Amid the recent mass shootings, the movie sticks to its roots in glorifying guns and fighter jets.
By Thacher Schmid, The Progressive
On May 24, the same day the blockbuster “military-entertainment complex” film Top Gun: Maverick came out, a man shot and killed nineteen students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.
As a society, we’re obsessed with gratuitous violence in films like Maverick while being horrified by mass shootings like those in Uvalde and Buffalo, New York. And while excessive gun violence in media is only loosely connected to gun violence in real life, it does reflect the particularly American obsession with guns and might to some extent explain how they’ve become so entrenched in our national psyche.
A recent review in The New Yorker claims that Maverick is defined by a “perfect substancelessness.” That’s true, but only if we ignore all of the guns.
As a fourteen-year-old in 1986, I went with my father to see the original Top Gun, which featured a twenty-four-year-old Tom Cruise. But now Cruise is fifty-nine, and something is off. Why is he so teary-eyed? Why does he keep running full-tilt, for no reason? And why can’t I enjoy a Top Gun movie the way I used to?
Recent Posts
U.S. Sent a Rescue Plane For Boat Strike Survivors. It Took 45 Hours To Arrive.
Take Action Now In seas that could kill a person within an hour, it took nearly two days for a rescue plane to arrive.By Tomi McCluskey and Nick…
“Keep Hope Alive”: Remembering Rev. Jesse Jackson, Civil Rights Icon Who Twice Ran For President
Take Action Now “Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the…
The Iranian Trap: Neither Military Action Nor Nuclear Negotiations Can Solve Trump’s (and Israel’s) Conundrum
Take Action Now After a failed regime-change strategy and an increasingly risky military buildup, the Trump administration turns back to nuclear…
Suffocating an Island: What the U.S. Blockade Is Doing to Cuba
Take Action Now Electric motorcycles are Cuba’s response to the fuel crisis.By Medea Benjamin Marta Jiménez, a hairdresser in Cuba’s eastern city…