Danger zone re-entry

The re-make of Top Gun tells me many of the gains we’ve made towards the better world that 14-year-old me envisaged are comprised more of surface than substance.

we’re It told me that time spending too much supposed looking back to enough hey-days and not with time reckoning socially, where we are – geopolitically or environmentally.

In the way that one does with Facebook memes, I saw it, snickered briefly, possibly clicked on the ‘ha ha’ emoji … and scrolled on.

But in the days that followed, I found myself thinking about it more deeply. ‘OK so let me get this straight,’ the meme read, ‘the #1 movie in the country is Top Gun, the #1 song is Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up that Hill’, and America is in a proxy war with Russia. So, we’re just like, f*** it, let’s give 1986 another go then?’

We tend to conceive of time as an arrow, locked into a forward trajectory. And we imagine – don’t we? – that we’re making this thing called ‘progress’. But, as the meme casually observed, ‘progress’ is oftentimes an illusion, and time’s arrow can sometimes seem to circle around rather than fly straight on.

Almost certainly, I saw the first Top Gun at Cinema One (out of two) at Village Hobart, probably while wearing acidwashed jeans and a Balance windcheater, sleeves artfully rolled to reveal my treasured Swatch.

This was in the time before Tom Cruise had officially lodged himself in the collective imagination as the kind of hot that made him a worthy rival (but still a secondplace getter) to Mum’s lamb roast*.

Now I’m a mother of teenagers, and Tom Cruise is the kind of Hollywoodpowerful that enables him to co-produce a blockbuster like Top Gun: Maverick, a film I probably wouldn’t have bothered to see, except for the Facebook meme, and the way it had made me start to wonder … actually, just how far have we come since 1986?

And so, with the objective of assessing what we’ve all done with the last three-anda-half decades, I set off for the cinema. In my jeans (no radical advance there, then), and in my petrol-fuelled car (likewise).

The snacks at the candy bar? A bit more choice, perhaps, but as in 1986, here in 2022, popcorn, fizzy drinks and chocolate coated ice creams are still the core products.

By the time I settled into a seat in the darkened theatre, I was reflecting that if I’d been scooped up in 1986 and catapulted to 2022, the only thing that would have given me serious culture shock, so far, was the price of the ticket.

But now came the serious business … the movie itself. What would it reveal to me, I wondered, about social change achieved since 1986? Would it show me a different world to the one I saw as a teenager?

Just over two hours later, I left the cinema, buzzing with an adrenaline hit every bit as chemical as the sugar high from the Maltesers I’d scoffed, and feeling like I’d just seen 191 minutes’ worth of Tom Cruise trying to prove to himself and the world that – three-and-a-half decades on – he’s still hot.

While Ice-man (Val Kilmer) has grown up, advanced through the ranks to Admiral and become mortal to the point of having a terminal illness, Cruise’s Maverick is still single, still ranked Captain, still wearing the same jacket, still zooming around on a motorbike, still pushing the envelope in the skies and still playing sport shirtless in order to display his pecs (which, we are told, are really his and not those of a body-double).

Meg Ryan is absent from the sequel, as is Kelly McGillis, who played Cruise’s loveinterest back in 1986. When questioned about this, McGillis, now in her 60s, put her omission down to the fact that she … looks like a woman in her 60s.

Her absence, compounded by the absence of any female character of substance, is the most disappointing thing about Top Gun: Maverick. As Charlie, McGillis was a woman of her time – smart, ambitious, trying to make her way in a man’s world. Her characterisation was also of its time: as much was made of Charlie’s seamed stockings as of her intellect.

Her 2022 replacement is Jennifer Connelly, shoved into an anodyne role as a yummy mummy whose ‘strong woman’ credentials are unconvincingly telegraphed in a scene where she helms a boat in rough weather.

In 1986, we – the daughters of second-wave feminism – believed better things were to come. That the world would become a better, more equal place.

In the new film, a posse of young pilots is entrusted to Maverick’s tutelage. While that group does contain a young woman, and while there’s some racial diversity in the film’s casting, there’s depressingly little to show for over three decades of agitation for gender and racial equality.

Geopolitically, there’s