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racingtoaredlight · 7 years

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On This Day...

On this day in 1986, Top Gun was released by Paramount Pictures. In that spirit, rather than wax poetic at length about what remains one of my favorite movies--especially for how re-watchable it is--I will instead just link to the post I did for July 4, three years ago in which I spent far too much time breaking apart every aspect of the movie. It was a truly inspired move by me to spend hours writing a post that went up on a day in which virtually no one was going to visit RTARL. That said, the comments, what few there were, were still more positive than those I received on the Pearl Harbor movie post. Going through this, I think it’s pretty clear why I only did three of these posts (the other one, besides Pearl Harbor, was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves...which I refuse to link to because of how horrible the writing is). Anyways, a selection from my “Deconstructing: Top Gun” is after the jump.

“Today is the Fourth of July. There are Americans who will take the opportunity today to attempt to place themselves in a stifling meeting room in Carpenter Hall while a draft of the Declaration of Independence was voted on and agreed to by a body of wealthy, white male landowners. Then there are those that will purchase a case of Keystone Light, a handle of Bacardi, a liter of Cherry Coke, some fireworks, bland pre-formed hamburger patties and say “It’s time to grill because fuckin’ ‘Merica!” This post will borrow from a little of column A, and a little of column B.

There are a handful of movies from the 1980s that capture the zeitgeist of that decadent decade in a manner that is both enjoyable and relatively accurate from a sociological point of view. Wall Street, Ferris Bueller’s Day off (or any John Hughes movie for that matter), Weird Science, Ghost Busters, Adventures in Babysitting, Goonies, and Top Gun fulfill the role of 80s archetype handsomely. It is the last one mentioned that I wish to give the ‘Deconstructing…” treatment to today.

Top Gun occupies an important role in my life. While I am not old enough to have experienced Top Gun in the theater—and this is an absolute shame given the achievements in sound, lighting, and cinematography which the movie can lay claim to—it is the first movie which I can recall it being a ‘big deal’ for a household to have purchased on VHS. Top Gun was the best-selling VHS of all time on the strength of its pre-orders alone. Sales of Ray Ban Aviators jumped 40% after the movie was released. My brother and I both became proud owners of faux fur trimmed leather jackets, complete with ridiculous, fake military patches. Sadly aviators were not made for the under 12 year old crowd at that point, otherwise we would have rocked those as well along with crisp white t-shirts (fortunately we did not develop an affinity for volleyball).

Ours were nowhere this good looking. Though we certainly thought they were at the time.

I still own our copy from 1987 which includes the 30 second Pepsi spot ahead of time and I treasure it. To say that I love this movie, despite its inaccuracies, is to understate what love of cinema is. This movie is built upon the paradigms, tropes, jingoistic assumptions, and nationalistic predispositions that would later be manifested, could only be outrageously be manifested by the later concept of “Merica…fuck year” that grew out of post-9/11 American patriotism. It could also be said, accurately in my opinion, that Top Gun represented the first unapologetically militaristic film that gained widespread and even some critical acclaim in the post-Vietnam era. 1986 was, after all, the same year that Oliver Stone’s unflinching view of the Vietnam War, told from the point of view of a line infantryman, was released as ‘Platoon’; an epic war movie in its own right though clearly one which is diametrically different from Top Gun. In short, Top Gun was the pro-military, pro-American lifestyle movie which we had all been craving in one way since John Wayne’s ‘The Green Berets’ in 1968 and in yet another way since the sunset of World War II movies during the Korean War. It is the late Tony Scott’s gifts as a filmmaker that make Top Gun a positive, if overly idealized, symbol of 1980s America and which in turn make Top Gun an important exhibitor of 1980s Americana.

Though the point of this is not to analyze the effectiveness of cinematic skills, it must be said that the opening title cards followed by the low-light scenes aboard an aircraft carrier during flight operations (variously described to have been captured aboard the USS Enterprise, on which ship the action of the story takes place, the USS Ranger, and the USS Carl Vinson), are incredibly effective at introducing with an air of mystique the importance and the danger of flight operations aboard a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. That the crewmen involved seem, at a distance albeit, to perform their duties with a laconic, matter-of-fact nature only underscores the attitude of the film that we are about to experience. This was, for many Americans, the introduction to the technical reality of naval aviation aboard an aircraft carrier and this reality, presented in such dramatic lighting and tones along with the amazing acts of man and machinery on display, make for a viscerally satisfying experience.

After this inspiring introductory sequence, we are foisted in media res to the activity of the carrier’s Combat Information Center (CIC). The CIC is, outside of the bridge, the center of command activity upon the carrier. This is the compartment on the ship into which all data—ship’s position, aircraft in flight, radar contacts—are fed and in which important decisions are made. One interesting omission of the movie which is worth bringing up now is the apparent lack of AWACS (Airborne Early Warning and Aircraft Control Systems). The E-2 Hawkeye, Navy’s primary platform for surveillance of radar threats that approach the Combat Air Patrol (CAP) around a carrier group, is never once mentioned or even referred to. All radar contacts are made and tracked from aboard ship and then radioed to the respective aircraft or detected by the aircraft themselves (sometimes, as will be seen later, in isolation of what the carrier can detect). The soundtrack provided, at this point, by Kenny Loggins distracts all but the most ardent followers of naval warfare from this.

A title shot, showing the carrier in profile, tells us that this is the “Present Day” in the Indian Ocean. I’ve always found the Indian Ocean to be an interesting point of geography to place this movie’s conflict zone. Early drafts of the script by Jack Cash had the movie taking place in Cuban airspace. This was rejected for various reasons by the Navy and the movie studio. Instead the Indian Ocean was selected. While the Navy has, in the Cold War and even post-Cold War period, maintained a carrier strike group in the Indian Ocean, the exact nature of the enemy being shadowed in this opening sequence, and again in the later sequences, is never mentioned. We only know that they are bad because they fly black jets with red stars on them (those of us who were born in the early 80s or earlier know that a red star means ‘Soviet’ or allied to the same; bad either way), and the pilots wear black helmets with darkened visors (the ‘they are hiding their faces so they must be bad’ trope in full force). There were certainly people in that part of the world who were not necessarily friendly to American interests (India was very iffy in their affiliations prior to the end of the Cold War), but the notion that we would might find ourselves in aerial combat with India or Pakistan is laughable now as it would have been then. Our enemies at the time resided in Southeast Asia, but I suppose that revisiting Vietnam only 11 years after its end would have been somewhat redundant given the success of the Rambo franchise.

“Clearly, I hate freedom and puppy dogs.”

We find our heroes, Maverick and Goose along with Cougar and Merlin, in two F-14 Tomcat fighters on a typical Combat Air Patrol (CAP). The CAP, whether flown by a small handful of aircraft on a radar picket mission or by dozens of aircraft in a combat zone, is something which has been standard practice for any carrier group to maintain since the advent of modern carrier operations during and immediately after the Second World War. I remember in middle school visiting the USS Lexington, by then a museum ship, in Corpus Christi, Texas. One of the guides haughtily informed us that our ideas of naval aviation and carrier operations, obviously misinformed by Top Gun and the somewhat later and underrated Flight of the Intruder, were incorrect; aircraft carriers do not launch only a handful of fighters at a time. When they launch their aircraft, they launch them all at once. Unfortunately my middle school mind was still in the formative stage and while I knew that what he was saying was not quite correct, I did not have the intellectual ability at that point in my life to say “Hey fuckface, you are completely misrepresenting the difference between an air strike and a Combat Air Patrol”. If only it were so, I might have affected so many minds at the USS Lexington Museum.

Back to the movie: because of the aforementioned anecdote, we now know that it is not unusual for a carrier group to only have a handful of fighters deployed. There is even a line in which one officer says to the principal from Back to the Future, whom I presume is the CAG (Commander Air Group, i.e. the most senior pilot aboard who isn’t the Captain or the Executive Officer…by Congressional mandate, aircraft carriers must have both a captain and an executive officer who are each qualified naval aviators) that they—the carrier group—were not expecting any ‘visitors’ that day. So based on this we know that the carrier, identified earlier as the USS Enterprise, was not expecting any aggressors; thus the reason for the relatively small CAP of only a couple of fighters.

Some of these ‘visitors’ engage the CAP, probably for geopolitical reasons—not intending to fire, but certainly looking to make a statement—and Cougar immediately gets cornered by one while Maverick instantly gets ‘missile lock’ on one and scares him out of the area. Cougar’s aircraft is engaged in radar missile lock or “painted”—meaning that his F-14’s systems are telling him that the enemy aircraft has locked onto him with radar and is ready to fire—and he immediately loses his composure. Maverick’s subsequent remark, something to the effect of “He’s just trying to piss us off”, correlates well with the tactics of Soviet bloc nations during the Cold War; harass U.S. military aircraft and try to force a showdown in which the U.S. would appear the aggressor. This practice was so common during the Cold War that American aviators took pictures of their opponents and did things to ‘engage’ them without firing a shot. So, while the ‘international exchange’ by Maverick and Goose may have been a bit of Hollywood exaggeration, it absolutely has foundation in the truth.

The next series of events revolves upon Maverick returning to the Enterprise while Cougar, the target of the last enemy MiG’s machinations, having completely lose his nerve and unable to fly his aircraft back to the carrier (not an uncommon occurrence actually). The part of this which beggars belief is Maverick’s sudden realization on final approach to the carrier that Cougar was in trouble and that he might need some assistance in landing. This is video of fighter landing in normal daylight conditions on an aircraft carrier; where in this do you think the pilot had the opportunity to consider the welfare of anyone but himself and his aircraft?

But, despite all of this, Maverick has jumped all four arresting wires and completed a ‘touch and go’ in order to help shepherd his friend back to the carrier. While the drama of Cougar’s inability to land properly is very real and is a testament to the daily pressures of naval aviation which we rarely, if ever, hear about, the dramatic tension caused by the fact that they are both low on fuel is made comical by the fact that every aircraft carrier had several refueling aircraft on board, including some in the air during landing operations just in case something like this exact situation with Cougar occurred. Granted air-to-air refueling isn’t easy, but it is easier than landing a 43,000 lb. aircraft on a heaving ship’s deck. Providing the possibility of an airborne lifeboat of sorts would certainly decrease the drama of the movie. And we can’t have that.

I am going to ignore, for now, the disciplinary issues with Maverick ignoring a direct order to return and land his aircraft, mainly because ignoring orders and ‘going against the grain’ or ‘flying by the seat of his pants’ is used by the filmmakers to enhance Maverick’s already burgeoning hero capacity (seeing someone give someone else the finger while inverted always enamored me to that person, granted my sample size may be restricted to this movie alone). The approach by Cougar does accurately demonstrate just how difficult and terrifying the land approach to an aircraft carrier is. The voices you hear over this, added for dramatic effect but important nonetheless, are from the Landing Officers on a catwalk adjacent to the deck. These white-jacketed individuals seen earlier in the movie during the opening sequence are not desk jockeys who got a chance to breathe over the radio to pilots on a given day, but are in fact pilots themselves. It is customary in the U.S. Navy for pilots on their day off to stand in as Landing Officers to guide in, and grade, their fellow pilots on final approach. While it is not immediately clear which of the Enterprises’ four landing wires Cougar manages to snag, I think his approach could nonetheless be classified as ‘DNKH’ (‘Damn Near Killed Himself’).

Moving along: Cougar turns in his wings to the CAG (once again, my presumption) and he (the CAG) is now required, unbeknownst to the viewers, to send Maverick and Goose to the Navy’s preeminent Fighter Weapons School: Top Gun (but, you already knew that from the title). What is amazing about this is that the CAG—who I am struggling not to call ‘Mr. Strickland’—offers positions in the Navy’s elite fighter training program to two guys (well, Maverick, but whatever) who just half an hour earlier defied a direct order of his. Article 90 of the U.S. Code of Military Justice states that it is a crime to willfully disobey a superior commissioned officer. Even if Maverick was to make the case that he did not willfully disobey, that he was in fact compelled to assist his fellow pilot and safeguard military hardware, he would still likely face some time with JAG lawyers and would likely not be given his ‘dreamshot’ simply because another pilot ‘ahead of him’ decided that that day’s events were enough for him and turned in his wings.

*sidenote: Merlin (Tim Robbins) gets treated pretty badly in this movie…Maverick and Goose are treated as a team, albeit with Maverick being the more talented of the two, while we don’t see Merlin again until Maverick conveniently needs a back-seater later in the movie. What was Merlin doing on Enterprise this whole time?

I will at this point address and dispose of the whole “Maverick is haunted by the legacy of his father” storyline. It’s an interesting storyline, one which underpins Maverick’s motivation throughout the movie, and it leads to a great payoff scene with Viper—played ably by Tom Skerritt and his amazing mustache—later in the movie. But for the purposes of this (since we’re already beyond 2,000 words) I’m not going to address it.

The introduction, by the inimitable Michael Ironside, to Top Gun does accurately illustrate the changing ratios in air combat victories by the U.S Navy aviators from Korea to the early stages of Vietnam. After Top Gun graduates began to flow back to their squadrons in and around Vietnam, the kill ratio did indeed increase from 2.5:1 to 12:1. This is a somewhat controversial figure which I will not examine further here, but suffice it to say that enough people were convinced by these figures to label the Navy Fighter Weapons School, or Top Gun, to be a success. It is at the tail end of this scene that we are introduced to Commander Mike Metcalf, callsign “Viper” (be honest, you all just read that in Michael Ironside’s voice). “Viper” is the actual call-sign of retired Rear Admiral Pete Pettigrew, who was both the primary technical advisor for the movie (along with the several others, some of whose callsigns are reflected in the movie and some whose are not) and is the “older man” that Kelly McGillis’s ‘Charlie’ is meeting with in the subsequent scene.

“I may not have a mustache, but I could still mess you up.”

The role of ‘Charlie’ is, despite what the chauvinist mind may think, based on an actual person. That said, it is difficult to imagine a military classroom being allowed to devolve, with a fellow instructor present, into the scene which follows. However, this is the first time in the movie in which reference is made to the MiG-28 (for those not familiar, MiG (short for Mikoyan-Gurevich) is and has been one of the primary aircraft design firms in Russia since the Second World War…though now is certainly also the time to mention that MiG aircraft, designated as the MiG-28 in the movie, have only ever received odd-numbered designations. This is also a great time to mention that Val Kilmer’s coughed ‘bullshit’ was completely ad-libbed and the reaction of the other cast members was genuine.

*sidenote: “Mighty Wings” is a pretty bitchin’ song and, in retrospect, a great way for Cheap Trick to keep their name in the spotlight in what was otherwise the doldrums of their career.

After the first flight-op, which Maverick and Goose successfully engage Jester (Michael Ironside) below the ‘hard deck’ of 10,000 feet, they are dressed down by Viper in his office. The seriousness of this is underscored immediately afterward when Goose (played by Anthony Edwards before he came the whiney Dr. Green on ‘ER’) jokes that he should look into being a truck driver and then again, later that night, when Goose visits Maverick in his dorm to say that he is worried now about whether they graduate at all. I do not have much to say about this other than what must already be obvious, but I do not think that the Navy is in the practice of constantly putting into challenging technical educational programs pilots who have a history of saying “fuck it, I’m doing this instead”. But here we are.

I guess, while we are on the subject of stating which aspects of a film we are not going to discuss, then I suppose now is the time to make it known that I’m not going to analyze the student-instructor relationship in the film other than to say that it was substituted into the movie in place of the original enlisted female sailor love interest because it was considered ‘more realistic’.

[cue sweaty volleyball match….really, volleyball in jeans? And then he puts on shoes and a leather jacket afterward and we are to believe that he doesn’t smell like a surfer’s asshole? Okay…

Fun fact: the elevator scene with Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis was a late add; it was shot so late in post production that Tom Cruise had noticeably longer hair and Kelly McGillis had to hide her own hair, now dyed brown for her next role, under a hat.

The very next scene has an exterior shot of the terminal and control tower at, presumably NAS Miramar, where we are about to meet Goose’s wife (the very young and vivacious Meg Ryan). But the brief shot outside the terminal shows at least four mint condition classic cars (one of which is a Chevy Bel Air).

This movie was filmed in 1985 and released in 1986. I accept that there were more ‘classic’ cars in existence in the 1980s than today, but for so many to be outside the terminal at a Naval Air Station…something doesn’t seem right. Seriously, draw a vertical line from the control tower in this picture straight down and tell me that the cars on the left have any business being there in a 1986 action movie.

There is, not long after this, an interlude in which Maverick succeeds in seducing Charlie and all is well within both of their worlds for a brief time. It is worth noting that the music which plays over this is by Berlin and it is both their most popular single and the song which tore them apart.

And no, I can longer hear that song or see this movie without picturing this either.

We have, at this point in the movie, arrived at the point where everything is right in the world of the protagonist and those closest to him. Maverick has successfully built a relationship with an intelligent and thoughtful female instructor, has cultivated a reputation as a brilliant if unpredictable pilot and wingman, and is poised to take the points lead in his Top Gun class. It’s at this point that during a flight-op Maverick allows his ambition to overtake his sensibility and the skills he has learned so far in order to try to take down the legendary Viper, who has unexpectedly joined the fray for the day. Maverick, awed by Viper’s reputation and possibly eager to seek his approval by engaging and defeating him in air combat, breaks off from covering Hollywood. The issue I have with this section of the movie is that Maverick is supposed to cover the six of Hollywood while he takes his shot on the aggressor and by breaking off he allows Hollywood to be somehow taken out by another aggressor. Hollywood is directly behind his target and, instead of taking a shot, he hectors Maverick not to abandon him to go after Viper….during which time Hollywood could have easily taken the shot and thus obviating the need for Maverick to cover him! Maverick not only fails to bag Viper, but he is also taken out by Jester who, inexplicably, has gotten out of the clutches of Hollywood…possibly because Hollywood had, instead of shooting Jester, had taken the time to read through a Restoration Hardware catalog, or something.

Because Maverick broke a tactical rule and did not profit by doing so—didn’t cover Hollywood and got taken out by Jester before he was able to get Viper—he is made to feel like a reckless asshole; your ‘loose cannon’ movie trope. Yet, there is a subtextual reference to the fact that if Maverick had succeeded in getting Viper, perhaps the sin of breaking off from his coverage of Hollywood would have been forgiven. It is difficult for me to believe that a school which teaches effective air combat tactics would, if a pilot ignored one aspect of them, be lauded for doing so if he was successful in his gambit; an example of the “Ends Justify the Means” Fallacy if there ever was one.

After a short period of self-reflection, we see Maverick and Goose having a night on the town with their significant others. I don’t have much to say about this scene other than to introduce the FAA rules on alcohol in relation to piloting an aircraft—8 hours bottle to throttle—and to point out that this particular bar, Kansas City BBQ, is still in operation in San Diego today, with a large amount of Top Gun memorabilia as I am certain most of you imagined.

*Charlie’s beach front house is still standing today, though if you scroll through the link above you’ll see it’s in less than ideal condition while the other vintage homes around it have been torn down for another ubiquitous ‘mixed retail/condo’ development.

Next, we have the climactic Top Gun school scene. We know that because ‘Danger Zone’ is playing again. The pilots’ time at Top Gun is winding down and they are being presented with increasingly more complicated scenarios which they must deal with; they are often outnumbered. In this flight-op we experience Maverick being held up by another pilot again. This time it’s Iceman, despite being right on the tail of the aggressor, needing an absurdly long amount of time to line up the shot. Look, I understand that I am neither a civilian nor a military pilot and nor I have ever been and or will I ever be. But the notion that someone, who is directly in the ‘hip pocket’ of his target and cannot line up a freakin’ radar guided missile shot, especially the one pilot who is presented as like Maverick but more capable due to his personal discipline, is beyond belief for me. Then, asshole that he is, Iceman pulls off and lets Maverick run right through his jet wash.

The turbulence is extremely disruptive and causes both of the aircraft’s engines to flame out. Maverick cannot regain control or restart the engines and so he and Goose , with much difficulty, eject. This is the infamous ‘Goose Death Scene’. As the primary comic relief of the movie, it is of course upsetting to see this character depart. But the physics of his death, what appears to be a neck vertebrae fracture caused by his impact against the jettisoned canopy after ejection, are often in question. At least one online forum asserts that this Goose’s death was caused by a mechanical error of the ejection seat; that it ejected him a second too quickly. While I am not an aerospace engineer or an expert in physics, I do find it difficult to understand how an aircraft moving at hundreds of knots could have a recently ejected canopy floating above it long enough for a crewman to be ejected into it. Video seems to show this to be nearly impossible. Yet, here we are.

*Cool fact: when Maverick and Goose are floating in the ocean, waiting to be rescued, they seem to have, out of nowhere, an inflatable cradle keeping them above he waves. See the light gray, slightly puffy things which start the pilot’s chest and go back over his shoulder? Yep, that’s his built in, salt-water activated, life raft. Also a nice feature that they included the automatically deployed dye marker that would have come out upon landing in the water

Skipping ahead: Maverick stands before a Board of Inquiry which has investigated the events surrounding his crash. This is completely normal and the conclusions of the board are totally believable (said by a non-pilot) and so it is not unusual that Maverick would be immediately returned to flight status. I have no direct knowledge of this, but it seems to me that pilots who are assigned to the Navy’s elite fighter weapons school would also go through some manner of psychological evaluation. I am not saying that such an evaluation would have done much good for Maverick, this is after all a character who spurns authority and any attempt to analyze his psyche, but given his state of mind, I think it at least possible that a Navy psychologist might have suggested that he may be a head case still.

After some soul searching, Maverick has decided to stick with being a Navy pilot and not to resign his commission and become an United commuter pilot. The scene at the Top Gun graduation ceremony is amusingly reminiscent of a certain scene involving the view of the U.S. Navy’s white uniforms or ‘whites’ in another Tom Cruise movie six years later; A Few Good Men.

At the graduation ceremony/burgeoning frat party, Michael Ironside suddenly appears—with the voice of authority that only he can muster—and announces that some of the pilots present have to depart immediately and head to a ‘crisis situation’. The U.S. Navy in the 1980s was absolutely massive in both hardware and personnel as it sought to meet Secretary John Lehman’s (and by extension Ronald Reagan’s) goal of a 600 ship navy (for reference, the size of the current fleet is 290 ships). I realize that Top Gun trained pilots are the ‘best of the best’, but Top Gun has been at this point around for around fifteen years…..are there not pilots in the squadrons currently aboard the Enterprise capable of handling this situation in the Indian Ocean? And, if not, how in the blue fuck did those pilots make their way from San Diego across the Pacific to the Enterprise sailing somewhere in the Indian Ocean with 24 hours? I accept that the transportation abilities of our military are such that they could probably pick up and transport someone or a group of people across the globe in a matter of hours, but what exactly is so special about these pilots that they must be whisked across the Pacific Ocean—and, mind you, the International Dateline—to join a squadron, which would be one of at least four on the carrier, which is facing a ‘crisis situation’. A commercial flight from Los Angeles to Singapore takes at least 18-19 hours. Putting that aside, or accepting that the military would be ready, willing, and able to transport a handful of Navy pilots across the globe to an aircraft carrier, are we now supposed to accept that they would be ready for combat? They are jet lagged and probably exhausted from travel. It’s no wonder that Maverick nearly cracks up in the following scene.

There is next the briefing scene on the carrier in the squadron Ready Room—I guess the other squadrons already had their briefing or were told, I can only assume, “Hey, you guys are off, go get some sun on deck”. It is here that we again come across the somewhat peculiar tactic of sending up a limit CAP (and of jet-lagged pilots no less….how do the other pilots who have been aboard ship the entire time feel? Have to imagine they are feeling somewhat insulted that a handful of pilots just in from the States are being entrusted with such an important mission).

Hollywood and Iceman are tasked with maintaining the CAP and preventing planes with the Exocet anti-ship missile—something which gave nightmares to British sailors during the Falklands War—from getting near enough to the carrier. One aspect of the flight deck operations we subsequently see and which I approve of is that a red-shirted deck crewman goes up to a missile mounted on an aircraft immediately prior to launch adjusts a switch/handle/toggle on it. This crewman was arming the missile and it is completely accurate to show him doing so immediately prior to the aircraft being launched. Such procedures are in place to prevent another catastrophic incident on the desk, something which Enterprise in particular has experience with.

Maverick is not among the primary flights for the CAP, but he is on ‘Alert 5’, meaning his aircraft is in a position to be launched in less than five minutes upon receiving the order to launch. Once Hollywood and his mincing air combat techniques get his ass shot out of the sky, Maverick and—we discover—Merlin are launched. Maverick, however, is the only aircraft on Alert 5. The USS Enterprise had four catapults and there is considerable on the carrier that the fact that ‘both catapults are broken’ will prevent any aircraft from being launched. That just…doesn’t make any sense.

We are now at the scene that I have truly wanted to write about. Iceman is on his own against five enemy aircraft, or bogeys, and Maverick is on his way to assist him after being launched from his Alert 5 status. Maverick approaches the area, sees Iceman engulfed in a ‘fur ball’, and immediately disengages. This is met with considerable irritation and dismay amongst all involved; including Iceman. Maverick, holding with some random free hand that pilots must have, reflects midflight over Goose’s dog tags and, and after consideration, decides to reengage. Putting aside the fact that Maverick shoots down or assists in shooting down 4 of the bogies present, the fact that he initially disengaged would seem to be a violation of Article 99 of the Code of Military Justice.

I don’t care how successful a pilot someone is. If a pilot had, even initially, turn away in the face of the enemy, I am fairly certain that that would be an automatic court martial. Within the context of the character Maverick, it seems another trait in his unstable, ‘flies by the seat of his pants’ personality. Regardless of the end result, I do not see how some individuals in the Navy would not confront Maverick on his personal conduct and conduct before the enemy prior to his success. Shit, that’s happening now with a vetted Medal of Honor winner.

Based on his actions, I feel fairly certain that Maverick would have found himself before a Board of Inquiry again.

Oh, and the celebration on the aircraft carrier deck would have never happened.

All of this said, Top Gun is an amazing movie which captures a sensibility and moral feeling which the United States exhibited at the time in spades. It is a movie which set a tone and created a popular sensibility of military aviation in general and naval aviation in particular which is still alive and well to this day. Top Gun was created at a time when we ‘knew’ who the bad guys were and, perhaps more importantly, where they were. In this post-Cold War, post-9/11 world we all now inhabit, Top Gun I think represents a time when we were certain of who we were and what we represented, even if it is an exaggeration of all of those things.

Happy Fourth of July everyone!”

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#closing bell #on this day #top gun #long posts #military #navy #movies

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