Top Gun at 30: Aerial warfare has gone from combat cowboys to joystick jockeys
Dogfighting has now been replaced by drones
Today marks a special celebration on the liturgical calendar of cinematic events: it’s the 30th anniversary of the release of the movie Top Gun.
On the one hand, Top Gun is a film completely deserving of its reputation as a quasi-idiotic Tom Cruise vehicle with a guilty-pleasure soundtrack (“Highway to the Danger Zone”, anyone?), a highly quotable 1980s powerhouse as much about beach volleyball as about fighter jets. But Top Gun is also an important film, not for being well made or revolutionary, but for being simultaneously the culmination, as well as the death knell, of the fighter pilot film.
Thirty years on and the sexiness and glamour of aerial combat is dead, killed by technological advances that render the dogfight obsolete. The flying gladiators of the sky, courageously welcoming danger, have been replaced by the technocratic expertise of the drone pilot comfortably ensconced in an air-conditioned trailer.
You could probably guess the plot of Top Gun (or at least something close to it) from the VHS cover alone: a young hotshot Naval pilot with a wild streak, a chip on his shoulder, and daddy/authority issues overcomes all obstacles to become a badass fighter pilot. There’s also the obligatory love interest, played by the tough anti-ingénue Kelly McGillis.
Top Gun might have been the end of a tradition, but it definitely still fits snugly within that tradition. Flight and motion pictures developed almost concurrently, so it’s not all that surprising that the first classic fighter pilot movie, Wings, wasn’t released until 1927, nearly a decade after the end of the World War I, in which it’s set. The plot itself was conventional though: two young men of different socio-economic classes compete for the love of a single woman while simultaneously becoming bad ass fighter pilots. It won two Oscars and kicked off a tradition of rowdy, lovelorn patriots (usually American, but sometimes British) who are irascible, airborne heroes. The planes they operated, it would seem, were merely extensions of their untamed egos.
The heyday of these types of films (and the heyday of fighter pilots “dog-fighting”) came in the wake of World War II, naturally enough. From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, big budget Hollywood films were churned out at a prodigious rate. Some of them were even good. John Wayne stared in a slew of them, including Flying Tigers (1942), Flying Leathernecks (1952), Island in the Sky (1953), The Wings of Eagles (1957), Jet Pilot (1957). The thing to remember is that all of these movies were about relatively contemporaneous events, wars that were either occurring or had just occurred. These weren’t historical retrospectives, but flattering portraits of current fighter pilots as patriotic action heroes.
And then something happened. For brevity’s sake, let’s call that something the Vietnam War. With the long, unpopular, and destructive slog in Southeast Asia came a shift in American culture. No longer the simple glorification of our boys overseas, but a cynical, ironic take on the entire enterprise of war. No longer gratuitous celebrations of patriotic resolve, Vietnam movies such as Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and even Rambo: First Blood Part II, emphasized insanity, amorality, and betrayal. The films were echoing, and occasionally even signal boosting, the prevailing attitudes about the war, the country, everything. This sort of cynical take came to be known as Vietnam Syndrome, a collective rumination over unhealed wounds and national failures.
And then in 1986 Top Gun was released. As historian Andrew Bacevich writes in The New American Militarism, “Whereas First Blood Part II picked at old wounds, Top Gun magically made those wounds disappear. Instead of old resentments, it offered a glittering new image of warfare especially suited to America’s strengths. It portrayed this new version of warfare and those who waged it against a political backdrop shorn of messy ambiguities, and it invested military life with a hipness not seen even in the heyday of World War II propaganda movies.” Film critic Pauline Kael called the movie a “commercial” in the New Yorker, saying that it was a “recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.” It became the biggest movie of 1986, making over $176 million at the box office. It was the high water mark of jet fighter movies.
The thing about high water marks is that they are necessarily followed by an ebb. There were fighter movies made in the 90’s, but they were mostly nostalgia trips about World War II. It was the same in the oughts.
And now — both in war and on screen — we’ve moved past piloted planes altogether, on to the messy political and moral ambiguities of drones with movies like the recently released Eye in the Sky starring Helen Mirren as a middle-aged Colonel directing a complex terrorist-capturing operation from a control center in Hertfordshire, England. The drama of the film comes from the very thing that fighter pilot movies took for granted: the moral efficacy of the military operation itself. And the drones, flying over Kenya, are remotely piloted from an Air Force base in Nevada. The mystique and allure of the danger of aerial combat was replaced with precision-guided munitions, “bunker busting” bombs, and stealth bombing technology. The dogfight is a thing of the past.
In fact, the newest fighter we have, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, sucks at dogfighting. It is actually outmaneuverd by the much older F-16. The blog War is Boring noted that the F-35 “can’t turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or dodge the enemy’s own gunfire”. It sounds alarming, but here’s the thing: the F-35 isn’t mean to dogfight. The most sophisticated plane (and most expensive weapon) ever built is meant to intercept and destroy enemy targets well outside of visual range. In other words, there won’t be anymore dogfights because the F-35 will destroy the enemy before it even arrives. It’s technologically impressive, to be sure, but it isn’t very compelling material for a movie. And that’s why Top Gun will be the last of its kind. All future fighter pilot movies will be exercises in nostalgia, like films about cavalry attacks and wooden warships — the romantic image of an Iceman and Maverick high-five permanently seared into a cellulose acetate sunset.
