Top Gun: Maverick is poised to continue its epic box office run this weekend; with no major competition at US multiplexes, it’ll soon zoom past the $250m mark in domestic grosses alone, with $400m or more still well within its sights. It could wind up the highest-grossing movie of the year, at least until Avatar 2 drops. If you read the analysis of certain right-leaning pundits, Top Gun: Maverick’s triumph is their triumph, and a rebuke of “woke culture” – by which is meant, movies and TV shows that do not exclusively feature white men in their leading roles.
It is indeed true that Top Gun: Maverick does not go out of its way to celebrate inclusion and diversity in the sometimes-cloying, corporate way most closely associated with various Disney properties. (If there’s no “first gay character in Top Gun” that we know of, that’s OK; Disney will continue assigning similar designations to minor and/or desexualized characters for years to come!) It stars Tom Cruise, reprising his role as white man extraordinaire Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, fighter-pilot hero of the first Top Gun, training a new generation of recruits for a suspiciously Star Wars-like mission behind unspecified enemy lines. Many, though not all, of the trainees who get the most screen time are also white men.
That outlets like the Daily Wire, Breitbart, and their lockstep followers at Fox News have described the release of Top Gun: Maverick as both a rare occurrence and a rare win for Hollywood is both absurd and telling. Of course people like Tomi Lahren need to emphasize the “traditional” (read: white and male-skewing) nature of Top Gun: Maverick; it’s in their best interests to gin up outrage, and sometimes real-world violence, based on the idea that white people are being replaced – and that “real Americans” won’t stand for it. Somehow, a hit sequel to a hit movie from 35 years ago affirms everything the right wing has been saying about popular culture – or, really, the whole world.
Of course, there’s been no actual shortage of movies boasting either white men (Spider-Man: No Way Home, the biggest hit in years, imported white guys from two other franchises) or traditional values (The Batman may pay lip service to class warfare, but it’s pretty pro-cop; Dog is literally about a military man and his dog). Nor is there much indication that audiences are yearning specifically or exclusively for military-centric displays of “traditional” patriotism. Asian and Asian-American casts led last year’s big hit Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and this year’s indie smash Everything Everywhere All at Once. The average gross for that new trilogy of Star Wars movies that any of those pundits could (and in some cases did) describe as unrepentant wokefests is right around $700m in North America, putting their average popularity at around fifth place of all time (or, adjusted for inflation, merely as popular as Forrest Gump). The rightwing cultural-warrior audience considers a military-cooperating, entirely middle-of-the-road (and extremely successful) production like Captain Marvel equivalent to an encroaching Marxist revolution.
All that said, Top Gun: Maverick does have a conservative skew; it’s just a more streamlined version of the conservatism of (contrary to these ding-dongs’ assertions) so many movies with blockbuster aspirations. Despite some scenes where Maverick reflects on his past and his legacy, especially a touching moment with his former rival Iceman (Val Kilmer), the movie is a sleek empty vessel that defaults to endorsing the status quo. Cruise’s Maverick was the best, is the best, and, given Cruise’s aversion to ever dying on-screen, will remain the best for the foreseeable future. A few characters may call out Cruise as a relic of another time, but he remains the exception to every rule. What really keeps the movie from feeling like a paean to American exceptionalism is how otherworldly Tom Cruise comes across these days.
In other words, Top Gun 2 is studiously “apolitical” in the way that rightwingers love, because it allows them to claim just-plain-folks victory where white male/military dominance have no sociopolitical dimension – they’re the default, the normal thing. Pleas to keep “politics” out of movies have an implicit definition of politics that includes radical concepts like “non-white actors” and “more than one woman”. Some leftwingers inadvertently play into this too, when we detect the insidious conservative agenda in movies with ideological or provocative ambiguities.
It was fascinating, then, to see self-described leftists who look askance at Marvel for crypto-fascist propaganda surrender to the apparently value-neutral showmanship of Top Gun: Maverick. But that’s also anecdotal evidence of Maverick’s appeal reaches beyond the traditionalists who have claimed it as their own. It’s just something a whole lot of people can agree on – sort of like Black Panther (though Maverick may not make quite that sum of money in the end). It’s delusional to treat it like the Last Hit Movie; Doctor Strange 2, a sequel to a far less beloved movie, raked in plenty of cash just weeks earlier. Moreover, rightwingers misread the real unity behind Top Gun: Maverick, which is far stranger: for at least a little while longer, the United States is One Nation, Under Cruise.
