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V\Vjh] Master of Arts

PLAYING WITH THE BOYS: CONTESTING AND PEFORMING MASCULINITY IN

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of State University A In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree

V\vjh] Master of Arts

■ VJ55 In

Cinema Studies

by

Seth Adam Wilder

San Francisco,

May 2017 Copyright by Seth Adam Wilder 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read : Contesting and Performing Masculinity in Top Gun by Seth Adam Wilder, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree

Master of Arts: Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University.

Associate Professor PLAYING WITH THE BOYS: CONTESTING AND PERFORMING MASCULINITY IN TOP GUN

Seth Adam Wilder San Francisco, California 2017

This thesis considers how Top Gun works as a site for exploring and constructing masculinity through the male body and performance. It examines areas of contestation, complicating and underscoring the construction of a postmodern, performative masculinity, and suggesting the film as axiomatic of a historical shift in cinematic masculinity using the exhibition of the male body to perform masculinity in order to construct its postmodern formulation. It demonstrates how Top Gun leans heavily on the performance of the masculine, combining the spectacle of the male form with aspects of homeovestism, in settings and occupations that privilege the homosocial/homoerotic domain of masculinity while displaying striking levels of misogyny. The essay also argues that cinematic engulfment and exhibitionism reinforce elements of performative masculinity, while presenting a reconfigured oedipal conflict, and even a rather queer love triangle (or two), that resolves in a dominant reading that affirms— a now problematized and unstable— masculinity.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

Date TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

The film narrative and the question of narrative...... 5

Performing the masculine in a military context...... 13

The homoerotic in masculine performance...... 22

Misogyny as masculine assertion...... 27

Man of action...... 30

Echoes of Vietnam, John Wayne, and the crucible of combat...... 33

Conclusion...... 37

Bibliography...... 40

v 1

Introduction.

Why Top Gun (, 86)? That is, why concentrate critical energy on a more than thirty-year-old blockbuster film known primarily for its industrial effects on summer releases, its status as emblematic of high concept1 filmmaking more generally, and for its role in ’s ascendancy to superstardom? Maybe in part the answer is because it has been less consistently examined on non-industrial terms—despite, or perhaps because of, its remarkable success, and its arguably having reshaped the summer movie.

Although it generally received negative to middling reviews, Top Gun was the highest grossing film in the US in 1986, with more than $171 million in box office receipts against its roughly $18 million production budget. The film won the People’s Choice

Award for “favorite motion picture (Fleming, 1998, p. 77).” According to popular legend, the release of the film even led to a spike in naval recruitment. It was subsequently so successful as a video rental that a major trade organization for that industry, The Video Software Dealers Association, presented Paramount Home Video

1 “High concept” is a term coined to refer to a style of production that combines filmmaking and multi-platform marketing synergies. Reduced to cliche form, it is often described as filmmaking with a story easily encapsulated in a succinct pitch. Top Gun could be described as a competition film with fighter jets. The film’s producers, and , are closely associated with high concept filmmaking. One often repeated story of this film’s genesis is that the producers brought the magazine article about the Miramar school on which it based and pitched that they wanted to make a film that brought the article’s photographs of jets to life. Simpson is so closely associated with high concept filmmaking (and cocaine-fueled excess), that his biography uses the phrase as its title.

2 According to Parker, Richard D. in his 2005 article "The Armed Forces Needs Another Top Gun," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 131 Issue 12, the Navy saw a spike of 16,000 uniformed enlistments out of a total increase of 20,000 service enlistments across branches in the year following initial release of the film.

3 In the year after its VHS release, Top Gun became the fastest and best-selling home video release to date. 2

with the award for the top rental film of the year for 1988, as well (Fleming, 1998, ibid.).

All this suggests that the film was quite popular with audiences, both theatrically, where its spectacular elements were in full effect, and at home, where television viewing necessarily foregrounded the narrative aspects of the film. Although audiences undoubtedly loved the aerial spectacle, they must have enjoyed other elements, as well.

Still, in her two books specifically focused on Hollywood action cinema and male bodies in relation to it (1993) (2004), Yvonne Tasker manages only brief, passing references to the film, and these passages concern action cinema more broadly. Writing only a few years after its initial release and success, Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner

(1990), in their book length analysis of politics and ideology in new Hollywood cinema from the late 60s to mid 80s, reduce the film to “a rightist celebration of penis-brained militarism in which a narcissistic macho air force (sic) pilot triumphs over communist fighters in a pyrotechnic air battle (p. 297-98).” Top Gun is worth considering more closely than those accounts offer, in part because of its outsize success and its influence on the cinema that has followed. It is frequently pointed to as an exemplar of the high concept filmmaking that has come to redefine the summer release landscape in those intervening decades.4 In some respects, its formula of cinema as presold product, as spectacle over story, flash over substance - the sort of oversized experience that

4 See, for example, Mark Harris’ “The Day Died,” which catalogs how Top Gun's focus on marketing driven product, pioneered by its producers Simpson and Bruckheimer, programmed a generation that is now often in decision making positions at studios to approach films as a presold commodity, rather than individualized works. Even more vigorous application of those ideas in a landscape of franchises and would-be franchises defines the core o f major studio film production in the early 21st century. http://www.gq.com/story/the-day-the-movies-died-mark-harris 3

characterizes blockbuster films — and its focus on a kind of adolescent, masculine perspective that is in turn pitched at the predominately male, predominately aged 25 or younger audience seen to be the most steadfast, repeat theatrical consumers of film, have formed the template for decades’ worth of subsequent summer releases, including many of the franchise properties that dominate multiplex screens in the early 21st century.

Apparently, more than thirty years later, there is even a sequel in the works,5 which both would render this “proto-franchise” picture as a proper franchise, while also further underscoring the notion that there is something persistently appealing about the basic premise. Top Gun's role as an exemplary work, combined with its specific appeal, invites a closer consideration of the film.

This paper is concerned with gender performance, but what does it mean to say Top

Gun performs gender? The term “gender performativity” was coined by theorist Judith

Butler in her book Gender Trouble to address what she saw as a misperception of gender.

She found the traditional binary construction of gender - male or female - limiting and insufficient, and united the concept of gender with that of performativity to address this shortfall. For Butler (2007), "gender proves to be performance—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed (p. 25)." Since, in traditional formulations of gender, performance is not an unknown idea, but tends to stand for the

5 Producer Jerry Bruckheimer confirmed to Entertainment Tonight on March 31,2016 that Tom Cruise was on board to reprise his role as Maverick in a sequel to Top Gun. As o f this writing, the project is still in the development stage, with no scheduled release date. 4

conscious adoption of gender roles, Butler goes on to distinguish her concept of performative gender. Unlike the conscious role adoption inherent in traditional formulations of performance, to say gender is performative is to say that it is being continuously produced and reproduced. That is, gender is being constructed in a process that complies with dominant ideas of gender norms. More importantly, this performance is ongoing and outside of individual control. "[T]here is no 'being' behind doing... 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed - the deed is everything (Butler, 2007, p. 25)."

That is, it is in the performance that the individual is produced.

Since Top Gun is so concentrated on masculinity, and because it enjoyed enthusiastic, largely male audiences, what follows is a consideration of how this film embodies this concept of gender performativity, while specifically complementing and reinforcing Yvonne Tasker’s work examining Hollywood action films as sites for exploring and constructing masculinity through the male body and performance. It utilizes Top Gun to introduce additional areas of contestation, complicating and underscoring the construction of a postmodern, performative masculinity, while suggesting the film as axiomatic of a historical shift in cinematic representations of masculinity. Tasker’s (1993) essay “Dumb Movies for Dumb People: Masculinity, the

Body, and the Voice in Contemporary Action Cinema” specifically investigates films that use elements like torture, the voice, and the reconfiguration of established star personas, as well as the exhibition of the male body to perform masculinity as a way to construct its postmodern formulation. Top Gun adds to the menu, while also offering a particularly 5

ambivalent version of postmodern masculinity. It leans heavily on the performance of the masculine, in this case combining the spectacle of the male form with aspects of homeovestism, in settings and occupations that privilege the homosocial/homoerotic domain of masculinity while displaying striking misogyny. The film also demonstrates how cinematic engulfment and exhibitionism can reinforce elements of performative masculinity, while presenting a reconfigured oedipal conflict, and even a rather queer love triangle (or two), that resolves in a dominant reading that affirms-- a now problematized and unstable— masculinity.

The film narrative and the question of genre.

Top Gun tells the story of a hot-shot naval aviator, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, who is haunted by the early childhood loss of his father, who was likewise a navy pilot. After a fortuitous encounter with a MiG early in the film, Maverick is given the opportunity to attend the elite, highly competitive Naval Fighter Weapons School commonly called

“Top Gun,” where he studies advanced aerial dogfighting techniques. This location occupies the bulk of the narrative. While there, he strikes up a romance with one of his instructors, civilian contractor and astrophysicist, Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood.

Maverick’s stubborn independence and recklessness causes conflict and consternation with not only his superiors, but also his fellow student pilots, as well as his lover. Late in the training, due to a mechanical issue, he suffers the death of his RIO6 and best friend,

6 RIO is an acronym for Radar Intercept Officer, the second crewman in the F-14 who is responsible for most of the electronics. 6

Nick “Goose” Bradshaw. Although he briefly considers quitting, ultimately Maverick decides to persevere and graduate. Upon graduation, he is deployed on a special mission7 where he encounters and downs multiple enemy aircraft and through the crucible of combat earns the respect and admiration of his fellow airmen and service members.

Having accomplished this, he elects to return to the school as an instructor, where he rekindles his relationship with Charlie at the film’s end.

Even that brief recounting of the film’s plot seems to situate the film in the generic tradition of the Hollywood , and yet, examined more closely, its status as a war film becomes a bit less certain.8 Analyzed utilizing the semantic definition of genre as established by such elements as iconography, character, setting, and conflict (Altman,

2000), it is clear Top Gun shares generic aspects with the war film. It is undoubtedly a military film, populated primarily with military personnel and situated largely in military locations. However, unlike the conventional war films examined by critics such as

Thomas Schatz (1998),9 Top Gun doesn’t really feature a war in the “ongoing hostilities

7 A classic narrative trope that seems rather dubious on closer consideration. Why send pilots to an half way around the world that is already teeming with fighter pilots (Maverick was serving on it at the film’s outset) to assist in a breaking crisis?

8 Given the ubiquity o f locker room scenes and the competition for a trophy that underscores the bulk of the film, the latter of which was not a component of the actual school at Miramar, there is even an argument that Top Gun is a sports film disguised in military trappings, which is consistent with its high concept foundations.

9 See for example Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943) or Twelve O ’clock High (Henry King, 1949) for more conventional aerial combat war films set during World War II, situating the onscreen drama in the context of ongoing hostilities. 7

between nations10 or paramilitary groups” sense. In this, it is part of a body of peacetime military films. More specifically, it belongs to a minor tradition of dramas set during periods of peace stretching back to The Flying Fleet (George W. Hill, 1929)11 and including films such as Flight Command (Frank Borzage, 1940) and An Officer and a

Gentleman (Taylor Hackford, 1982). These are films designed to spotlight the training and technology of the US military, enhancing and valorizing the quality of US training and personnel, while, in the case of the aviation dramas, often simultaneously showing what cinematic technology can do in terms of bringing impressions of flight to the audience in the movie theater.

Unlike those earlier films, however, Top Gun doesn’t eschew direct combat like

Flight Command12 or replace it with a rescue mission, as in The Flying Fleet. Rather, it presents a conflict at the film’s climax between the heroic naval aviators and enemy pilots who do not correspond with any identified adversary, who possess no clear markings beyond a red star on plane and helmet that arguably marks them as

“communist,” whose motives are largely opaque, and who are not individualized in any human sense. Even the masks and helmets worn by this enemy, unlike those used by the

10 Of course, the Cold War is never too far from top o f mind when watching the film.

11 This film is particularly interesting in relation to Top Gun in as much as it includes a(n admittedly more conventional) love triangle, with two would-be hot shot pilots vying for the affection of the same woman. That one of those pilots is played by famously gay actor Ramon Navarro adds an extra-narrative gloss of queemess to that film.

12 Although the film was made in 1940, prior to US entry in World War II, so the “Hellcats” aren’t yet in combat, the “drumbeat” o f war can be heard loud and clear. 8

naval aviators, completely obscure their faces. They are the functional equivalent of the

“bogeys” and “bandits” that characterize the adversaries in the training sequences that occupy the bulk of the film’s aerial combat segments. The resolution of this combat renders its alleged stakes largely illusory, with no loss of life among the American aviators and a perfunctory statement that “the enemy” is flatly disavowing that the hostile exchange ever took place at all.

As Stephen Prince (1992) observes, Top Gun shares an affinity with other, roughly contemporaneous, Cold War era military films like the aforementioned An Officer and a

Gentleman and (, 1986) - films that harbor an undercurrent of anti-Soviet fear. These films also share Top Gun’s concentration on training, honing skills, and learning unit discipline, rather than the combat sequences that predominate in the typical war film.13 While the lack of ongoing hostilities and a concentration on training over/in place of combat distinguish these films from the broader genre of the war film, these films share generic conventions and tropes beyond setting and character. Like Scott’s film, An Officer and a Gentleman is a naval aviation training drama which offers a protagonist who needs to learn how to hold on to the positive aspects of his individualism while simultaneously subordinating his independent streak

13 Stanley Kubrick’s roughly contemporaneous drama, Full Metal Jacket (1987). offers a compelling contrast in this regard in as much as its concentration on boot camp in its early segment seems designed for distinct ends - namely, to demonstrate the dehumanization of military training necessary to transform the recruits into Marines who can kill and die. That it is also a period film involving Vietnam is arguably not insignificant in terms of this distinction. 9

for the greater good of the unit and his own personal improvement.14 The idea of rugged individualism and not following the rules is something of a traditional cinematic trope of masculinity that, especially in the martial sphere, is necessarily complicated by the need to follow orders and to do one’s job — in a more traditional formulation of masculinity, typically without complaint. This contradiction informs the narrative here, as well, but with the added wrinkle that the protagonist is presented as sensitive and vulnerable, rather than stoic. When pushed to the brink by the drill instructor, he displays the resolve necessary not to quit, but if he is reshaped into a model naval officer at film’s end, he has not become the formulation of the more stable, stoic masculine ideal embodied in films of the past, but rather some new 80s model of officer who is as sensitive and vulnerable as he is strong.

Eastwood’s film, while focused on Marines, is narratively similar to Top Gun in that, in addition to the concentration on training and discipline at the hands of a tough, go-his- own-way-for-purposes-of-a-stronger-military-unit gunnery sergeant, it also includes a deployment of the trained men that allows them to put their training into practice and demonstrate how effectively they have learned their lessons and formed a cohesive, disciplined fighting unit - in effect valorizing American military training as much as

American military might. In an era where direct conflict between major powers threatened global thermonuclear annihilation, perhaps the ideal contemporary military

14 A narrative element also common in war films such as Howard Hawks’ 1943 drama Air Force, which spotlights a character among the crew consigned to being a tailgunner after having washed out of flight school who learns over the course of the narrative to subsume his individual desires and master his task for the success and survival of the bomber crew in its fight against the forces of Imperial Japan in the Pacific. 10

drama offered little threat of all-out war, instead presenting copious examples of well- trained military personnel utilizing state of the art technology to reinforce a sense of

American security and confirm the wisdom of the massive military spending that defined much of that conflict.

Heartbreak Ridge is equally interesting for another reason. It features a drill instructor clearly designed to embody traditional notions of masculinity, and then problematizes that construction. Gunny Highway is a veteran of the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War, so arguably coded as traditional — a perspective reinforced by the casting of Clint Eastwood in the role, with his associations to earlier Hollywood cinema and his generally taciturn star persona. Perhaps most especially, his character is associated with stoicism and reserve, which the film renders problematic via his relationship with his ex-wife. One running gag in the film is that he reads women’s magazines to try and gain insight into what women want in a relationship. He spends a good deal of the interactions with his ex-wife trying to make sense of what went wrong in their marriage, while his ex-wife tries to get him to see that his taciturnity rendered him emotionally unavailable, so she ultimately felt alone in the marriage and divorced him.

This renders his stoicism, and by extension the related formulation of traditional masculinity, problematic in the context of 80s masculinity, at best showing this old construct to be anachronistic. In contrast, the younger Marines, with their posing and bellyaching, are his antithesis. Even as one narrative thrust of the film involves Highway forging them into a cohesive fighting unit, these interactions likewise reshape him into a 11

more modem version of masculinity by film’s end, when it appears that his ex-wife is willing to give him another shot because she perceives him as having changed and become more emotionally open.

As more of an action-oriented blockbuster than either An Officer and a Gentleman or Heartbreak Ridge, Top Gun is in some respects designed to foreground spectacle rather than character development or story, but this is not to suggest that the latter are absent. Beneath the spectacle, the film clearly presents the character journey and growth of its protagonist. Perhaps more than simply classifying it as a Hollywood , it is a film situated productively in the tradition of male melodrama. Male melodrama in this sense does not mean the patriarch-centered family melodramas and “male weepies” such as Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956) written about by genre theorists such as

Thomas Schatz or Thomas Elsaesser, and frequently considered in examinations of the melodramatic mode. Rather, this is a specific subset of male melodrama as employed by

John Mercer and Martin Shingler (2004) in their brief overview of cinematic melodrama more generally.

Drawing in part on the work of Ben Singer concerning the history of cinematic melodrama and its relationship to action and adventure films in the silent era, they identify a class of films within the contemporary action cinema that exhibit hallmarks of the male melodrama - namely, films such as John McTieman’s Die Hard (1988) and

Predator (1987) that “inevitably, though frequently inadvertently, explore gender constructions and the construction of masculinity itself’ within action cinema (Mercer 12

and Shingler, 2004, p. 99). For Mercer and Shingler these male melodramas are films that assert and “celebrate masculinist values,” but also call these very values and assertions into question (2004, p. 99). This is because melodrama is defined in part by emotionality and vulnerability, characteristics that stand at odds with traditional notions of masculinity with its stoicism and strength. Combining these melodramatic elements with more traditional assertions of masculine mastery, strength, and perseverance produces a dichotomous space that spotlights ambivalent instabilities in the representations of masculinity.

Although they don’t specifically refer to Top Gun, with its decidedly masculine and homosocial space, it is a case in point. The film’s treatment of Maverick as both a skilled and a problem pilot, and great and feckless wingman, presents a wrestling match of competing masculinities, with “going his own way” versus “conforming to rules and group pressure” being perhaps the most obvious, but far from the only such opposition.

The film also offers a protagonist who, on some level, must embrace heterosexual attachment and cultivate its associated vulnerability and sensitivity to enter into this newer formulation of adult masculinity and the discipline of professional mastery. The film’s ultimately ambivalent treatment of the irreconcilability of such oppositions arguably indicates unresolved tensions of the construction of masculine values in the

1980s, when societal transformations forged new permutations and performances of masculinity. 13

Hollywood action films of the 80s serve as an exemplary body of work for considering masculinity as performance in this postmodern sphere. Whether considered as part of that somewhat ill-defined group, as an action oriented male melodrama, or as an example of the war film or the military genre more specifically, Top Gun plays such a role. The economic shifts and changing roles of women and men that in part characterize postmodemity, with women factoring more pronouncedly in the work force and specifically in roles and spheres previously occupied solely by men, offer a valuable context for observing such performances of masculinity. As Richard Dyer (1987) puts it, in an environment “of microchips and a large-scale growth of women in traditionally male occupations... values of masculine physicality are harder to maintain straightfacedly and unproblematically (p. 12).” This perspective offers a point of entry as to why films might perform masculinity as a way of (re)defining it. The strategies employed in Top

Gun to perform the masculine, and the ways in which this performance exhibits homoeroticism, oedipal fantasy, and problematized portrayals of women form the basis for the examination that follows.

Performing the masculine in a military context.

The aerial combat sequences in Top Gun serve a clearly performative function in the film. As has been the case in cinematic representations of air to air combat since at least the time of Wings (William Wellman, 1928) and Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels (1930), these sequences are designed to bring the viewer inside the action, speed, and excitement of flight. In this they exemplify a variation on the cinema as exhibition examined by 14

Tom Gunning (1989) in his work on the “cinema of attractions,” offering up a “look at what cinema can do” to the audience and dazzling them with the technological potential of the cinematic apparatus itself. In their realization in Top Gun these sequences also offer striking examples of the concept of cinematic engulfment introduced by Thomas

Elsaesser (1998). That is, these passages sometimes seem to temporarily halt or retard the narrative while bombarding and overwhelming the viewer with overpowering sound and images, creating an immediate, visceral experience of shock and awe.15

Contemporaneous reviews of the film, while generally not overly positive, tended to go out of their way to praise the spectacular qualities of these aerial sequences. Gene

Siskel’s (1986, May 16) positive review and ’s (1986, May 16) negative review are typical, with Siskel comparing the aerial passages positively to The Right Stuff

(Philip Kaufman, 1983) while acknowledging that overall the film is “sexist” and “silly,” and Ebert’s generally harsh review suggesting that the dogfights are as great as the scenes on the ground involving character interactions are risible.

In Top Gun these sequences are realized using a shooting and editing style typically associated with then-contemporaneous production. This type of editing is a version of what David Bordwell refers to as intensified continuity, wherein rhythmic editing enhances and reinforces classical cinematic technique to create a propulsive

15 In the latter sense, the sequences serve as a forerunner to the notion o f cinematic immersion, which will be more fully experienced with the subsequent introduction of things like the IMAX formats and the implementation of improved 3D technologies. IMAX 3D is particularly interesting in the context o f Top Gun owing to the film’s re-release in that format in February 2013. 15

effect. The relationship of these aerial sequences to MTV-style filmmaking is further underscored by the driving tracks that accompany them. These sequences are in effect rendered as miniature music videos - that is, as aviation video performances within the film, even advertisements16 for US naval aviation. And, like the jet fighters and motorcycles they present, these sequences move.

Further, since so many shots in these aerial dogfight sequences offer the perspective of the missile and gun targeting system of the aircraft’s heads up display, placing the viewer in the POV of the pilot angling to get the shot off and score the “kill,” they likewise serve as something of a forerunner to the first-person shooter video and computer games that would become popular over the following decade - games that overwhelmingly favor masculine fantasies of combat and mastery. All that is missing to the (masculinized) viewer is control, namely, the ability to pull the trigger and fly the plane; but, inasmuch as the POV is so carefully orchestrated, the viewer can enjoy the experience vicariously, with these aerial sequences as something like a demo of one of these games.

Action films such as Top Gun are concerned with movement -- most often movement of, typically male, human bodies in space, performing complex and important physical tasks that demonstrate prowess and work towards attaining objectives. While this spectacle of movement is often engulfing, it is not entirely separable from the narrative.

16 Perhaps not coincidentally, the film’s director Tony Scott got his start directing television advertising. David Denby points out in his 1986 New York Magazine review of the film that it plays like a recruitment poster. 16

As Tasker (1993) observes, action films are linked by a “particular kind of scene or spectacle,” with visual effects, stunts, and the like occupying a place of privilege over dialog and character development in terms of advancing the narrative (p. 12-13). In other words, in addition to the ways in which it is literally spectacular, even occasionally overwhelming and engulfing, it is a display of movement designed ultimately to push the narrative forward.

Equally, since so much of the dogfighting occurs in the context of training, rather than “real” aerial combat, these sequences serve as a kind of performance in the role- playing sense. These are largely sequences of men playing dogfighting games, acting in competitions where they both display and hone their skills. Arguably, this is one expression of the film’s emphasis of training and readiness as an expression of masculine strength - masculinity as honed skills, whether these are skills in action or those held in reserve. A more traditional reading of masculinity might describe this as individuals conforming to their social roles, with the male figures playing the assigned role of fighter pilot and of this realized spectacle as a performance of the masculine. That reading would suggest that the film presents men playing pilot in assertions of mastery and competition that define their masculinity. Judith Butler (2007), on the other hand, would invert the idea, suggesting instead that these individuals are enunciated by the discourse in which they believe themselves to be in control - that rather than the performers, they are themselves performed by gender discourse. 17

Another example of performance resides in Top Gun’s parade of male bodies.

Numerous sequences of healthy, physically fit young men in various stages of undress in the locker room17, in a restroom, and in a memorable game of beach volleyball emphasize the scopophilic, specifically voyeuristic capacity of cinema, in effect often objectifying male figures and reducing them to their “to be looked at-ness.” This presents something like a male pin-up, which is a more complicated formulation than a simple masculinized version of a female pin-up. For Richard Dyer (1987), these complications reflect anxieties related to the way masculine power is maintained in western cultures. He emphasizes the imperative of male disavowal of being looked at, and sees in the chiseled hardness associated with male physiques presented cinematically an expression of the body in action as cinematic subject - even if it is potential or reserve action — in an attempt at deliberate contrast to the passivity often associated with the female character captured as cinematic object (1987). This carries an inherent contradiction, inasmuch as the disavowal of being looked at does not mean no looking is taking place. It isn’t as simple as male-active/female-passive. Rather, the male form is simultaneously active/subject and posed/object. To offer one example of these complications, in grieving the death of Goose, Maverick is shot largely from behind, looking into the mirror above a sink in the locker room restroom while wearing nothing but his underwear. While on one level it is possible to read this choice as objectifying, it offers equally a suggestion of vulnerability, even fragility, in this character’s grief over the death of another male, that,

17 According to Fleming’s biography o f producer Don Simpson, star Tom Cruise was particularly interested in scenes occurring in the locker room (1998, p.70-71). 18

while placing Maverick’s body on display, moves beyond simple sexualization and objectification. This contrasts with the more obviously sexualized and objectified images of men that often abound in the other locker room sequences, and arguably even more so in the volleyball game discussed in greater detail below in its relation to the homoerotic.

In some respects equally spectacular to the aerial sequences, the fetishized presentation of male bodies in Top Gun also tends to take on the appearance of music videos or the advertising of healthy male physiques due to the intensified continuity editing, camera style, and music used, particularly in the locker room sequences and the beach volleyball match. Susan Jeffords (1994) offers the perspective that the arrival of the often more muscular physiques associated with stars in the reflects the reassertion of patriarchal masculinity and an anti-feminist backlash that corresponds to the Reagan era (p. 25). Conversely, although thinking more specifically of the steroidal action stars of 80s cinema like Sylvester Stallone and , Barbara

Creed (1987) sees the muscular physiques as an expression of masculine anxiety. Top

Gun arguably presents these male physiques to the camera and the viewer with their chiseled muscles as both reflecting Jeffords’s suggestion of an affirmation of Reagan-era patriarchy while also embodying Creed’s “anthropomorphized phallus” and “simulacra of exaggerated masculinity” in a postmodern “p/ay with the notions of manhood (quoted in

Tasker, 1993, p. 757) (emphasis added).” As Judith Butler might suggest, the film presents healthy men performing for the camera in part as an attempt to answer the question “What is masculinity?” 19

That uniforms should serve as an aesthetic signifier of masculinity is not new. In her famous antiwar treatise, Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf describes “clothes”

(military dress uniforms) which she says “make us gape with astonishment (p. 23). She goes on to explain how these uniforms serve the dual purpose of impressing the beholder with the importance of military office, while also inducing young men to sign up for military service (193 8).18 Besides these aesthetic functions, uniforms serve an additional, performative role. As Tasker (1993) observes generally, psychoanalysis offers a useful framework for examining how this recourse to uniforms offers an example of performing masculinity. In contrast to the action films examined by Tasker in her 1993 essay, which do not rely on uniforms, but not surprisingly given the narrative context of the film, uniforms feature prominently in Top Gun.

Homeovestism is defined as “a perverse behavior involving wearing clothes of the same sex (Zavitzianos, 1977, p. 489).” More importantly for present purposes, rather than considering this as fetishistic, Zavitzianos’ work further describes the use of garments associated with the military to stabilize body image, relieve anxiety, and improve self-esteem (1977). Another way of thinking about this is that this work involves consideration of the uniform as a component of the performance of a role. In the context of the era in which the film was made, the role of navy fighter pilot was a privileged domain of the masculine, so fighter pilot was, by definition, a male role.

18 The latter is especially noteworthy in the context o f Top Gun, the release o f which was not only accompanied by military recruitment stations set up near some theaters, but which also legendarily led to an observable increase in naval enlistment. 20

Equally, as Tasker (1993) further observes, the military uniforms can be read as an example of Lacan’s concept of the male parade “in which the accoutrements of phallic power, the finery of authority, belie the very lack that they display (p. 765).” In other words, the uniforms can be seen to represent the attempt to assume male power via appropriate costume; if they wear the proper uniforms, then they are the (masculine) fighter pilots. The clothes “make the man,” in a sense, with the uniforms, which are by their nature on display, enacting masculinity.

Operating in conjunction with the uniforms, the call signs assigned to the aviators can also be thought of as a performative element in the film. After all, “Maverick,”

“Goose,” “Iceman,” “Viper,” and the like all signify an assigned identity that rests on top of the fiction of the character name, in some respects overdetermining the performative aspect of the very identity of the characters. As if to underscore this point, for the central characters of the film these call signs represent core personality traits and characteristics

(for example, in Maverick or Iceman) or ironic juxtapositions to the personalities of the aviators to whom they are assigned (such as the humorless instructor whose call sign is

Jester).

“Maverick,” “Goose,” “Iceman,” and the like all are call signs that also resonate with notions of super heroic identities, or possibly with sports nicknames, each which likewise often reinforce observable characteristics. As a central figure, Maverick’s is, not surprisingly, the most obvious. What better way to foreground and overdetermine a character whose personality is defined by his “goes his own way,” “plays by his own 21

rules” attitude than to identify the character as “Maverick” in the narrative? Every time he’s addressed by name, the viewer is reminded of his position as a kind of outlaw hero.

“Goose” is a name both somewhat comical and ludic, and simultaneously a reminder of his often motherly role towards Maverick, with all the oedipal undertones that implies.

“Iceman’s” call-sign is described in the narrative as being due to how ice cold and calculatedly he flies as a combat pilot - he is as cool as ice, making no mistakes. In the case of one pair, “Hollywood” and “Wolfman,” it is even possible to see an element of self-reflexivity creep into the narrative, as their call signs serve as a self-conscious reminder to the viewer that this is a film. This underscoring of character name as characteristic reinforces the role-playing aspect of the masculinity on display in the film, and since the characters are introduced with the call signs in place, they arguably help to call forth the characters, rather than being applied to them. The one female character given a call sign is Charlie, and her call sign is both more quotidian than the others, and arguably a masculinized nickname. Even her call sign serves to reinforce the masculinizing aspect of the practice of such an assignment of identity in the film. And the call signs are so pervasive that Maverick and Goose, as well as Maverick’s paramour and Goose’s wife, refer to their partners by using those identities rather than their given names. 19

19 In fact, they are so pervasively used that Goose is never referred to by his first name, which only exists in exposition in the screenplay. 22

The homoerotic20 in masculine performance.

In the otherwise largely forgettable film Sleep with Me (Rory Kelly, 1994), the most memorable moment is a throwaway conversation at a party where one character (played by filmmaker , no less) lays out his ideas about how “gay” Top Gun is.

Although he mischaracterizes the dialog towards the end of the film to prove his point, 91 the broader notion is made and stands. That the film is decidedly homoerotic is not particularly surprising, nor is it a novel insight in and of itself. In his 1986 Washington

Post review of the film, Paul Attanasio identified the “real romance” in the film as being

“between the men and the men, the men and the planes, and the camera with both (May

19).” Similarly, New York Magazine’’s David Denby referred to the film as arguably “the most brazenly eroticized recruiting poster in the history of warfare (1986, May, p. 101).”

Michael Wilmington of the Times likewise captures the homoerotic vibe of the film without naming it as such when he writes that “[t]he deepest impulses behind

Top Gun are not political, but sensual: You can tell by the number of scenes that are set in the shower (1986, May 16).”

20 In writing about homoeroticism in Top Gun, it is difficult not to acknowledge the persistent rumors of its star’s alleged, closeted homosexuality, which Cruise does not simply deny, but goes so far as to launch defamation lawsuits against individuals who publicly voice such claims.

21 While there is some back and forth between Maverick and Iceman about who would serve as wingman if they share combat duty in the future, neither refers to “riding [the other’s] tail.” 23

Given the film’s setting, the privileged site of masculine identity that the US military historically represents, or maybe even the nature of the conventional male oriented action film itself, homosocial23 and homoerotic elements are arguably inevitable. Butler might suggest that this is a result of gender performance’s inherent multiplicities of signification resulting in subversions of the heterosexual regime. That the inability of gender to be contained by the subject means subversion is always occurring and always unpredictable. This masculine site, namely a school for only male naval aviators, makes suppression or avoidance of the homoerotic difficult, although some films have arguably minimized such elements.24 However, rather than minimizing them, Top Gun seems to amplify its queemess. It isn’t as if the homoerotic elements of the film present as subtext exactly, more like they offer a second, queer text that runs at equal prominence alongside any conventional, heterosexual reading of the film. As Alexander Doty (1993) observes, ostensibly straight oriented films like Top Gun might offer the potential for a stronger range of queer response within their male-male dynamics than deliberately gay films by creating a space for instability that queer positioned viewers might be able to more easily

22 Particularly in the context o f 1986, when the movie was shot and set, naval combat aviators were exclusively male.

23 In using this term, I’m conscious of Adrienne Rich’s careful consideration and rejection of what she sees as the political rhetoric used to render homosocial and homosexual as distinct terms, with the former less problematic to heteronormative American culture than the notion of labeling ostensibly straight performances and moments as the latter. Like Rich, I suspect any such lines are less clear than that, if they exist at all.

24 To name a contemporaneous example, Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War drama, Platoon, also released in 1986, features a homosocial environment not as obviously inflected with homoeroticism. Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge arguably presents a similar example, although the film does offer one character, Profile, who seems coded as queer, and who is the only marine who is killed in the film’s military combat. 24

connect to in a myriad of ways. That is to say, a film like this one might particularly invite gender fluid and homoerotic connotative readings that would be foreclosed by the presence of denotative gay characters.

In Top Gun the homoerotic is visible in the dynamic of the “love story between men” embodied in the relationship between Maverick and Goose that dominates so much of the narrative. They share a bond and relationship rather Hawksian in intensity of affection, with the brash independence of Maverick balanced by the, frankly, nurturing interventions of Goose. Their interactions call to mind the relationship between Geoff and Kid in Hawks’ non-military aviation drama Only Angels Have Wings (1939), with

Kid occupying a role somewhat analogous to Goose as a nurturing figure to Geoff s more brash protagonist, and with Kid’s death late in the film also serving as a catalyst in that film to propel Geoff towards a heterosexual romance with Bonnie Lee, who has been pining for him without admitting it. It is even possible to see Goose as a kind of mother figure to Maverick, rendering the relationship oedipal, with the “Mother” of “Mother

Goose” silent• 9 but implied• in • his • call sign. Goose’s death serves as a profound moment of soul searching for Maverick and nearly convinces him to abandon his career, as well as arguably offering echoes to the earlier losses of his father and mother. Although he is clearly uncomfortable with acknowledging it, his response to the loss squarely reveals a level of vulnerability only hinted at previously that marks him as distinct from the heroes

25 Although not a military film, Robert Ray makes a compelling case for Hawks’ 1939 work as serving as the paradigmatic text for the war film genre that followed it during World War II.

26 This is true except for one exchange, when Iceman hails Goose by calling him “Mother Goose.” 25

of aviation dramas of the past. Rather than sucking it up and taking the loss with a stiff upper lip or a heartened resolve, as his older, arguably old school commanding officer

Viper suggests or as a Hawksian protagonist likely would, Maverick’s first impulse is to quit. In effect, he is so discomfited by the realization that he had something to lose all along - that he has in fact lost something — that he tries to run away. In rethinking things and sticking it out, his response to the death of Goose can be interpreted as “letting go” of the company of young men, and their relationships without domestic or emotional entanglements, and of instead assuming the role of an “adult” male, even if Maverick, like so many of the characters Cruise portrays in this era, retains more than a hint of edgy adolescence in his masculinity.

There is also a strong, competitive sexual dimension to the relationship between

Maverick and fellow pilot Iceman. Close examination of the film shows eye line matches and meaningful looks between these characters that would more commonly be associated with would-be lovers in the courtship phase of a Hollywood film. One scene that lays out the power of the charge in their relationship involves a locker room confrontation.

Maverick confronts Iceman by asking him what his problem is. Iceman responds by saying “You’re everyone’s problem. That’s because every time you go up in the air,

27 For example, in Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983), The Outsiders (Francis Ford Coppola, 1984), Taps (Harold Becker, 1981). and even his small early role as the pyromaniac in Endless Love (Franco Zeffirelli, 1981), Cruise offers variations on a decidedly adolescent form of masculinity that is marked by a certain freneticism and edginess. Those characters are ostensibly younger men than Maverick, but this extendedly adolescent character likewise shows up in his other performance from 1986, The Color o f Money (Scorsese), as well as in his next film Cocktail (Roger Donaldson, 1988), in effect establishing it as a feature of his star persona. 26

you’re unsafe. I don’t like you because you’re dangerous.” Maverick lunges towards

Iceman while responding with “That’s right Ice.. .man. I am dangerous,” in the process brushing imaginary dandruff off Iceman’s shoulder. Iceman’s retort is an exaggerated biting action. The combination of the grooming gesture of brushing off the shoulder and the castrating implications of the biting seems striking and pregnant with significance.

On one level, the exchange presents the emotional volatility of Maverick, a flinty freneticism — movement (more jerky than fully fluid, maybe, but movement in both the figurative and literal sense) that positions him as distinct from more traditional masculine protagonists. He lashes out rather than containing himself. Also, in a film where one of the main lessons the protagonist must learn for narrative closure is how to stick by his wing man rather than pursue his independent desires, it is pointed that Iceman is the pilot to whom Maverick must remain loyal (faithful?) at the film’s climax.

The beach volleyball match with Maverick and Goose on one side, and Iceman and his RIO Slider on the other (the closest characters to the bete noire function in the narrative) is likewise particularly loaded with homoerotic energy. According to one of the film’s producers, Jerry Bruckheimer, this sequence was a late addition to the film designed to offer “eye candy” to the women in the audience, but somehow it doesn’t read that way. If anything, it has more the quality of men guessing at what women would find appealing. Maybe it’s the fact that the sequence excludes women (in front of or behind

28 If one wanted to read this homoerotically charged film as a contemporaneous allegory of the AIDS crisis in the mid-80s, or as a struggle to come to terms with homosexuality akin to the assertion to this effect in Sleep with Me, use o f the term “unsafe” combined with Maverick’s nearly reckless independence and need to learn to “stick with his wingman” could offer potent ammunition. 27

the camera), or any on screen spectators, whatsoever; if anything, the men seem more to perform for one another. Relatedly, perhaps it validates Laura Mulvey’s (1975) assertions regarding the inherent male gaze of the motion picture camera lens as used in

Hollywood filmmaking. It certainly reinforces Richard Dyer’s (1987) ideas concerning the contradictions, complications, and anxieties of the male pin-up, offering a great example of men both active and posed, simultaneously subjectified and objectified in a fluid, sexually charged, and sexually ambiguous display. Three of the four characters (all save Goose) are shirtless and sweaty, while the camera work lingers as much on their masculine physiques as it does on any athletic prowess. They pose and flex. The cinematic gaze effectively objectifies them for the duration of this inarguably spectacular and narratively unnecessary sequence, but it does so with them in action - in motion.

They perform for the audience, and as importantly for each other. This all transpires in a contest charged with repressed sexual frustration, set to the tune of the song “Playing with the Boys (emphasis added).” Importantly, when the characters have played to an effective draw, and are all hot and sweaty, and when it is apparent that the film cannot neutralize the erotic energy on display, Maverick leaves for his first proper date with Charlie.

Misogyny as masculine assertion.

Another way of characterizing this transition is to say that the film employs a strategy of displacement, attempting to channel any homoerotic sexual tension between

Iceman and Maverick into the budding romantic relationship between Maverick and 28

Charlie (and at the risk of overstating the case, it likewise seems telling in this context that the female character has a masculinized name). As Doty (1993) has observed, this displacement is a common strategy of Hollywood narratives that involve strong male- male bonding sequences (p. 8). Offering a female love interest for Maverick displaces the potentially homoerotic sexual energy onto a more acceptable (read “heterosexual”) relationship. Charlie’s presence is a constant reminder that, despite the homoeroticism that permeates the film, Maverick is “definitely” not gay.29 However, the romantic relationship equally serves as another performance, this time the role of masculine, heterosexual, romantic partner.

Maverick’s relationship with Charlie is the fulfillment of affirming/performing masculinity in another sense. After all, Charlie is a female instructor, ostensibly a superior and authority figure to Maverick operating in the male space of the Top Gun program. Her professional role embodies an aspect thought to be one cause of the postmodern crisis of masculinity referenced above: The entrance of women into traditionally male roles and occupations. As Tania Modleski (2007) observes in her brief examination of Top Gun as a misogynistic text, a common strategy of the war film is to marginalize, neutralize, or eliminate the female perspective to maintain the masculine sovereignty of the martial space (p. 101). Charlie is introduced in the film as an

29 The introduction of Goose’s wife, Carole, into the narrative arguably serves a similar function - attempting to negate the reading that Goose and Maverick share an unrequited love by forcefully asserting their heterosexual identities. There is even a moment where Carole boisterously commands her husband to “take [her] to bed or lose [her] forever,” a line repeated subsequently by Charlie to Maverick in a more seductive and less brassy tone. 29

effectively fungible and anonymous potential sexual “target” for Maverick. Upon entering the bar where he will meet her for the first time, Maverick literally refers to the location as a “target rich environment.” He and Goose then make a bet whether

Maverick will have carnal knowledge of one of the women on the premises that night.

This is yet another example of the games and competitions that permeate the text - another form of “play.” Ironically, while Maverick ostensibly “loses” the bet in that scene, he ultimately “wins” by establishing a romantic relationship with that very woman.

As Modleski further observes, when Charlie is subsequently reintroduced in her official, authority position, the film style effectively objectifies her, with a slow tilt up from behind, starting at her legs, visually fetishizing her while one of the male instructors goes over her academic qualifications (2007, p. 102) Even her first official exchange with

Maverick involves him correcting her information on the new MiG fighter, further undercutting her authority. Furthermore, by subsequently converting her to a romantic partner for Maverick, the film reasserts masculine primacy. Charlie goes from being

“Charlie the astrophysicist and instructor” to “Maverick’s girlfriend,” a position she problematically occupies for the remainder of the narrative including the coda sequence, where she returns from the dream job for which she had lobbied long and hard, to be back in Miramar in the hopes that Maverick will return, as well, and where it seems clear that their heterosexual union is back on track as the film ends with their reunion.

Perhaps the most intriguing element the character of Charlie offers to the film is the least obvious - namely, her standing in for the “absent mother” in an oedipal 30

configuration. Maverick is an orphaned figure. During their first date, in his first intimate exchange with Charlie, he reveals to her that his father and mother both died when he was very young. Tellingly, the two diegetic pieces of music associated with the relationship between Maverick and Charlie, “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling,” the song

Maverick publicly serenades Charlie with on their first meeting in the bar, and Otis

Redding’s “(Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay,” which accompanies part of their first date, are anachronistic to the era in which the film is set (the 1980s), but appropriate to the era of Maverick’s parents’ relationship (the 1960s). The Redding song is playing when

Maverick reveals one of the only pieces of information about his late mother that appears in the film - her affection for the song, which she made him play repeatedly on the stereo when he was a young child (and she was presumably mourning the loss of her husband).31 That Maverick then engages in a sexual relationship with Charlie is thus coded with the fulfillment of the oedipal desire to possess the (symbolic) mother. This can be diagrammed as an additional psychoanalytic displacement that runs from the absent mother first to Goose and then from Goose to Charlie.

Man of action.

Closely related to the problematic portrayal of women in the film is the notion of the protagonist as a man of action rather than contemplation and repose. This concept is

30 They can also be read as sonic markers of the Vietnam War era. More on the role o f Vietnam in this film below.

3'The Redding song, which was released in 1968, could not have been a song loved by both his parents as the film suggests, because the film clearly establishes that his father perished in Vietnam in 1965, years before Steve Cropper and wrote and recorded it. 31

introduced towards the very beginning of the film when Maverick’s performance in the first encounter with MiG fighters is contrasted with that of fellow pilot Cougar. The mise en scene shows Maverick to be cool and in control, hardly sweating while he playfully taunts one of the MiGs. Cougar, on the other hand, is sweating profusely, and when one of the enemy jets gets a missile lock on his jet, he freezes. The sequence eventually cuts to his point of view, showing a photo in his cockpit of his wife and young child. It is all

Maverick can do to get Cougar’s plane down safely on the carrier. Cougar proceeds to the CO’s office, where the pilot informs his superior that he has “lost the edge” and is quitting. It is only because of Cougar’s withdrawal that Maverick gets to attend the Top

Gun school at all. Pointedly, when Cougar knocks on the CO’s door, a close-up of his hand displays his Naval Academy ring. This combined with his earlier look at the family photo tags him as someone who plays by the rules, someone who is connected to others, and more specifically someone aware that he has something to lose.

Maverick, in contrast, is all action. Unlike Cougar, he is an orphan, unmarried, and with no biological connections. In addition to playing with the enemy jet, which he left his position as Cougar’s wingman to do, Maverick subsequently disregards a direct order to land his plane so he can go back up and coax Cougar safely down on the carrier.

Additionally, the CO goes to some lengths to remind Maverick that he is a problem - violating orders, leaving his wingman, performing unauthorized fly-bys of the control tower - while simultaneously informing him he is being sent to the Top Gun school, which is described as his “dream shot.” Already the film is showing its ambivalence 32

towards punishing Maverick, and in effect championing his ways of action. The way the film opposes and does not entirely resolve this dichotomy reveals a fundamental structuring element associated by Robert Ray (1985) with Hollywood films of an earlier era, which can be read in the context of their presence in this film as persistent ideological values that had been largely sublimated or repressed in the more liberal

Hollywood period characterizing the “New Hollywood” from the mid-to-late 60s, but returned in force with the rise of Reaganism and resurgence of conservatism in the 80s

(Ryan and Kellner, 1990).

Even more problematic in the “man of action” context is an exchange Maverick has with Charlie in her official role as instructor and superior. When, in a review session,

Maverick’s tactical choices are criticized by Charlie in a “What were you thinking” style of critique, Maverick’s response is “Up there you don’t have time to think. If you think, you’re dead.” Interestingly, while the instructors’ (Charlie and Viper) critique is that what

Maverick demonstrated was incorrect tactically because it was too risky, the film valorizes his choice by having Charlie concede that the result was that Maverick’s tactic, while an example of the “wrong thing to do,” was a success, leading one of his fellow pilots to whisper to Maverick “Gutsiest move I ever saw, Mav.” So, in a sense, while on one level criticizing Maverick’s seat of his pants flying style, and his failure to “play by the rules,” it is equally celebrating him as the individualistic man of action, rather than a rules-following man of deliberation. In this way, as Robert Ray might assert, it further embodies the sort of dichotomous oppositions that in their synthesis, in their ambiguous 33

irresolution within a text, often define classic Hollywood narratives (1985). Likewise, as

Tania Modleski (2007) observes, the exchange with Charlie raises the implicit question

“When is it time to think?” in the process arguably associating thought and deliberation with the feminine, and assertion and action, arguably even motion itself with the masculine (p. 104).

Echoes of Vietnam, John Wayne, and the crucible of combat.

In a film where the most palpable absence is that of Maverick’s parents, the absent father figure, the late “Duke” Mitchell, looms large, particularly so given the film’s preoccupation with masculinity. As Maverick’s best friend Goose pointedly observes, when Maverick is flying it is like he is “chasing the ghost of his father.”32 Duke was likewise a naval aviator, and he died during the early days of the Vietnam War under circumstances that led not only to his being posthumously black balled by the navy, but that also prevented Maverick from attending the U.S. Naval Academy. Maverick refuses to believe that his father was in the wrong, however, and when it is revealed by the chief instructor to Maverick late in the film that Maverick’s father was in fact really a hero who saved several other pilots before losing his life, and whose only violation was that he faced his demise on the “wrong side of the map,”33 this seems to lift a burden from

32 This can be read as an intriguing variation on a classical reading of Hamlet, where it is often held that the protagonist is paralyzed until the ghost of his late father activates him and compels him to action. Maybe even in Top Gun, in a sense it is in finally confronting this ghost that Maverick is fully activated and becomes self-actualized.

33 Which in and of itself presents a compelling link between Maverick and his father in as much as one of the issues Maverick had early in the film was due to his having violated an arbitrary hard deck attached to a 34

Maverick, and allow him to take up the imago himself, in effect becoming the father in the masculine order. This last point is reinforced at the end of the film, when Maverick makes the decision to return to the Top Gun school as an instructor, ostensibly occupying a fatherly, mentor role for subsequent students.34

References to the Vietnam War abound in films from the mid-80’s, when Top Gun was released.35 As the then most recent, large-scale, open conflict America had faced, at the time only a little more than a decade past its official ending and a little more than twenty years since its inception as a wide conflict, it is not entirely surprising that this conflict looms large, particularly in a contemporary military setting. Even more so, the fact that the war represented a military defeat for America makes references to it more pointed, and more inflected with the contestation of masculinity. Lynda Boose (1993) notes that the language surrounding the loss was feminizing, and that one of the forms taken by the cultural re-masculinization during the 80s that surrounded considerations of this defeat was in the idea that the loss was a result of politicians preventing American training sortie. Maverick proceeded below the hard deck in pursuit, and in doing so “broke a rule of engagement.” 34 This is somewhat difficult to reconcile with Maverick’s comparative youth, but it is arguably one reflection of the character entering finally into adult masculinity.

35 While these cinematic references are heterogeneous, they often break down along three lines. There are the films like Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986) and Hamburger Hill (John Irwin, 1987) that are period war films concerned with the conflict itself and more particularly its effect on the American service personnel caught up in it. Additionally, there are the films exemplified by Rambo, First Blood Part II (George Cosmatos, 1985) and Golan-Globus’s Missing In Action (Joe Zito, 1984) that feature a return to Vietnam in the 80s to recover American POWs, and in a small-scale sense, to re-litigate and “win” the war. Finally, there are films like Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987) that prominently feature Vietnam veterans who have been psychologically wounded by their wartime experiences. What Top Gun and these three types share is this pervasive sense of working through the trauma o f the war’s loss, arguably to redeem the American masculinity perceived as having been damaged by it. 35

fighters from fully waging war.36 The tale of Maverick’s father having been killed on the

“wrong side of lines drawn by politicians” obliquely serves this narrative, in as much as it places the onus for that loss squarely in the realm of the political. As Viper recounts,

Maverick’s father did the right thing, was a hero who saved men, but his legacy is besmirched only due to arbitrary line drawing and political expediency.

That his father is given the call sign of Duke seems particularly interesting in this context. After all, Duke is a nickname associated with John Wayne, an icon of a masculine ideal that resonates and relates specifically to the Vietnam War in a couple of ways. The notions of heroism, nationalism, and of a specific kind of “man’s man” embodied in his performances in earlier, predominately World War II war films seem to have weighed heavily on the minds of the young men who grew up consuming these films and who ended up serving in Vietnam. John Wayne, as a ubiquitous and iconic presence in many of the World War II films watched by that generation of young

American men, often stood in as short hand for a constellation of “heroic” male values presented in those earlier films. “John Wayne” was even used as a typically disparaging term by Vietnam era soldiers to refer to particularly gung ho soldiers, in this arguably revealing shortcomings in the traditional form of masculinity Wayne’s characters displayed. His earlier films filled their heads with unrealistic notions dispelled in the harsh realities of service in that war. Additionally, John Wayne was responsible for

36 In Cosmatos’ Rambo, First Blood Part II, when the protagonist is tasked with the mission to return to Vietnam to rescue American POWs, Rambo pointedly confronts his former commander by asking the colonel if he’ll be allowed “to win this time.” 36

directing The Green Berets (1968), a war film set during the Vietnam conflict, but realized as a deeply problematic, anachronistic work that was harshly criticized by

Vietnam veterans as not reflective of the realities of the conflict in that country. Among myriad points of criticism, it was frequently decried as ham-fisted, jingoistic, and more specifically as the “wrong” film for that war, which might also reflect that even in the late

60s it, and Wayne as an iconic screen presence, reflected a problematic construction of masculinity.

The combat sequence that serves as the climax of the film, where Maverick and fellow naval aviators take on nationally ambiguous, but certainly communist foes and best them in aerial combat is thus readable in part as a restoration of the masculinity lost with the defeat in Vietnam — as a re-masculinization of American identity, an assertion of

American dominance over the Soviet Bloc in the Cold War, and a culminating expression of performative masculinity. All that training has paid off. The success of the fighter mission is as an assertion of the performance of fighting prowess as redefining masculinity.37 The fact that Maverick’s RIO in this sequence, Merlin, was formerly

Cougar’s RIO arguably offers yet another sign that Maverick has assumed the mantle of adult masculinity with its relational entanglements, in essence successfully integrating the notion of having something to lose that Cougar could not manage. When Maverick throws Goose’s dog tags into the ocean, “letting go” of Goose also becomes a way for

37 Heartbreak Ridge again offers a parallel in this as well, especially given that the Gunny Highway character is a Korean War and Vietnam War veteran. In that film, the US liberation o f Grenada, a historical event, is the heavily fictionalized locus o f US victory. 37

Maverick to release his lost father and situate him, and maybe his version of masculinity, in the past.

Maverick’s masculinity is distinct from that of Duke, with those clear allusions to

John Wayne. Maverick did not know his father well enough to model his behavior after him, and the one character in the film who knew Duke, Viper, describes Maverick as both

“better and worse” than his “old man,” which presents a potent, if ambiguous, ambivalence. In place of the traditional, patriarchal masculinity that Duke ostensibly represents, Top Gun offers its own ambiguous, vulnerable, arguably even blatantly eroticized masculinity. The film’s irresolution of this ambiguity offers another example of the masculine anxiety that permeates the text, and arguably of a conception of postmodern masculinity as itself more ambivalent, opaque, and fluid - a masculinity defined more by motion than stability.

Conclusion.

As Ryan and Kellner (1990) note in their brief look at the film, Top Gun was the top grossing film of the summer of 1986, while the second highest grossing summer film

(and fifth overall for the year) was Aliens (James Cameron) (p. 297-98). Whereas they see some promise in the (admittedly quasi-)feminist and anti-capitalist representations in

Cameron’s film sharing the upper reaches with Scott’s film, the latter of which they see as the paradigmatic example of a hyperbolically excessive masculinity at its peak and the beginnings of its decline alongside a slide in popularity that characterized the latter years 38

of Reagan’s presidency (ibid.), closer attention to Top Gun calls this perspective into question. As with Cameron’s film, which is arguably more like Scott’s film than it is an oppositional text, Top Gun, even if hyperbolic, is much more ambivalent and even uncertain about its gender positioning than they assert. Rather more than simply serving as a right-leaning, retrograde booster of traditional masculine values, it problematizes and interrogates issues of masculinity endemic to post-Vietnam postmodemity by performing them. It uses the performance of several masculine positions, arguably including the homoerotic, on some level to deal with a crisis of masculinity precipitated by shifting gender roles and expectations in the work place and beyond, as well as by the trauma of

America’s recent loss in Vietnam. Rather than condemning or criticizing the older masculine constructs, Top Gun’s ambivalence expresses nostalgia for that more stable masculine hero of the past, for sure. On some level, the film longs for this earlier construct of “Duke” Wayne masculinity, which arguably contributes to the misogyny in the text (one strategy to restore stable masculinity might be by undercutting perceived feminist gains), as well as to the film’s ambivalence towards cabining Maverick’s rebellious individualism. If, in so doing, it seems to reaffirm retrograde, “penis-brained” notions of masculinity, it at least renders them problematically. That version of masculinity can no longer “fly” in the newer environment, with women’s roles shifting into traditionally male spheres, and with technology arguably reshaping what is needed of men - less physical strength and prowess, and more role flexibility. The new era calls for a new version (or versions) of masculinity, still virile and capable of action, mastery, and 39

victory, but more vulnerable, even sensitive, while also on display. That this all plays out in the highest grossing film of the year, and in a film thought to be a model for industrial transformations and trends that follow for decades in its wake, makes these considerations particularly resonant.

Ultimately, Maverick and his cohort poignantly reveal a lack, a stunning chasm between the male as constructed and played out in work and social roles on the one hand, and the impossibility of an authentic, embodied sense of masculinity as anything other than performance on the other. In this sense, they are arguably all performance, with their relative earnestness attempting to conceal this game of masks and appropriations, these base anxieties and uncertainties that define the postmodern discourse of masculinity they display. One way to think of it is that the performance of masculinity in the film queers the very notion of stable masculinity itself. Another way to describe this is to suggest that, as played out in Top Gun, masculinity becomes less a matter of being than a matter of movement. 40

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