Hey GenX: If Age, Stage, and America are Getting to You, Go See Top Gun Maverick
It's Memorial Day 2022. For the first time since the pandemic began, Dan and I take ourselves to a local theater to catch a movie on the big screen. We want to be smart and safe about the virus. But we also want to see Top Gun: Maverick. We choose a theater where it’s possible to reserve seats so that we can tell how full the theater will be. We select a morning showing for its relative emptiness.
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It’s May of 1986. The original Top Gun movie debuts. I'm eighteen and am finishing my freshman year of college, and Dan is seventeen and rounding out his junior year of high school. Top Gun becomes an instant classic featuring a gripping hero's journey plus a love story set against the backdrop of the Cold War, which is perhaps the greatest existential threat of the era. Tom Cruise, as Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, and his pals, are nice to look at, whether on a motorcycle, in a naval classroom, at the bar, on the beach, or in the cockpit of the F-14. The opening theme “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins darts and thuds its way into our bones. By the fall, the movie is breaking records and the soundtrack dominates the pop charts.
Dan and I meet a year later and fall in love soon after that. Before long we live together, and soon after, we marry. Along the way, Top Gun references and snippets become the casual shorthand we twentysomethings use, to the consternation of our elders who lack the context to understand what the heck we’re talking about. Things like:
It’s too close for missiles I’m switching to guns.
Remember?
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It’s the 2000’s. Dan and I are in our mid-to-late thirties with two kids in tow. Top Gun quotes are part of the family dialogue. When Dan or I say
Take me to bed or lose me forever
And the other says
Show me the way home, honey
the kids roll their eyes, but only a bit. They seem to appreciate that it’s a good thing that their parents are still madly in love.
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After all these decades, Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick is still nice to look at (which makes you wish you'd been using his elixirs and anti-wrinkle creams). But what also endured about Cruise is the way his eyes convey what Maverick is feeling, and how he chews his jaw to express more than words could ever say. I find this subtle expression of interior thought – set against the backdrop of interpersonal conflict, complex machinery, bravado in all genders, and just a lot of loud noise – to be breathtaking. There are also a lot of close ups of Cruise’s torso, thighs, and butt. Okay yeah, I find that part breathtaking, too 😬
Top Gun Maverick is bigger than Cruise, though. As a matter of craft, it's one helluva movie from stem to stern and I find it neither a remake nor a sequel, but rather a continuation, like life itself.
Every moment is well-timed and unfolds as it should. The familiar music and settings – from the Southern California naval air base, to the motorcycle and bomber jacket, to the bar, beach, flirting, persons in authority, rules, and planes, and the few classic lines they chose to bring back – could have come across as so tired, as when Harrison Ford tried to be Indiana Jones decades past the original movie (sorry, yes I love him, but still….) Instead, as Maverick climbs onto his motorcycle and races away from a hangar with the arc of the drive and the slant of the bike both at the exact same angle from years before, with Kenny Loggins’ original version of the song fueling the ride, we get the visual and sonic message: Past is present.
Remember the classic bar scene? Well that's back, too (as with the iconic cantina from Star Wars), this time with Maverick’s new yet old love interest present, but the officers who are playing darts are a generation (or two) younger than Maverick. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that Maverick becomes the old timer who can’t quite keep up with the new rules and finds himself on the outside looking back in through the panes of glass. Another example of how the past has caught right up to the present. This scene also shows us that when we see the past in the present, we realize our power to effect a different outcome.
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Okay yeah, I was occasionally brought to tears watching this movie, not because who I was before is something I necessarily long to be again, but because like Maverick, I’m still here. I felt like I was on that bike and in that bar and piloting that plane and doing a dance between the elders and the youngers and finding a way to be completely me, regardless.
What a message for us, GenX!
And yeah, for a split second in that movie theater, my mind turned back to the present moment in our America, with all of the shit we’re dealing with and all of the pain. Again came the refrain I’M STILL HERE. History repeats. Yet we, showing up as our full and enduring selves, can demand a different outcome this time.
What a message for us, America!
As thoroughly contemporary as this movie is, it's also old-fashioned in that it’s made by real people flying real planes doing real daredevil moves and experiencing the all-too-real consequences. Far superior to computer-generated action. Here's the New York Times' take on this aspect of the film:
"Cruise ... was adamant that every stunt be accomplished with practical effects. Each jet had a U.S. Navy pilot at the controls, while its actor spun like a leaf in a windstorm. The deserts and snow-capped peaks in the background are real, and so are many of the performers’ grimaces, squints, gasps and moans.
“You can’t fake the forces that are put on your body during combat,” the director Joseph Kosinski said by phone. “You can’t do it on a sound stage, you can’t do it on a blue screen. You can’t do it with visual effects.”
From the safety of theater seats, the audience faces its own challenge: unlearning the computer-generated complacency that’s turned modern blockbusters into bedazzled bores. The imagery of the sky and ground spiraling behind the actors’ heads in “Top Gun: Maverick” looks like it must be digital wizardry. It isn’t."
You feel it. The G-forces and mountainous terrain grip you. I grabbed for Dan's hand a few times when the action was just that intense. Or when the emotion pierced me in the feels.
I knew what was coming, but I didn’t know what it would do to me. This movie made me feel seen. I felt like I’d been infused with the elixir of myself again. I walked out of the theater with a little more swagger. Maybe a lot more swagger. I want that for you, too. Cuz, let's face it, GenXers: There's a little maverick in all of us.
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Have you seen it? Tell us what you thought of it in the comments below. What did you think? How did it make you feel? Is it possible to hate Tom Cruise (as I know some do) but still find value in this movie?
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