Nobody Remembers Top Gun

I've seen the original Top Gun at least three times in my life, and each time I see it, I forget virtually everything about it within a matter of hours.

Now, there are plenty of movies where I don't necessarily have vivid memories of them because I saw them under non-ideal circumstances, such as when, God help me, I was just too sleepy. There are other movies where I don't remember much about them because I haven't seen them in a really long time. And then there are, of course, movies that I don't remember very well because they just weren't very good, and there was nothing to remember them by.

Top Gun, though, belongs to another category altogether. Often cited as a quintessential example of '80s popular culture, bound together in the ideological retrenchment and chauvinism of the Reagan era, at most a dumb and slickly produced action programmer that more than any contemporary film distilled the crass commerciality and synergistic music video vibe of a whole generation of action flicks to come, Top Gun is, for me, above all, an extremely ephemeral film. There are times when I chance thinking that I remember something about it. And yet no sooner do I consult the record, I realize that my memory is almost entirely wrong. What I do remember is like a fugue impression, informed no doubt by the film's hyperbolic legacy, as well as by the uncanny flow of its visual narrative. It's what happens when the hyperreal, atmospheric texture of director Tony Scott and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball's camerawork, to say nothing of its anthemic synth-rock soundtrack, is wedded to such an abstracted and by-the-numbers plot, playing less like a late-Cold War military drama and more like a teen sports flick. As strange as it sounds, I've only really ever had this same experience with one other film, which is Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad. There is just something about Top Gun where I feel like it is internalized for me in a way that makes its tremendous box office success against its surprisingly modest budget make total sense, but where, at the same time, I am convinced that its effects are fully subliminal. For however well it did on the silver screen, home video, and cassette, I can't be alone in the feeling that Top Gun is not so much a film that endears itself in the conventional sense that we remember pop films or their aspects fondly, but is rather an experience that completely washes over and saturates you through to a psycho-molecular level. 

I'd go as far as to say that nobody really remembers Top Gun. And the only reason I have for making such a claim with any sort of conviction is that, out of every single '80s movie whose popular or cult affinity was drummed into my millennial mind via the incremental escalation in '80s retro-chic over my last fifteen years on this planet, Top Gun seemed to be the one artifact of that decade where the substance of any professed nostalgia was the least tangible. I accept the premise of the film's cultural salience, what with its revolutionary flight-photography and patriotic bravado and squeaky clean PG rating. I understand that it caught all the nay-sayers off-guard and ended up dominating the U.S. cinemas for a relentless six months, going on to rack up record-breaking numbers on home video as well. I understand that there are probably a large number of people who are maybe only fifteen years older than I am who saw Top Gun, on film, in the theater, multiple times, or re-wound the VHS until the magnetic tape disintegrated. And yet, for all that, Top Gun was never part of the home theater repertory of my house or those of my friends. The second highest-grossing film of 1986, Crocodile Dundee, had a far more lasting impact in that regard. And among Generation X's childhood heroes, Tom Cruise's naval aviator Pete "Maverick" Mitchell is miles off from Indiana Jones, the Star Wars Rebels, the Ghostbusters, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Even as I recall first becoming aware of the niche appropriation of '80s popular culture by my generational cohort, and the very overt attempts by media companies to capitalize on this faux-nostalgia, Top Gun was consistently mentioned, but barely ever rated, even in the context of the rest of the era's corny action ranks. The lowliest Don Bluth animation, fantasy bombs like Jim Henson's Labyrinth or Ridley Scott's Legend, and cynical rip-offs of John Hughes movies (not even the John Hughes canon itself!) clearly stir more profound emotions, technical appreciation, and are rated miles more highly than Top Gun, the very title of which has, nonetheless, become metonymic of the '80s itself. How can one film leave such a deep impression on the zeitgeist of two completely separate eras of popular culture, and yet at the same time feel so completely incidental?

Nobody seems to remember Top Gun. And that seems born out by the first significant popular attempt to remember Top Gun. It goes without saying that even less people remember the Rory Kelly-directed indie comedy Sleep With Me than they do Top Gun. But I have a sneaking suspicion that there's a non-insignificant number of cineastes who remember cameo actor Quentin Tarantino's impassioned monologue from the film breaking down the homoerotic subtext of Top Gun much better than they themselves remember Top Gun, if they even bothered to see Top Gun, as opposed to simply taking the contrarian Tarantino's word for granted about what Top Gun was "really" about.

Now, mainstream critics had noted the supposed homoeroticism of Top Gun the moment it was released. Writing for The New Yorker, for instance, film critic Pauline Kael described the film, in the absence of Tom Cruise's romantic co-lead Kelly McGillis, as "a shiny homoerotic commercial" in which "pilots strut around the locker room, towels hanging precariously from their waists," a bunch of "kissy-faced brutes" engaged in an unending boarding school tête-à-tête. But what needs to be said - and which is all too frequently neglected in conversations about the apparent "homoeroticism" of mainstream American films, especially from the action-figure '80s - is that these perceptions were being pinned down at a time when American popular culture, forced by the atrocity of the AIDS crisis, was just on the verge of barely acknowledging that homosexuality existed. There may indeed always be a certain degree of repressed homosexuality in rituals and displays of hetero-masculinity, especially in times of severe ideological reaction, over-compensation betraying latent desire. But, by the same token, a society in the grip of a gay panic is liable to see traces of homosexual possession anywhere and everywhere. Even Kael's description of the locker room scenes of Top Gun emphasize not nakedness, but brutishness; not vulnerability to touch or penetration, but a warrior inflexibility. If anything, what Kael seems to identify as the "homoerotic" underbelly of this chauvinistic display is, in fact, the cattiness, the preening narcissism. The implications of her reading are far more homophobic - especially in her allusions to, of all things, Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita - than persuasive in describing a homoerotic spectacle. When a straight world looks for gay witches, it diagnoses the symptoms of the most toxic variants of hetero-masculinity as part of some faggy degeneration, and contributes to the total obfuscation of the pervasive inflexibility of the straight world.

A little over eight years after Top Gun was released, I have a feeling that just that sort of ambivalent conceitedness really started to percolate in terms of the false memories the film conjured. In Sleep With Me, whereas actor Todd Field's character dismisses the film as being about "a bunch of guys waving their dicks around," Tarantino insists that the film is allegorical of Maverick's struggle between his desire for a conventional heterosexual relationship with McGillis on the one hand, and the exciting and liberating gay lifestyle as represented by the boy's club of his naval air station's flight school on the other. This is embodied especially in the rivalry between himself and the frosty-haired Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, played by Val Kilmer. As Robert Ebert would acknowledge in his contemporary review of Sleep With Me, Tarantino's queer reading of Top Gun sounds more plausible the more he talks. The problem is that virtually nothing Tarantino describes about the film is accurate, especially and most importantly its final exchange between Maverick and Iceman. Whereas the rivalry between the two ace aviators culminates in Iceman saying, "You can be my wingman, anytime," followed by "No, you can be mine" from Maverick, both Tarantino and Field's characters remember the line as "You can ride my tail," the two actors exploding with their own self-aware chauvinism, pretending to whip their own dicks out and "sword fight" with one another, two nerdy hipsters sharing triumph over sussing out of the gay subtext of the jockiest '80s movie on earth, the supposed subtext now rendered entirely textual in their memory. Of course, there's a huge difference between what these two Gen-X slackers remember and what occurs in the film, an irony that is magnified by Tarantino's reputation as the freakish movie savant. Iceman telling his rival that he can "ride his tail" is certainly the perfect macho double entendre. A "wingman," on the other hand, is just a friend who helps you get pussy at the bar.

And even still, the alleged homoeroticism of Top Gun is so ubiquitous to the reading and understanding of the film nearly forty years on that you're hard-pressed to find anyone discussing any other aspect of the film. Which makes sense to me, because, again, I am confident that nobody really remembers Top Gun.

If you were to ask me even just 12 hours ago if Top Gun was the most homoerotic movie of the '80s, I would have probably said "No," but I also would have probably been fairly confident that there is a discernible gay side to the movie. I probably would have been more inclined to agree with a certain film critic friend of mine that same-sex temptation is just one afterbirth of the film's propagandistic fervency, in which all sexual energy is sublimated into the penetrative, explosive power of those F-18's, supreme objects of desire, soaring through spaces collapsed by Scott and Kimball's long lenses, their forceful mid-air ballet exceeding carnal delights, rendering them all but irrelevant. And if you caught me just this Memorial Day, coming out of an early afternoon showing of the recent sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, I would have sworn up and down that one of the most disappointing aspects of the film is how badly director Joseph Kosinski and his team fumbled the ball in terms of giving their own film the same kind of erotic potency as the original. I would have especially called attention to the sheer gulf in sensuality and excitement between the one part of Top Gun that everyone seems to think they remember - the notorious beach volleyball scene in which the shirtless, blue jean-wearing Cruise and Kilmer square off to the tune of Kenny Loggins' "Playing with the Boys" - and the hackneyed homage payed to it in Maverick, in which Cruise leads his younger cast in a sweaty, flexy game of beach football.

But all it really took was for me to rewatch the scene in question before I realized something quite shocking: That the most homoerotic scene in the homoerotic '80s classic Top Gun is barely erotic at all. The version of the scene that I held in my head was, after all, just an impression, informed far more by my familiarity with the song "Playing with the Boys" than with any distinctive image of the scene itself.

And that, right there, makes complete and total sense. The Hi-NRG pop rock style that influenced the Top Gun soundtrack, and so many soundtracks of the mid-to-late '80s, was indeed, as with a lot of elements of '80s pop music, something that had originally germinated in the underground gay scene. The appropriation of its flamboyancy by the hetero-mainstream is so much more overt and self-spoofing from our perspective, now. But in the context of the actual Top Gun, it is so unavoidably just the cynical background noise of a completely gratuitous sequence, one that was understood by everyone involved as pandering to what straight male filmmakers thought straight female viewers would want to see. I'm not about to discount the sexual awakenings that such tone-deafness no doubt inspired. I will say, however, that to then describe the scene as necessarily "homoerotic," much less erotic at all, is like calling Anthony Michael Hall's riff on Billy Crystal's jazzman character in The Breakfast Club and Weird Science an homage to black culture. I remembered this scene, three times over, as being so much gayer than it clearly isn't - and it's literally just because I listened to "Playing with the Boys" (a legitimately fantastic pop song) so much on its own that I now completely associate it with a fictive version of the volleyball scene in my head. Like H. Jon Benjamin's dumbass spy Archer periodically shouting "Danger Zone!," revitalizing the Top Gun soundtrack and the false memory of Top Gun by association as a meme, I don't actually remember anything about the movie. All I have are the ephemeral strands of its audio or visual aspects, which assume the iconic scope of a film that never actually existed.

And I want to be clear here: I am not saying that Top Gun is, therefore, an overrated movie. Frankly, I think Top Gun has been exactly fairly rated since its first reception. My point is that there is quite evidently just something about the film, and all of its combined craftsmanship, that continues to suggest something non-incidental to the popular imagination, that so far exceeds the technical borders of the film itself.

There will be those who claim that Top Gun: Maverick is not only a fitting sequel to the original film, but in many ways superior to it. This is, I am afraid, exemplary of the impossibility of really remembering Top Gun. Indeed, Maverick is but the latest accident of the original film's epiphenomenal reach. It clarifies only certain ideas about what the original film is supposed to be, in terms of how we remember it. At the best of times, this yields stuff like new recruits Miles Teller and Glen Powell sharing moments of homoerotic tension and chemistry that are clearly gesturing at an idea of the subtext of the original film, but which, despite the brevity of these charged moments, is more genuinely erotic than the totality of predecessors Cruise and Kilmer's merely insecure, pretty boy-playing-macho schtick. (With Teller's mustache alone, one exchange of close-ups between he and Powell at a pool table verges on a Tom of Finland scenario.) Overall, though, despite some truly dynamic and exciting action sequences, the film merely repeats the cornball flatness of the original film's melodrama, settling and clarifying itself, lacking any of the enigmatic suggestiveness or formal prescience of the original. If the sun doesn't take us too soon, nobody will really remember Top Gun: Maverick... and not in the same way that they don't really remember Top Gun.