problem. I know I’m basically my dad.
FYI, if you haven’t seen it, A24 is airing it tonight!