Top Gun (1986, Tony Scott)
Exploiting our Pavlovian response to camaradic cliché, Top Gun arouses by coupling human tenacity and mechanical precision, revealing an erotic tension at the center of competition. Wavering between esoteric and nostalgic, this beautifully-rendered bit of folderol succeeds when sticking to its insular world, transfixing through the calculated disorientation of aerial photography. The ambiguity of its innuendo only heightens the pleasure, though it eventually succumbs to the mandates of melodrama and narrative convention, abandoning aesthetic in the name of practicality.
At its most enthralling, the assembly of images dances between the volatile and ethereal, manifesting hulking aircraft from windswept alien landscapes, each vision awash in the tumult of tinny radio transmission. The vastness of oceanic skies is contrasted by the intimacy of the cockpit, shot only at close range and as solitary as a coffin, humid with perspiration and echoing with the disembodied voices of isolated men. Obscured by their helmets, these faceless pilots resemble the featureless noses of their aircraft, embodying an anonymity that befits the chaos of dogfighting.
An intellectual vacancy pervades the work, suiting the purely cinematic nature of the bookended aeronautics, but clashing with attempts at psychoanalysis, specifically the unresolved guilt and father complex of our cocksure protagonist. As a renegade airman, Maverick’s (Tom Cruise) enfant terrible routine jibes with Tony Scott’s war room bluster and two-fisted flight sequences, but both are undermined by superficial dalliances with the notion of military ancestry. Whether consciously addressing Maverick’s absentee father or reckoning with the forfeiture of the Vietnam War, subtextual insights into hegemonic masculinity are foreign objects, rejected by the pugnacity of the picture’s action sequences.
The prerequisite romantic subplot is just as discordant, smothering Maverick’s virility in twilight blues and Giorgio Moroder’s maudlin synthesizer. Fumbling into emotional honesty also betrays the film’s central conceit, especially as catastrophe strikes and Maverick receives retribution for a chauvinism championed in the exposition. The fact that the object of his anguish only functions as a pawn in his metaphorical castration further implicates the machinations of plot as corruptors of the overarching concept.
As all story threads are knotted and familiar notes of love, loss, guilt, and triumphant recovery are struck, Top Gun begs pardon for its bravado, imposing moral conflict onto its feats of balletic motion and transforming unabashed aviophilia into an excuse for Phoenician rebirth. The completed piece is a work at loggerheads with itself, relishing visual art and perseverance, before abandoning both in the name of audience expectation and narrative symmetry.
Top Gun (Paramount Pictures, 1986)
Directed by Tony Scott
Written by Ehud Yonay (based on his article “Top Guns”), Jim Cash (screenplay), and Jack Epps Jr. (screenplay)
Photographed by Jeffrey Kimball
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