Sex, jets and rock 'n roll

This Friday is an inestimably important anniversary. Not because it’s the 13th, and therefore the subject of a whole bunch of really crap horror movies taking up space on the shelves in Mr Video. No, I have been awaiting the advent of Friday the 13th of May with breathless anticipation (no pun intended) because it happens to mark the 25th anniversary of the release of Top Gun, my all-time favourite 80s movie and one of the great cultural institutions of the time.

Top Gun is one of those movies that have come to take on a significance beyond their immediate entertainment value and defined the era from which they emerged. Tom Cruise and his F-14 Tomcat certainly made a bigger impression on me than any other product of pop culture at the time, bigger than the Gummi Bears or V or Tempo chocolate bars (you can feel it in your … feet).

As I’ve mentioned in this blog before, as a child, I went through a stage when I was obsessed with military aircraft. My favourite plane by some way was the SR-71 Blackbird, but I could also draw pretty accurate and detailed renditions of the F-14 Tomcat, F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon, as well as endless iterations of beautiful and dangerous-looking helicopters. This was partly the influence of Airwolf, my favourite TV show. But it also had a lot to do with Top Gun.

A love of military aircraft was something I originally got from my father and his Time-Life books. His all-time favourite movie was The Right Stuff, based on the book by Tom Wolfe, and it was thanks to him that I learned about Chuck Yeager and the sound barrier and why Mach 3 was much more impressive than Mach 2. This is why he took me, at the age of eleven, to watch a movie that is basically all about sex. I vividly remember wanting to crawl underneath my seat when the opening notes of Take my Breath Away sounded and Tom Cruise started humping Kelly McGillis in silhouette. This would have been traumatic enough had I witnessed it on my own; in the company of my father it was torture.

Given the benefit of perspective, it is possible now to see the deeper significance of Top Gun, which is that it really is all about sex. Saturated with boy’s own virility, it’s tempting to put it forward as a candidate for the most cheerfully phallocentric movie ever made, which is presumably why Quentin Tarantino was inspired to rattle off this monologue about how the Top Gun is actually about a man’s quest to deal with his homosexuality (“Go the gay way”. In this famous re-edit of selected scenes from the movie, Top Gun is reimagined — rather convincingly — as a love story between Maverick and Iceman.

When I first watched Top Gun I had no idea that there were men who fancied other men (I was 17 when I was made aware of the existence of lesbians; this might have happened earlier had I attended a girls-only high school). Oh, for that lost innocence, for a time when sex made me embarrassed — actually, sex still makes me embarrassed — and I believed so fervently that the America in our TV set and on the movie screen was the best country on earth. And no movie epitomised everything I loved about America the way Top Gun did: all those wonderful machines, all that fabulous firepower.

(I had something of a thing for missiles, the more the better. I was a strange child.)

There were ghostly echoes of that America in the news of Osama bin Laden’s assassination at the hands of US Navy Seals (to quote Charlie Sheen, who tweeted his thoughts on the news: AMERICA: #WINNING; Sheen, if you’ll remember, once starred in a Top Gun spoof). My 11-year-old self would have been utterly besotted with those stealth helicopters. But for the most part, the America I admired before I started having to wear a bra is gone. Now I struggle to get my head around the notion that I was once a fan of Ronald Reagan and considered myself spiritually aligned with the Republican Party. In my defence, all I can say is that I was a prepubescent product of Christian National Education in a fascist state, and what did I know?

Top Gun evokes a glorious mythical land where guys get to fly fast planes and blow up stuff, and chicks say things like “Take me to bed, you big stud”. Now that I’ve grown up, I know it’s a place that no longer exists, and never did, though some like to think it is out there, somewhere. Still, every now and then, it’s fun to indulge in the cultural equivalent of eating Nik Naks and drinking Creme Soda. So, in honour of 25 years of Top Gun, dust off your aviators, go along to topgunday.com and generate your own call sign (I’m Lt Sarah “Dragon” Britten). After all, there’s a part of you — even if it’s a little one — that will always feel the need for speed.