The Top Gun Death Dream Edition

On Tom Cruise, speculation, and blockbusters

Colin here. I saw Top Gun. I couldn’t resist. And by and large, I forgot what a pleasure it is to take in a blockbuster as a communal experience. The sound was overwhelmingly loud—I can recall that original afterburner scene from the first movie on the flight deck blowing my young mind, and this 3x’d it. From the opening, which showed the machinations and details of countless fighters landing on a carrier replete with an homage to those original flight crew hand signals, the film was basically a multi-hour reminder of why theaters are better than the soundbar plus flatscreen combo we’ve lived with for the last two years.

I won’t review the movie or anything—there are plenty of better places for that. But I found it satisfying. It delivered exactly what I was expecting when I bought the ticket. Of course it was full of absurdity (hotwiring an old Tomcat being near the top of the list), but considering the summer blockbuster has been recently dominated by mutants, wizards, and the like, realism isn’t exactly a necessity.

Why is this interesting? 

Which is why I had a chuckle at one of the prevailing theories, which is peak cultural criticism: The idea that the entire movie is a death dream. Some spoilers below.

When Top Gun: Maverick begins, its title character is still flying, having successfully skirted all promotions, and is working as a test pilot for a hypersonic jet that’s on the verge of being discontinued for having not yet reached its promised speed of Mach 10. Rear Admiral Cain, played by a desiccated Ed Harris, plans to shift the funding over to unmanned aircraft, which he believes are the future, and is coming to shut the program down personally. This gives Maverick just enough time for one last flight, and one last attempt to save the program from getting scrapped. He takes to the air, his speed ticking up decimal point by decimal point until he reaches what was supposed to be the day’s goal of Mach 9, and then keeps going past it. This sequence is strikingly beautiful, up in the calm dark of the stratosphere with the curvature of the planet clear as Maverick edges up to become, as Bashir Salahuddin’s character reverently notes, the fastest man on earth.

He makes Mach 10, and then, because he can’t help himself, tries to push the plane just a little harder, a little more, to disastrous effect. We cut to a shot looking up from the ground to see the aircraft strewn in pieces across the sky. It looks unsurvivable, impossible, a tragedy — but then there’s Cruise, shellshocked and covered in dust, somehow alive and walking into a diner, with all the patrons turning to gawp wide-eyed as he wordlessly takes a glass of water, drinks it, and asks in a croak where he is. And which is easier to believe? That Maverick makes it out of that crash untouched, skates past the consequences of another insubordination that destroyed a surely very expensive experiment aircraft, and is called back to the scene of his greatest triumph to wrap up loose ends, reunite with his youthful hookup, and prove that he’s still the best? Or that those are all hallucinatory images coming from the last synaptic firings of a past-his-prime flyboy getting smeared across the horizon alongside the pieces of his jet?

It’s a fun theory for a second—one that I’m surprised didn’t run in the Atlantic. But it is over-intellectualizing this movie immensely. It is a way for the smart kids to have a talking point: a hot take in a pop culture conversation that seems smart and edgy. The movie is Bruckheimer par excellence—over-the-top, cheesy, American, and implausible. But it is the type of movie that we like to escape in for a few hours on a hot day, and one that helps us remember a simpler time when the first Top Gun game came out with Kenny Loggins blasting on the radio. And as one commenter on the NY mag piece puts it: “Incomprehensible grit and self-determination through impossible odds despite enemies both foreign and domestic while highlighting that redemption is open to all. Pure Americana!” (CJN)

Quick links:

• An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (CJN)

• 200 restaurants, 100 tips (CJN)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN)

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