|
|
DVD
|
|
Top Gun
Is the 1986 Tom Cruise blockbuster nothing more than gay pulp fiction? The audio commentary for a new DVD puts a bullet in at least one of Quentin Tarantino’s critical points of analysis.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
By Todd Gilchrist
|
|
|
Paramount Home Video
Photo
|
|
In the Navy
|
|
In 1994, Quentin Tarantino made two significant contributions to the world of cinema. Along with his tour de force Pulp Fiction, there is the matter of his five-minute monologue in the little seen but nonetheless infamous Sleep With Me.
As partygoer Sid, QT expounds - in only the strident and impossibly enthusiastic way that he can – about his theory that Tony Scott’s Top Gun is an ode to homosexuality. Seeing as how the film was recently re-released on DVD as a two-disc Special Edition, FilmStew decided it was high time to dive back into Quentin’s roiling rhetoric to determine whether or not he was right.
In his conversation with a young Todd Field, years away from his own directorial triumph with In the Bedroom, Tarantino begins by labeling the 1986 Simpson-Bruckheimer blockbuster ‘subversion on a massive level.’ “You think it's a story about a bunch of fighter pilots?” he contends. “It is a story about a man's struggle with his own homosexuality.”
|
|
Paramount Home Video
Photo
|
|
A lover, or a beard?
|
|
|
Looking back at Tom Cruise’s breakout role today, it’s easy to understand its mass market appeal, particularly within the context of an age when simplistic portrayals of heroism and villainy were de rigeur. “You've got Maverick, all right, and he's on the edge, man,” Tarantino recounts in language both more fanboyish and evocative than I could provide. “He's right on the f*cking line, all right? And you've got Iceman, and all his crew. They're gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they're saying, go, go the gay way, go the gay way.”
“He could go both ways,” QT continues. “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.”
Let’s see. Taken at face value, the more conventionally accepted narrative of a rebellious pilot trying to make it in the fast-paced world of Navy airmen sounds only euphemistically different. But under the sure hand of Tony Scott, who at the time was coming off of his directorial debut, the erotic thriller The Hunger, the film takes on proportions both epic and self-contained, human and super-heroic.
Wanting initially to make a film that he describes in the audio commentary as “Apocalypse Now on an aircraft carrier,” Scott ultimately forewent his vision and adhered to Simpson and Bruckheimer’s concept for the picture: good looking guys, great images, and gargantuan themes. But no one expect the film to be capable of grossing more than $350 million worldwide, let alone making megastars out of Cruise and several other members of the cast.
|
|
Jeffrey Mayer/Wireimage.com
Photo
|
|
Director Tony Scott
|
|
|
As to the lingering suspicion that the film is a subversive gay text disguised as populist entertainment, Scott reveals rather intriguingly that Tarantino isn’t terribly far off the mark. No, it’s not really a gay movie. But Scott says he did in fact research a great deal of photographer Bruce Weber’s work to cast the film, going in some cases as far as picking actors exclusively based on their resemblance to models captured in the pictures.
As such, Cruise, Val Kilmer and Rick Rossovich are all dead ringers for some two-dimensional, glossy magazine counterparts. In assembling a film around the twin merits of look and sound rather than, say, acting and story, Scott perhaps inadvertently aligned it a little more closely than he might have thought possible to what passes for Saturday Night Fever among same-sex denizens.
The furtive romance between Cruise and co-star Kelly McGillis - picked, according to Scott, because she’d just got her kit off in Peter Weir’s Witness - is shot with no more interest than the myriad locker room and volleyball male-bonding scenes, lending further credulity to Tarantino’s assessment. “He goes to her house, all right?” explains Tarantino. “It looks like they're going to have sex, you know, they're just kind of sitting back, he's takin' a shower and everything. They don't have sex. He gets on the motorcycle, drives away. She's like, ‘What the f*ck is going on here?’”
|
|
Paramount Home Video
Photo
|
|
More than just a cockpit rival?
|
|
|
“Next scene you see her,” the former video store clerk and perennial film fanatic continues, “she's in the elevator, she is dressed like a guy. She's got the cap on, she's got the aviator glasses, she's wearing the same jacket that the Iceman wears. She is, okay, this is how I gotta get this guy, this guy's going towards the gay way, I gotta bring him back, I gotta bring him back from the gay way, so I'll do that through subterfuge. I'm gonna dress like a man.”
This, unfortunately, is where Tarantino’s eager extrapolation collides with the hard truth of a Hollywood production. As both Scott and producer Bruckheimer explain on the DVD, several months passed after principal photography before this fabled ‘she’s dressed like a man’ scene was shot; the reason was that the relationship between Maverick and McGillis’ characters was simply too rushed.
By then, Cruise had moved on to The Color of Money and McGillis had cut her hair. The solution? Grease Cruise’s lengthened locks to make them look sweaty and tousled, and cover up McGillis in hat and jacket to maintain continuity. The result? A great, intimate moment that serves as a prelude to the film’s climactic and entirely hetero coupling.
Jessica Simpson may have covered “Take My Breath Away” for the modern mallrat crowd, but Berlin’s original version still to this day elevates a stylish moment of silver screen canoodling to the ranks of the movies’ most memorable love scenes. Of course, Tarantino would have you think that Cruise and McGillis’ romantic interlude is little more than an unwelcome interruption on the Navy crew’s path towards homosexual liberation.
“The real ending of the movie is when they fight the MIGs at the end, because he has passed over into the gay way,” Quentin maintains. “And they're beating the Russians, the gays are beating the Russians. And it's over, and they f*cking landing, and Iceman's been trying to get Maverick the entire time, and finally, he's got him, all right?”
“And what is the last f*cking line that they have together?” Tarantino asks rhetorically. “Ice comes up to Maverick and says, ‘Man, you can ride my tail anytime!’ And what does Maverick say? ‘You can ride mine!’”
This, as any astute viewer of Top Gun knows, is inaccurate. The exchange is actually, ‘You can be my wing man anytime,’ to which Maverick replies, ‘Bullsh*t - you can be mine.’
| Does this lessen the Kill Bill filmmaker’s argument? To an extent. After all, there is a certain authority we accept from Tarantino, predicated on his encyclopedic knowledge of all things celluloid. But removing this last argument from QT’s analysis of Scott’s fast-paced and facile entertainment, the bottom line is that the filmmaker’s Sleep with Me monologue still makes for a pretty convincing case. | |
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|