By Ken Stokes
The word ‘nostalgia’ derives from Greek and roughly translates as ‘a return to pain’—that sentimental longing for the past.
To this day, I can’t drive through Ketchum without remembering Bald Mountain Hot Springs and Slavey’s. Warm Springs Road brings back a flood of memories of our family’s cabin (which, in my mind’s eye, was Ralph Lauren when Ralph was still Ralph Lifschitz) and the mysterious old man who lived across the road who, once upon a time, ran with bulls and climbed Kilimanjaro. On reflection, the pool’s changing cabins were Ketchum’s answer to motel rooms that rent by the hour, Slavey’s was a dive and the old man was busy wrestling demons while pounding out a sentimental memoir of ‘la vie bohème’ in 1920s Paris on a vintage Smith-Corona.
In this quasi-post-pandemic era, nostalgia is the new black, and lockdown-weary cinephiles in particular have been pining for the opportunity to once again catch a must-see Hollywood blockbuster in a packed theater where, at least since 2012, masks are absolutely forbidden.
Their collective pain was assuaged about a month when the highly anticipated Top Gun: Maverick—nostalgia incarnate—finally lit up screens across America. Box office records tumbled. The drought had ended. The good old days were back. As were inflation and obscenely-high gas prices. And there’s the rub: nostalgia is invariably a double-edged sword.
The Movie
Tom Cruise and Co. made a gutsy call delaying the movie’s opening by almost two years, but in hindsight, it was a no-brainer. This is not your garden-variety sequel. Top Gun: Maverick is a dazzling piece of entertainment that is flashy, straightforward and just what the zeitgeist demanded. It is an experience, not just a flick. It would be a travesty to watch it the first time in the comfort of your home unless you live in a fully-functional F-18. When viewed in a fully tricked-out theater, the film yanks the audience out of the very messy present and thrusts it on a popcorn-scented journey back to the rose-colored good ol’ days and the joy and comfort of the communal experience, once again living vicariously through the daring-do of real-world heroes (OK, the portrayals of real-world heroes) and the mythology of Maverick—Cruise’s aptly-named character, moving on to flushes of unapologetic patriotism and arriving, as if to paradise itself, at Reagan’s ‘Morning in America.’ Yes, Top Gun: Maverick is one hell of a movie.
The character of Maverick returns after a 30-plus-year hiatus and is plopped into a world where the ‘right stuff’ is being replaced by the right equipment. And he is still not a team player.
Nostalgia meets obsolescence. The 36-year period separating the two Top Gun films is one of the film’s best tricks. Sure, the character of Pete Mitchell (Cruise’s Maverick) is still a maverick in every sense of the word, but those 36 years in Cruise’s personal and professional life were no doubt invaluable in informing Cruise’s performance as a man whose gifts, like those of a doomed Greek hero, are also his curse. It also permits—in real time—a boy from the first film to reappear as an adult and a very unwilling partner in a joint return to pain.
Don’t panic, that’s the extent of the liberal arts portion of the show as well as the extent of any emotional complexity or depth. As in Cruise’s Mission: Impossible films, characters are one-dimensional and motivations are constrained to the task at hand. The procedural is everything, because this movie is first and foremost a VR game. When it’s at its best, it’s very linear and step-by-step. Its structure is informed by gaming models and learning theory.
The decision to use POV cameras in the arial sequences, which constitute a huge chunk of the movie, are a revelation, quite literally keeping the film aloft and serving as a distraction from the pedestrian activities on the ground. Moreover, the choice of live-action cinematography is a deceptively simple dynamic and a wildly engrossing alternative to the incessant CGI of most comic-book films.
‘Don’t think.’
A few weeks back I advised the same when viewing Everything Everywhere All at Once. In that case, it was to keep from killing the momentum. In the case of Top Gun: Maverick, it’s to keep from ruining the illusion, and like the now-mythic Reagan Administration itself, the film doesn’t hold up particularly well under real scrutiny.
There are some sincerely disappointing tropes and shortcomings in play: women are ornamental and subordinate, men with glasses are docile and inferior. The voice of reason is housed inside the mouth of a relic or a by-the-book son of a bitch (ironically, the by-
the-book son of a bitch used to be the face of Mad Men’s maverick Don Draper). Jingoism is alive and well. Tom Cruise has only one look (hey, they say it in the movie, and, in fact, he has four: the smirk, manufactured belly laugh, concentration and teary-eyed reflection). The intoxicating combination of sport, sweat, sun, skin and surf might be reason enough to debut manscaping as a competitive sport in the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. High-risk military operations are fairy tales where nobody breaks a nail and which end with true love’s kiss, reminding us that the sexual chemistry between a Tom Cruise character and any actor, female or male (remember Interview with the Vampire), has all the incendiary potential of a pack of matches submerged in an aquarium. Once again, please keep your arms and mind inside the aircraft at all times.
But the most disturbing trope of all is the celebration of the lone wolf. You know, that guy with a singular focus and a blatant disregard for collateral damage, be it achieving Mach 10.3 come hell or high water or getting even with society by shooting up an elementary school.
The 2022 Maverick is a hubris-laden man with a manufactured bravado, self-assured to a fault, free of second thoughts and second guesses, and engaged in a tenuous relationship with reflection and regret. Did I mention he is a toxic interloper as well? Can you really imagine a rational woman wanting to be with a megalomaniac like Maverick circa 2022, or a rational man befriending him, or rational people trusting him for an instant?
And there’s the catch. This is precisely the kind of man—one who is self-assured and unfettered by convention—that women want to be with, that men want to be, and that companies and countries concerned about incompetency or self-dealing simply package it all in a carefully-crafted illusion of uncompromising leadership. We build these mythic creatures in our heads and then assemble pedestals for them in real life. It led to a cowboy presidency in the 1980s and a sociopathic presidency in the second half of the 2010s. It’s presently in play in the Russian Federation. I shudder to think what’s in store down the road.
So will this dissuade anybody from seeing and loving this movie? Hell no. Returning to pain is becoming an American ritual. Maybe there should be a national holiday, with fireworks and ice cream just like we used to get at Ketchum’s Main Street soda fountain.