Top Gun

[music]

0:00:04.0 Landry Ayres: Zooming from over imperialist military propaganda to a homosexually-​charged action hootenanny, Top Gun is a non-​stop thrill ride. Joining me to get a lock on what Tom Cruise’s 1986 blockbuster means today are senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Brandon Valeriano.

0:00:24.2 Brandon Valeriano: Hello.

0:00:24.8 Landry Ayres: And Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and writer of the Substack newsletter “Systematic Hatreds”, Paul Musgrave.

0:00:33.9 Paul Musgrave: Great to be here.

[music]

0:00:36.8 Landry Ayres: This film, there’s a little bit of a flack that it gets or a simultaneous celebration, depending on how you wanna interpret it, for its depiction of military prowess, aerial combat maneuvering, and this unabashed glamorization of war tactics and what war is supposed to mean. So, is this just a fun action flick? Because it is fun, it’s a romp, it’s a good time, but is it just to that or is there some deeper, darker underbelly to what this film is doing, whether it intends it or not?

0:01:18.2 Brandon Valeriano: Yeah, that’s a tough question, and that’s something that Paul and I can dive into very deeply, because the issue is, for some people, they believe that pop culture predicts the future, and you can gain some sort of intelligence from these objects of pop culture, these artifacts. I have the view that Top Gun is just a fun sports movie, and that the sort of jingoistic military overtones are built into it, but they’re not really primarily the main motivation, and that comes out in the sequel too, that it’s not really about who the enemy is, it’s more about the nature of competition and leadership, which is what fed directly into the explosion of military recruitment after the first movie, and probably after the second.

0:02:08.2 Paul Musgrave: So, when I think about Top Gun, I do think about this duality between it is first and foremost a piece of entertainment, and it’s also a really interesting instance of the 1980s… What do we wanna call it? The re-​celebration of the military and the spirit of Reaganism, the spirit of Cap Weinberger, re-​capitalizing the US military. And I was just looking at the script here, and there’s a moment early on in the film, in the text itself where they justify why Top Gun exists. So Top Gun in the movie is supposed to be a redemption story, the actual school is there to teach people the fundamentals of dog fighting, of aerial combat maneuvering. And that’s a redemption story to get over that Vietnam era, loss of proficiency. And people who are aviation geeks knew this debate about guns versus missiles, but in the film, they take a big step and they say “Vietnam was bad and we’re going to recover that.” And actually, I think that a lot of… In the movie, 40 years on, we’ve all watched this movie on TBS a million times in the ’90s where it’s become part of pop culture through being available on streaming and everything.

0:03:18.7 Paul Musgrave: At the time, this was actually taking a really hard side. Most films in the ’80s that dealt with the military in the shadow of Vietnam did so in a really different way. This is not Rambo, this is certainly not the second Rambo movie. Things in which Vietnam was a traumatic experience. This is a, “Vietnam was a technical experience that we’re going to get over, we’re gonna redeem this.” So is this entertainment or is this something more? And I think that, from my perspective, a lot of what we think about world politics, because most of us day-​to-​day do not directly interface with world politics in a way that we’d understand, and so when it’s presented to us, it comes to us in the news or it comes to us in entertainment. And those things are not separate, they’re mixed together, we blend them together in our minds, and a film like Top Gun actually will re-​conceptualize how you see the US military as opposed to, it’s kind of this drug-​riddled organization that lost a war, to it’s now a series of highly intense professionals who are learning from their mistakes and they’re gonna go on.

0:04:26.2 Paul Musgrave: And in a way, a movie from the mid ’70s about the US military feels way more foreign to us than Top Gun, because Top Gun actually represents with the American military to a large extent, now is professional lessons learned, all of that. But also Top Gun is showing you the very best side of that, like Maverick and Iceman are never going to be the subject of an investigation for misusing federal funds or doing something way worse as we’ve seen with the Navy SEALs. So it’s both entertainment and it’s also this way of looking at the world and changing how you see the world, and I think that the Vietnam era reconceptualization of the US military, the post-​Vietnam reconceptualization of the US military, is actually a really big part of it, and I think it’s something that the film was intentionally trying to get at. If only because for dramatic purposes, you want a movie about cool, sexy, awesome Tom Cruise, not post-​traumatic stress disorder, drug addict, all that stuff. But this is also, it’s still a big change, this is not the last deer hunter, this is not any of these things. And I think that that tracks both with where the US military was going and also with how the Reagan administration and related elements of society wanted to portray the US military.

0:05:42.4 Brandon Valeriano: That’s a great point. And we have to remember the milieu at the time, this comes between Rambo II which is in Afghanistan, and it’s kind of this revisiting Vietnam and how the Russians are failing just as much as we are. And then after this movie came “Lethal Weapon”, which goes to Paul’s point of this, the PTSD, the failures of Vietnam, and then Top Gun is something completely and utterly different, and it represents a change in recovery during the Reagan era of what it means to be an American and what it means to fight.

[music]

0:06:21.1 Landry Ayres: What do we make of the choice to make the antagonists, then this sort of pseudo-​faceless antagonist? I know that we talk about, I think you see red stars on their helmets and on the jets that they’re flying at one point, but they do make a conscious effort never to name the enemy in and of itself in the original, at least, I think MiGs is the only specification that we get. What are we supposed to take away from that? Would it have been obvious to an audience then? And I just wondered, why not just come out and specify it if in that period there was a sense of who the enemy was, and afterward?

0:07:06.9 Brandon Valeriano: This is my favorite part of the movie in some ways, besides the beach volleyball scene obviously. But the idea that they don’t [0:07:16.3] ____ denote an enemy in this movie and the next one, not really, that is a [0:07:19.8] ____ sport there, is a deliberated choice. And I run a lot of experiments and I do a lot of war games, and we do not put a specific enemy or specific territory in our war games ’cause we don’t want people to bring their baggage to the study. And I think that’s something that they deliberately chose to do here, they don’t want people to bring their baggage to this movie, but people choose to do that anyway because you can find volumes of articles that the enemy is China or it’s Russia or it’s Iran. And you can see the same thing with the second movie where it’s like, obviously, this movie is about Russia, when nothing really… That doesn’t match at all. If you really wanted to merge this to a historical incident, it’s really Libyan freedom navigation, I think, in 1981, which is not really an exciting enemy for a major blockbuster. So there is a deliberate choice to not bring people’s baggage into the international conflict situation to this movie, but also the reality of the movie isn’t that exciting.

0:08:21.2 Paul Musgrave: Yeah, I’ve actually always just assumed that this was the Gulf of Sidra incident, even before we get to the question of who are they really? It’s not 1971. This is not the middle of the Indian or the Pakistani civil war. Why the hell is the enterprise shooting down anybody over the Indian Ocean? Literally, it actually doesn’t make any sense. So yeah, I’ve always just assumed that this is actually an error in the captions and that actually, for some reason, the enterprise is in the Mediterranean. And shooting down the MiGs is of course in itself a post-​Vietnam celebration because that was the whole problem that pre-​Top Gun, the actual Top Gun, the fighter school, the Navy had a problem doing. And in a sense, it’s a really idealized combat, you’ve got these knights of the air taking off and rescuing each other is extremely chivalrous, almost single combat. This is not a Tom Clancy novel, the technical details are almost irrelevant. I was learning the other day that the reason why you could do that dog fighting trick that the MiGs pull, where they have two blips that look like one, is because actually US radar at the time couldn’t tell the difference.

0:09:39.2 Paul Musgrave: So this is like [0:09:39.9] ____ seriously. But they don’t explain that. This is all about values, this is all about valor, this is really all about Tom Cruise learning to be a team player. And the combat is almost secondary. The enemy is seriously underpowered, the Soviets, and it is supposed to be Soviets, but again, what the hell they’re doing there, why would the Indians invite them? Why would they be doing all this? Two MiGs don’t pose a threat to the carrier strike group. I’m sorry. Put some bears up there, maybe that would be a problem. But basically, this is just a couple of guys in the world’s most effective naval interceptor whacking some baby seals. It’s not actually a great challenge because the whole challenge is actually about what’s going on inside Tom Cruise, but the stakes feel immense, and that’s largely because we’ve come to identify with these characters.

0:10:29.7 Paul Musgrave: And this is one of the ways that the film gets away from the purpose of the military establishment and invites us to identify with the individual characters, which is the way to make this the most sympathetic possible thing. But Brandon, you know guys in the military a lot more than I do, but my sense is that, even if they have a very good sense of who the red team is, they are always just thinking about defeating the adversary. And they’re all bogies out there, they’re all going… You’re not psycho-​analyzing these guys, you’re fighting mix, and they could be, Soviet pilots could be Vietnamese pilots, it could be Chinese pilots, but they’re still mixed, and you’re still going to fight them. And so it’s not necessarily the specifics that’s important to the story of the audience, it’s understanding that the brave Americans have gone off and they have, for some reason, in an F-14 designed around a missile that was supposed to be able to take things out at 40 miles, they are closing in and doing it with guns.

0:11:29.1 Brandon Valeriano: Yeah. And the second movie, oh my God, but we’re not gonna go there. But I think it’s an interesting reflection of reality in many ways too, because the PTSD of it all, the bugging out of it all. The reality is, most people who fight in combat never fire their weapons. Most people who fight in combat don’t really do anything and shiver in the face of battle, and you see that quite often here. Which is why this kind of conception of this as not really a war movie but more of a sports movie, and overcoming a… Faces adversary is more important because… And I’ve said this many times, and I’ve gotten in fights with people in the DoD over this, that we need to stop lionizing China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, because our next war isn’t gonna be a war we anticipate, it’s gonna be an Afghanistan, it’s gonna be a Ukraine, it’s gonna be something where a third party drags us in. And every time we try and game out [0:12:28.8] ____ a future near competitive war with China or Russia, reality doesn’t work like that, and that’s something that’s so interesting about this movie and how it presents that.

0:12:41.3 Paul Musgrave: Yeah, I actually just wanna jump in on that for a second, and if this is a sports movie, then the whole thing with Cougar at the beginning who kind of chokes, the problem is that he’s got the yips. Right, like this is just a sports movie, he’s got the yips, and Tom Cruise is the young buck who gets the chance to make a move up and… Looking at it like that, because the only thing that it really, I think, productively says about the military establishment is, frankly, bringing in a civilian outside expert with a doctorate who can actually analyze your tactics, and who happens to be a woman and is smarter than you about this thing, might actually be a good idea more often than not.

0:13:24.1 Brandon Valeriano: Oh, I would love to dive into the gender of it all, and I’ll look up the person’s name, but Kelly McGinnis is based off a real person. And this is how our world really works, so there are people with expertise that know things that the pilots don’t know. And getting back to the Cougar of it all. That’s a great point, I love that. And that he specifically says, “I have a child I have not met.” And that’s something we’ve been confronting for the last 10, 15 years in the military, particularly as we have people who are going for the third and fourth combat tours. And in some ways, people have these grand aspirations for professional military education, all the institutions and universities that the military run as training features and Top Gun schools, and my best friend works at basically the [0:14:16.9] ____ land Top Gun school. But it’s not like that. They don’t really breed in competition, some do, but not all programs breed in competition and ranking. In some ways, these programs are for people to recover after combat and to get together with their family after being away for so long. So that aspect of Cougar’s failure is a really interesting point about trying to create those bonds or those connections to the homeland, ’cause otherwise you can’t fight if you don’t have those bonds.

0:14:50.1 Landry Ayres: Yeah, there’s an interesting, two-​sidedness to this entire conversation ’cause we were talking about what the depiction of what the military was trying to do post-​Vietnam and what it became, this valorization of war in the wake of what people took the Vietnam conflict to really be about. But then Top Gun itself in doing that becomes a sports film that is much more about individual people and teamwork and defeating a faceless other in combat, rather than really grappling with the realities of what war is. Which is interesting because when you mentioned it being a sports movie and the stakes being so high, I was really struck by that because it had been years since I had seen this movie myself and I re-​watched it recently, and I was struck by the lack of stakes for the first 45, 50 minutes or so. I was like, “So, the stakes of the film up until the point where Maverick is trying to decide, he wants to figure out who his father is and really get his status back within the eyes of his, essentially, teammates, in the sports metaphor.” Before that, the only stakes are, “I need to win a competition at some sort of school, I just have to win.”

0:16:21.1 Landry Ayres: And I was like, “Wait, why is this… ” You start off with Cougar, and it’s really interesting ’cause you’re getting this moral conflict about, does he make a choice about pursuing this or does he go back to his family and tried to preserve himself? And then we abandon that for 45, 50 minutes, and then we get back to Tom Cruise, and it finally comes around, but there is a very wide gap there. And you talked about it, the intentions of the film and what it tried to do for depictions of the military. And Brandon, you also brought up using the film as a recruitment tool, which it very much was a part in doing and really drove a massive, massive amount of recruitment after its release. And I actually found a quote from Glenn Robert who was Chief of the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Media Office. He told Vice, when speaking about what the Department of Defense does in consulting film productions, in script consultations and offering them the things that they can use for the production, he said, “I would tell you in my mind, propaganda is un-​truthfulness.” Because they were asked like, “Are you really helping to make military propaganda?”

0:17:45.9 Landry Ayres: We are an arm of public affairs, and we do marketing for public affairs, essentially for the Department of Defense, which I think is a great product, by the way. You can say it’s product placement if you want. We’re doing nothing different than any civilian privatized company would. We want to put our best foot forward and we want to show our best. We’re proud of who we are and what we do. Has the military always viewed itself as quasi-​private producer who’s providing a product for the nation, and/​or instead of providing the service of national protection? And if so, when did that change? And how do you take that? Because it seems like an odd take from someone who has grown up with a certain depiction of what the military is supposed to do in the very valorized manner.

0:18:45.6 Brandon Valeriano: Something that’s interesting that I found out about this Ukraine war is that, we talk a lot about Ukraine winning the information operations battle. But I think the reality is that Ukraine… I’m not saying this right obviously, don’t @ me at Twitter. But Ukraine has the better product, that’s why they’re winning the information. And in some ways, that’s never changed. The military has always been in some ways about marketing [0:19:16.4] ____ from the history of recruitment posters, to the old real films of World War II and… What’s the Capra movies, why we fight, that’s always been about this kind of vague form of propaganda to get people to be part of the national product. And it goes back to stuff that Hans Morgenthau said about national morale and national culture, it’s all bred into this kind of, baked into this movie in Top Gun, where it’s really about competition, it’s not about victory, it’s about the nature of competition. Because when you dive into the question of victory and war, outside of total war, there really is no victory, there really is no winner. There’s no war where we can all come out ahead and think about all the lessons and friends we’ve built along the way, it doesn’t work like that. But in this movie, it does, and that’s why it helps with recruitment.

0:20:13.1 Paul Musgrave: Yeah, I wanna just follow on because I think Brandon has really put his finger on something important there. One thing that stands out to me is the difference between how the Silent Generation and the World War II generation, the people who actually were around for the Second World War in Korea, many of whom of course fought in it, participated in it, were around for it, how much less idealized vision of the military than Top Gun portrays. So if you go back and you think about the F Troop, or if you think about just any depiction of the US military in 1960 sitcoms, Sergeant Bilko, this was… Can you imagine this stuff put out today? You’d be pilloried. Nancy Pelosi would denounce you as anti-​American if you showed just ordinary graft taking place in the US. Well, that was prime time stuff in the middle of the American century, and everybody agreed on it. And that was people producing things for the market, and obviously they had a lot of surplus military uniforms and things, but that was just how people assumed.

0:21:20.9 Paul Musgrave: The product placement back before Vietnam and before the draft ended, was a lot less sentimental, and that middle has dropped out, from time to time for professional purposes, ’cause I actually find a lot of the contemporary pop culture around the military to be almost [0:21:37.7] ____ unlogical. I will watch things like NCIS or the show about SEALs and all the other stuff on CBS and things, and you get two really different types of portrayals in the military now, you get the super shiny Top Gun style portrayal. And then there’s also this weird gritty, special operations stuff, and sometimes they push it in a really dramatic way, and sometimes it’s just, “These are the things we have to do in order to protect the country.” But there’s nothing about the majority of people in the military. There’s never anything about the Air Force’s weather service. And the people who go to work in the Pentagon were in nondescript office buildings in Northern Virginia, and just like crunch numbers. There’s never been a sitcom set in a nuclear ICBM silo. Imagine being trapped with four people for 24, 70 to 96 hours at a stretch. It would be like The Office, but even more apocalyptic.

0:22:41.6 Paul Musgrave: And I think that if you’re trying to have product placement, you’re doing that in part because recruitment since the end of the draft has been a huge issue for the military, and getting people to volunteer their time, really has changed how the military wants to be portrayed. The other part, of course, is that during Vietnam, as popular mobilization against the military really took on huge, huge characters. Think about the protester in summer 2020, imagine those going on for years, attracting a million people to come march on Washington for things like the November ’69 mobilization against the war. Public opinion became a battlefield for the US military. And it became something that for a long conflict you had to have the public on your side, or at least indifferent to what you were doing. And so it’s not just about product placement. I think that he’s actually under-​selling this here. This is actually kind of a theater of war, and Ukraine has certainly understood that in its relations with its allies, and there’s a reason why Zelensky has cast himself as kind of a Che Guevara type figure.

0:23:47.4 Paul Musgrave: I can only imagine that if you woke up in Ukraine after a five-​year coma, your first question would be like, “Oh my God, the Russians invaded?” Your second question would be, “Our Jon Stewart is now a revolutionary zero? What the hell is going on?” But this actually, I think, gets back to how Top Gun portrays everything. And the thing about the sports movie frame, is that it actually lets us see who’s able to keep score and what matters to the players. And even within the bounds of Top Gun, there’s a scene in there, Brandon, when you mentioned that Tom Cruise is trying to figure out who his father is, where they blame the politicians for having cast his father as being kind of a trader and he died on the wrong side of the line and all this. This is actually a weirdly conspiratorial moment in a film that’s otherwise rara America. And I think that the significance there is that is drawing a distinction between the government and the civilian policymakers. And there’s a couple of sliding remarks about the people who, in Washington, who make those decisions, and the military and the true United States, that there’s an American people separable from the politicians, and all the bad stuff can be blamed on the politicians.

0:24:57.7 Paul Musgrave: If you really want it to be a super critical [0:25:00.1] ____ Noam Chomsky type, I’m not. You can say that this is like an incipient [0:25:03.7] ____ agenda, and actually, the military could have always won. I think that’s pushing it too far, that’s just a trope in how Americans have come to understand Vietnam. But it is also something that allows you to portray this as a redemptive narrative for the military and for Tom Cruise, about getting over yourself, about learning to be part of a team and so on. But also you’re going to be judged by people in your circle, in your literal fraternity. And civilians who know stuff about the military can’t help you, but they can’t judge you, they ultimately can’t assess what you’re doing, only people who are in the arena are able to do that. And one of the reasons why this really stands out to me, of course, is that this is a movie about the Cold War, about the military, about a confrontation with some commie enemy in which nuclear weapons just don’t come up.

0:26:00.1 Paul Musgrave: There’s no nuclear weapons in this movie, there’s no discussions of nuclear weapons in this movie, this is about really high-​tech conventional warfare in a way that lets you think about nuclear combat, or think about combat in a nuclear… Without worrying about the apocalypse. And of course, the other foil for this movie then are things like the day after or things like threats, or even Red Dawn, which came out a couple of years before that, and which has in the background [0:26:26.5] ____ a nuclear conflict. And I think, I’m less of a Cold War kid than Brandon, but I was around just long enough to have a couple of nuclear war nightmares as a kid. And you have to do a lot of work dramatically to get that stuff out of it, but that’s also, if you want people to join up to fight and to be the people who are first on the list and in Moscow or Beijing, you have to show this as something that’s going to be a really fun, interesting experience that’s going to be exciting. Maybe sometimes somebody’s gonna make a movie just about the back-​seaters and how they feel about the pilots, but it’s telling that the only guy who dies is the poor shlob in the backseat. Poor Goose.

0:27:12.6 Brandon Valeriano: Oh jeez, you had to go out with an attack on Goose, after attacking my age on top of that, but…

[laughter]

0:27:19.4 Brandon Valeriano: No, I think you really hit the nail on the head, in terms of the libertarian-​ness of this all. ‘Cause I wasn’t really sure how we would approach that because there is a negative reading of this, obviously, this idea of the military, the jingoistic, the rapid spending on aircraft carriers that are vulnerable to missiles. All that stuff is obvious. But what’s not obvious, as Paul pointed out, is that this notion of disrespect of authority, disrespect of US government, disrespect of the command, the chain of command. And that comes out even more so in the second movie, which I would love to talk about in the future, that these themes are endemic in the Top Gun series, and I never really noticed them because it just seems like it’s there to support the US military, but is it really? Or is it more… It’s obviously evolved as Tom Cruise has evolved. Now, it’s just more, there’s more Tom Cruise. It’s not about the US military now, it’s about Tom Cruise’s America. America fails without Tom Cruise. That’s kind of what we built ourselves into, and I’m horrified at that, but that’s where we are.

[music]

0:28:30.7 Landry Ayres: Paul, you wrote in the document that we had where we were taking notes before this, a question that I’m very curious about, and that I’d like for you to ask and then give us your answer because I wanna see where it goes, honestly. You said, “What is the relationship between demand and supply?” Can you tease that out a little bit more for me and how it might apply to Top Gun?

0:28:55.6 Paul Musgrave: Yeah, absolutely, I think this really is a great time to talk about this too. So, we’re talking about this from the point of view of the producers, of the creators of the military who’s lending real and valuable assistance to the production of both of these movies, and that’s one thing about thinking about how do you craft the story? What does the military want the story to be crafted like? How do you actually come up with this in a way that’s going to be a coherent narrative? Well, the other half of all of this stuff, of all popular culture, the reason why we talk about the popularity of it all is that this is a business aimed at delivering products that can sell. And like all big businesses, all big oligopolies, all big things that are interested, you do a lot of market segmentation, you deliver some products at a certain price point that will appeal to some markets, you do some things for prestige that allow you to reward people in your firm, your actors who want to get an Oscar and are willing to take a pay cut to get it, but at the end of the day, you also have to start delivering big popcorn movies. Top Gun, even the original one, it has to fill a 1000 screens in a week.

0:30:08.7 Paul Musgrave: This was before we did the big simultaneous Batman 1989 releases. But it’s got to play a lot of places, it’s got to appeal to something close to the median American filmgoer. You ideally want people to go see it multiple times, and you want to have a halo effect that’s going to get people to run out and buy singles by Berlin, or to be buying the soundtrack and to be cruising down the expressway listening to “Highway to the Danger Zone.” Who has not done any of these things? And that means that you have to have a product that people want to have. I think that that’s actually an interesting point to bring up here because when we talk about propaganda in closed societies… Xi Jinping has just released his fourth book of the year, he’s putting all academics to shame, we should all be writing this much, and it’s going to be a bestseller, it is mandatory that it’s gonna be a bestseller. That’s propaganda. We talked in the pre-​chat about Wolf Warrior, which is a series of film strongly supported by the Chinese state, about Chinese special ops going off and taking down evil Westerners. That’s propaganda.

0:31:17.1 Paul Musgrave: And those are things in which the state is trying to put forward a very specific political line, and everything has to be vetted through. And even when you have imported movies that come in, in the Soviet Union, they would reject movies from being shown that were imported from the West because even just in the background they would show American workers as way too rich, they had their own televisions and their own phones, and if you showed this to the Soviets, they would have actually rioted ’cause you’re living 40 to a room in Downtown Leningrad. But in an open society, propaganda is a lot harder to do. The ultimate [0:31:56.2] ____ coddle that DoD wields over films like this is withholding their support for a production if they don’t like the script. That’s a big step-​down from what China has been able to do over the last 10 or 15 years, which is not give you a license to show your movie at all, which is why Transformers infamously has that big scene about a Chinese official proclaiming that they will always protect Hong Kong, in a movie where the American military is kind of the bad guy too.

0:32:22.9 Paul Musgrave: Alright. So all DoD can do is withhold support, and sometimes movies go for without that support, independent stay, went forward without Hollywood support. It’s all about the US military. The US military asked them to take Area 51 out of the script, and they said, “We cannot possibly do that.” And so they made that without assistance from the US military. So you can’t get these things done. But this is a propaganda of a very different sort, this is more nudging, this is more influencing. And I think that the ultimate, interesting point here is that, in some sense this is what the American public, or at least a big segment of it, was demanding. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be supplied, but it does mean that there was a market who is receptive to themes generally of this nature. And there was also a market even for, literally taking exactly what the Mujahideen were doing to the Soviet invaders and flipping it so that the [0:33:19.7] ____ mooch were all Americans and calling it Red Dawn, where you could get people to pack in the theaters to go see that at almost exactly the same time.

0:33:29.2 Paul Musgrave: I’m actually left at a little bit of a crossroads here, and I’m interested to see, Brandon, what you think about this, because in everything from video games to movies, the American public obviously like stories where they are the good guys, and also like stories where often their government can be the bad guys. I was just watching “Enemy of the State” a couple of weeks ago, I’d never seen it. And the message is very clear that you can only trust Gene Hackman, you can only trust the guy who flees from NSA, and you can’t trust the actual NSA, and maybe. But it is very weird that you can have these propagandistic vehicles that actually portray a somewhat cynical conspiratorial view of Washington, and also a view of militarism and patriotism as redemptive factors that can overcome enemies domestic and foreign.

0:34:21.7 Brandon Valeriano: You know what? That’s an incredible statement, and you’ve basically described Stranger Things, and it just demonstrates that these themes are endemic in American popular culture, ’cause in one way, Stranger Things is a libertarian reading about the failure and overreach of government, and that only private individuals, kids can solve these problems. And in some ways, that’s what Top Gun is too, that there are problems in this world, and the only people on that wall, to go back to “A Few Good Men”, are people like Tom Cruise who can solve these problems because they’re so extraordinary, and that theme goes towards Top Gun: Maverick. So the uniqueness of the American experience, the uniqueness of the quality of the American hero really comes out in these movies and in this version of pop culture. And it’s something, I think, [0:35:15.8] ____ where… Are probably, as a culture, gonna be really uncomfortable to deal with, it’s gonna be a tough thing to really think about how these themes, that you don’t really even think about, have really reached deeply into our psyche and that we’re attracted to this idea of a hero like Will Smith in the Independence Day or Tom Cruise here, who are a rogue, just like Han Solo, they’re against the establishment.

0:35:44.5 Brandon Valeriano: But the establishment is with them, and the establishment is paying for them, and the establishment is making them continue to go, even in Stranger Things that theme is there. So how do you disconnect this idea of independence and freedom, and the disconnect between the power of authority, and the need for authority and the need for that support? Top Gun: Maverick. The budget was 170 million. I have no idea what their budget would have been without the US government support, but it probably would have been $500 million. So this idea that Maverick is a success ’cause they brought in a billion over $170 million is only there because of the support of the US government. But how much credit will the US government get through all this? Probably very little, but we’ll see when recruitment numbers come out.

0:36:33.2 Paul Musgrave: I have to say, as a former high school newspaper editor, the reach of the US government is incredible. One of our best, take it to the bank. This is back in the era where you had to actually print high school newspapers, where we had to sell advertising, and God bless the recruiters, consistently second or third largest advertiser in a high school newspaper. And if you’re thinking about this in a bigger historical way, to get back at, Landry, to a question you asked a little bit ago, “When did all this change?” I really think that we are still as a society grappling with the fact that 1945 changed everything, and maybe [0:37:13.6] ____ wanna date it in 1940, just before Pearl Harbor. But the shift to a permanent national security state really sits uneasily with democratic and representative institutions that were designed around the idea that there would not be a standing military establishment, or that if there were one, it would be very, very small. And culturally, the fact that almost every American directly or indirectly has a tie to the security state is inescapable, but politically, the idea that the dominant agency in the military in terms of policy-​making in foreign and security areas, would be the Department of Defense, that was never supposed to be the case.

0:38:00.5 Paul Musgrave: And it really runs through a tension between founding ideals and deep ideas of patriotism. And what we all know to be, I don’t wanna say the routine abuses, but certainly the inescapable abuses of any agency that commands, in the 1980s, what was it, Brandon, 4% of GDP? Now it’s about 3%, 3.5%. And that’s up a little bit. And I think over the next 10 years it’s almost inescapable. The only thing we can get bipartisan agreement in DC on at the moment is to increase that a little bit more. And it really is a huge challenge, I will say. The libertarian aspect of this comes through not only in the fact that the market is determining some aspect of what these stories can tell, it is actually interplayed between the government agencies supporting this and the audience that has to be sold this. Unlike China, we can’t just bring people to the theater in droves.

0:38:58.9 Paul Musgrave: But there’s also just the fact that, Wolf Warrior is not going to have something in which an actual officer of the PLA or an entire cast of the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army, is abusing power in a huge and systematic way. And yet, in almost every military-​inflected film that we’ve talked about today, you can just see, even in Independence Day, the secretary of defense is hiding the existence of aliens from the president when the aliens arrive. And that is an uncontroversial part of the movie that nobody in the audience is like, “That would never happen.” In fact, we were like, “Oh yeah, I can see that, that’s totally what would happen, Dick Cheney would’ve 100% lied about that to George HW Bush.”

0:39:47.0 Brandon Valeriano: And it continues today with, I haven’t seen Moonfall, but I believe that’s one of the plots, but my other favorite recent movie “Geostorm”, is also one of these ideas that the US government has an entire platform to control the weather, and it goes bad and only one man can stop it. These are persistent themes. The hero’s journey is a persistent theme. The hero of this movie, the winner of this movie is obviously Tom Cruise, it’s not the US government. It might have won through recruitment, snd we’ll see what happens with the second movie and the pandemic because recruitment has really hit… The pandemic has really hit recruitment hard. I read an article the other day, they were complaining. We couldn’t get the high schools for two years and it’s like, “Well, should you have really been in high schools? Is that really your complaint?” But… Okay.

0:40:43.5 Brandon Valeriano: We’ll see what happens with the next movie, but really, the winner is the hero. The winner is Tom Cruise. He’s just an amalgamation of Han Solo, with Goose being Chewbacca, and these themes continue and they’re universal across US popular culture. And it tells us something about ourselves. It tells us something about who we are as individualistic, as competitive, as in some ways jovial, joking, lazy, Lotharios, all these things are right there. And I think that’s one of the most interesting things in entertaining things about these series of movies is that it really is this idealized version of the American character that isn’t reality, but it’s the reality we choose to believe.

[music]

0:41:33.7 Paul Musgrave: The interesting thing about this is that this is a movie about air-​to-​air combat. And one of the things that we’ve learned, in Ukraine, one of the things that we’ve learned in both Iraqs and Afghanistan and so forth, is air-​to-​air combat is not a huge part of what even fighter jets do. The F-35 is really supposed to take on the close air support role that’s bombing things from the sky, there’s a huge amount of discussion about the kinds of munitions you’re going to have on there. But really, I think what we’re learning in Ukraine in particular is just the importance of good old artillery and good old surface-​to-​air missiles, air defense systems. And nobody wants to see Top Gun 3, Tom Cruise versus a MANPADS, man-​portable air-​defense system. You got this amazing vehicle and all that, and Tom Cruise goes out there and then he’s shot down by some guy with a stolen Singer. Oh man, that would suck, right? Like, “The movie’s five minutes long and what we’ve learned is that asymmetrical warfare is super important.”

0:42:35.4 Paul Musgrave: And in my readings of the air battle over north Vietnam, the battle was not really between guys and fighters, shooting guys and fighters, the battle was between guys and bombers being shot down by guys on the ground. And so, when we’re talking about the kinds of metrics in the [0:42:54.9] ____ kind of way, it’s like, Top Gun is a morality tale, doesn’t really have a lot to do with how the military fights, but it has a lot to do with how the military wants you to believe that you will take part. Brandon, what’s the tooth to tail on maintaining an F-14? We don’t have it anymore, but choose your F series, versus actually flying it. You got one guy in the cockpit and then 50 guys, the one guy who’s in charge of cleaning the gaskets after every flight, that is the reality of what you will be doing. And maybe that’s actually a pretty good job, in terms of quality of life, but that’s what you’ll actually be doing.

0:43:33.7 Paul Musgrave: And it is just really interesting in terms of what you have to do to sell the military, you have to make it all about combat, all about valor, all about all the things that are traditional. You could have somebody writing this up for the French royal court in the 14th century, and he would hold pretty much the same story. You just replace all of the air-​to-​air combat with jousting. But in terms of real military stuff, man, it’s like, what you talk about is, how expensive is this missile versus how expensive is that plane and how many missiles do we gotta use to shoot that down? And my guess is, is that we’re finding out in Ukraine that good intel and good integrated air defense system is a lot more important than a really bold courageous fighter pilot.

0:44:18.9 Brandon Valeriano: That’s the interesting thing, right? Modern warfare is about combined arms, it’s about all working together. And in doing preparation for this podcast, I have seen quite a few people wonder, what do the back-​seaters do? What does Goose do all day? And it’s like, “That’s not my question.” Obviously, it’s counter-​air warfare, it’s radar, it’s weapons, protection and weapons systems management, but people are just like, “It’s all Tom Cruise.” And that’s not the story. As Paul says, the story is the entire ecosystem in city that an aircraft carrier is to support these sorties, these plane runs that require a village, literally, to maintain. And that’s a tough story. That’s a tough story to get people, to get behind and to use for recruitment.

0:45:11.9 Landry Ayres: Speaking of stories that we wanna get behind, I think it’s a great way to end on because it’s sort of a zero-​sum question that we can… Will tie together a lot of the things that we’ve talked about today, which is, do either of you think that you can have a movie or a TV show or a piece of media that celebrates the military and doesn’t propagandize? Is that possible to you? Would it have to focus on individual service members, or is it possible to do that on an institutional level without propagandizing? Is that even possible, or is supporting an institution in and of itself propaganda?

0:46:03.5 Brandon Valeriano: I would, one, avoid the word “propaganda” in this context, it would be more about promotion. And there is a right way to do it. And I think both Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick are great examples of progressive notions of representation. In Top Gun you have Charlie who’s based on Christine Fox, who I think I ran across in real life, who’s a very famous DoD… She made DASD level US acting this, US acting that. She was a very important person in the military industrial complex. And there was even the question Kelly McGinnis was asking about her… The pantyhose with the run in the back, like, “Is that too sexy for this person?” And they even asked a person and Christine Fox was like, “Ah, I might wear that.” It’s these simple forms of representation that are very interesting. I forget the guy, there is a Black guy in the first movie, but it’s even more so, in the second movie, which some pundits have said that the second movie Maverick is a version of a… I don’t know what you would call it, but it’s anti-​woke. When in reality, my whole reading of this entire series is very much woke, even though there is a White hero, that White hero is supported by an entire complex of people, including Kelly McGinnis, who are essential to his success in this story.

0:47:31.3 Paul Musgrave: Yeah. Just to jump on Brandon’s point about wokeness. In the traditional World War II movie, if you put that front and center, that was the new deal war. And so you’d have the all-​American squad of Simpson and Alcalde, and Bernstein, and Tex, always a guy named Tex. The only thing is of course, the Second World War, they were not integrated by race. Captain America in the Second World War, Marvel made sure that his squad was integrated, but Captain America fought in a segregated army. He was a captain in an apartheid army. Korean war, though, and you even watch something like Mash and you even there were some gender problems. It’s obvious, right, traditional military films in the US context have always actually been about the integration of the US. That is actually one of the central projects of the US military. And it is partly practical reasons ’cause you’re trying to recruit whoever you can recruit, and also just partly that is what the military wants to have as an integrated fighting force. And that is one of the things that the military, unlike some of its more reactionary defenders, has always been very clear about.

0:48:50.5 Paul Musgrave: And so, the question is, how would you promote an institution like that without falling prey to some of these things? And I actually, I think that if you told a story that would look something more like Apollo 13, the story of an organization, adapting and learning and overcoming challenges. If I could wave a magic wand and induce market demand for this, one of the things I would have would be, we’re going to tell the story of the guys who mastered the Wild Weasel mission in Vietnam. And this is the mission where you go in and you are flying your F-4 Phantom against air defenses. And you are actually going to fly into the lion’s mouth and you were going to try to defang that. Well, that is a huge organization, and it takes guys who know science, it takes guys who know tech, it takes guys who know tactics, it takes guys who have, frankly, balls of steel, to actually do these things, but you have to have them all working together. And that is the opposite of the kind of special operations glamorizing, Navy SEAL, tip of the spear sort of thing that you have coming out of Hollywood now, which is all about a guy in a ghillie suit walking around and you’re taking somebody out with one shot.

0:50:04.7 Paul Musgrave: Yeah, okay. Well, that is the tip of a very long steel… A very long spear, that includes the guys who specifically modified your gear to do that. And I think that the way that you’d want to think about war and the military complex now, to promote this in a semi responsible but also much more intelligible way would be to tell that as an organizational story of challenge, learning, and adaptation, and that would be one that would just demote the status of the war fighters. But, again, look, war fighters, if you’re listening and I’m sure some of you guys are, I can’t do what you can do. And also I know that if you guys have HIMARS, and if you guys have electronic intelligence telling you where to point those rockets, your job gets a lot easier. And that is really the story of how warfare is done nowadays. But that would be my suggestion, actually oriented around the entire organization, and to foreground a lot of the things that Top Gun puts in the background.

[music]

0:51:10.8 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @popnlockepod. That’s Pop, the letter N, Locke with an E, like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time.

[music]