I’m not much of a moviegoer, still less a devotee of Hollywood blockbusters. But I spent an enjoyable couple of hours at a movie theater this week watching Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise’s sequel after 26 years to his smash hit of almost the same name.
Sure, it offered an excessively rich diet of hyper-emotionalism, as today’s culture demands, and was packed with cliches — a flawed but misunderstood rule-breaking hero; a lineup of good-looking, racially mixed supporting characters (the likable, straight-arrow black guy, the confident Latina able to thrive among the jocks, the white nerd); plus a selfish hotshot who learns a lesson in teamwork and earns redemption; and a brusque commanding admiral too hidebound and risk-averse to realize the need for daring and martial dash until it’s almost too late.
Such stuff was inevitable, but it is digestible when it is in service of a good story. And I’m also a sucker for fighter pilot movies because my immediate forebears were fighter pilots — my grandfather hugely successful in a biplane over northern France a century ago and my father in a ground-attack Spitfire first against Japanese positions in Burma in 1945 and then in British India against Afghan rebels whom he referred to as “Taliban.”
So, when the F/A-18 “Super Hornets” ease menacingly into a stepped-line formation for a ground attack, then hurtle along a winding valley with the commander leading at the lowest altitude, it makes me catch my breath, and I get a bit of grit in my eye.
But not all of us who’ve helped the movie gross more than $1 billion at the box office have such personal reasons for embracing a story of air warfare. The truth is rather the reverse. The big appeal of Top Gun: Maverick is that it ministers to a widespread, even national, yearning for qualities America has lost and that so many ordinary people want it to rediscover.
They want the United States to be strong and assertive, not limp and indecisive; they want the military to be more capable and impressive than any other, for warrior prowess to be celebrated rather than diluted or hemmed-in by requirements for LGBT virtue-signaling and the strictures of woke ideology. They want the nation to regain its self-confidence and international leadership, and for America finally to recapture the cohesive patriotism that was essential to its two centuries of dazzling success.
The movie offers escapism from the dreary, internecine politicization of everything and allows people to bask again in the national myth. I use “myth” not to imply falsehood, but to suggest the emotional idea that America has of itself, which reflects the qualities its people think they should embody — what they want their country to be.
They’d prefer that the movie were not escapism but a depiction of something closer to reality. In other words, they don’t want the America that the governing class is making it in response to the demands of activists saturated in ideology.
A movie that captures their desire will make billions of dollars. A political party that captures their desire and carries conviction will win election after election.
