Top gun gay theory
Since the iconic Tom Cruise airplane flick came out 30 years ago, fans have argued the testosterone-fuelled actioner is actually laden with homoerotic subtext – a coming-out production in blockbuster clothing. But how factual is that?
“I yearn somebody’s butt, I want it now!”
“You can be my wingman anytime.”
These are just two of the lines in ‘Top Gun’, the 1986 classic place in a flight school for Navy fighter pilots.
Directed by the late Tony Scott and starring Tom Cruise as Maverick and Val Kilmer as frenemy Iceman, it was a massive summer hit, perceived as a perfect recruitment tool for the Navy and featuring epic dogfights alongside witty guy banter.
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But is there more to it? Mythical US film critic Pauline Kael wrote in her review at the second, “the movie is a shiny homoerotic commercial: the pilots strut around the locker room, towels hanging precariously from their waists.”
And the camera certainly gazes longingly as the actors’ ripped bodies – the hilarious topless volleyball game (never mind the locker room scenes) is proof enough of that.
“We didn’t write it as that,”
The Top Gun Volleyball Scene Is Not Homoerotic. It Is Homosexual.
This weekend sees the release of Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited follow-up to the 1986 blockbuster, and while the movie did not necessarily need (the ask for for speed!) a sequel, I am ready. The original Top Gun is about a bunch of people who know how to fly very sophisticated fighter jets but have not yet determined that they can wipe sweat off their own faces with even ordinary paper towels. Top Gun blew all the hell up in the summer of '86 for a variety of reasons: the Reagan-era jingoism, Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone,” the absolute incandescence of a childish Tom Cruise. It was a big, sweaty phenomenon.
But Top Gun holds an entirely separate place in some of our hearts. A few of us walked into that multiplex and found ourselves excited in ways our peers may not hold been. Some of us witnessed a moment that stayed in our hearts forever.
I utter, of course, of the beach volleyball scene, a one minute and forty second sequence in which a shirtless Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, and Rick Rossovich (plus a wisely shirtful Anthony Edwards) face off in a high-stakes pickup game to the sound of Kenny
Jerry Bruckheimer Weighs in on Tarantino’s ‘Top Gun’ Male lover Film Monologue: ‘A Compliment’
“Top Gun” producer Jerry Bruckheimer celebrated the film’s 35th anniversary this month by reflecting on the movie’s unexpected legacy as a gay film in an interview with Vulture. This reading of the production was immortalized by Quentin Tarantino, who has a single scene in the 1994 movie “Sleep with Me” in which he appears to give a monologue explaining why the Tom Cruise-starring “Top Gun” is really “a story about a man’s fight with his own homosexuality.”
“You’ve got Maverick, all right?” Tarantino’s character says. “He’s on the edge, gentleman. He’s right on the fucking line, all right? And you’ve got Iceman, and all his crew. They’re gay, they symbolize the gay man, all right? And they’re saying, go, go the same-sex attracted way, go the male lover way. He could proceed both ways…Kelly McGillis, she’s heterosexuality. She’s saying: no, no, no, no, no, no, go the normal way, play by the rules, go the normal way. They’re saying no, go the gay way, be the gay way, g
A film is a petrified fountain of thought. – Jean Cocteau
When I told my friends I was going to see Top Gun during its short 3D theatrical re-release (which ends this week), nobody was particularly impressed. When I mentioned that I had never seen it before, their eyes widened, and each insert forth some variation of the matching question: “How is that possible?” The film is not high art; it’s not that that they couldn’t conceive how someone who writes about production would never acquire gazed upon it. They were surprised because this movie was everywhere when we were kids, and it was specifically targeted at young, impressionable boys like myself. But what was its impact on my generation? Top Gun was the highest-grossing film of 1986, but its legacy extends far beyond mere dollars and cents.
Many critics and cultural historians include written about the film’s impact. In an article for GQ entitled The Day The Movies Died, Mark Harris cited Top Gun’s release as the moment when movies changed into “pure product.” He suggested the film’s aim was not story but the “transient heightening of sensation” that has subsequently become the basis of most forms of contemporary media