Daily Archives: Wednesday, June 1, 2022

Tales from the vault of unpopular views – ‘Not my Top Gun’

I recognise this is a pro military, nationalist propaganda tool and I planned on ending my virtue signalling here as I did not want to get political about the film.  Unfortunately this will not be the case.

It was 1986.  I had just turned 16 and there was this American fighter plane film at the cinema.  ‘Top Gun’  was a film that I can’t deny had a massive impact on me.  I had a super hard crush on Kelly McGillis and the soundtrack was tailor made for a white boy teenager.   I had the soundtrack which I wore to the nub on my chunky Walkman with fat buttons.  Berlin’s ‘Take my Breath Away’ still scratches a caveman part of my brain that had yearnings for Kelly McGinnis’s character, Charlie.  I even had the VHS tape.  By 1995 I was at Uni.  I had a new love, ecstasy and speed and ‘Top Gun’ was way back in the rear view mirror.  Today I can barely remember the characters and the plot.  The knowledge they were making a sequel interested me in no way at all.  Then all the reviews from all across the spectrum of reviewers started coming out and they dragged me back in.

‘Top Gun Maverick’ is not my ‘Top Gun’. It starts with the Paramount logo and the chime from the ‘Top Gun’ anthem before the uplifting electric guitar solo and I thought this is ‘Top Gun’.  There was this piece with this experimental stealth plane, with Tom Cruise as Maverick flying it and Ed Harris playing some sort of military brass and I thought, ‘interesting, some kind of homage to ‘The Right Stuff’.  We get a remix of Kenny Login’s ‘Danger Zone’ which was cool.  As I said my ‘Top Gun’ is ‘Take My Breath Away’ but this is not my ‘Top Gun’.   It then goes in to the film proper.  There is plenty of reviews and synopsis around for this film and I’m not really interested in doing that here.  I mostly want to analyse it and to give my totally biased, selfish reasons why this is not my ‘Top Gun’.

The demographic of people who went to the cinema to view this film on the opening weekend were mostly around my age, maybe a decade younger.  It was all about the nostalgia.  Right from that first chime at the introduction with  the Paramount logo.  I have no problem with that.  I don’t think it did it bad.  Unfortunately I had forgotten most of the 1986 film and have no intention of going back to see it, which kind of blunted the nostalgia for me.  Also the most important elements for ‘ME’ from the original were missing from this film.  Kelly McGillis’s Charlie, or at least a character like her.  Kelly Mcgillis had  equal billing in the original ‘Top Gun’.  Charlie was a well-developed character, who stood toe to toe in the power dynamic with Maverick.  In this film Jennifer Connelly was fine as Penny Benjamin, bar owner, mother who sails and had, had a past relationship with Maverick.  Penny the love interest.  Not my ‘Top Gun’.  To be honest this is quite symbolic of the difference in most trajectories for careers depending on gender within the Hollywood machine.

‘Top Gun Maverick’ had all the tropes you would expect from a film like this, competitive characters, one’s an arrogant hot shot.  A higher up person who doesn’t like the protagonist and puts up obstacles to interfere with their goals.  The journey from failure to success, blah, blah, blah.  Which is fine.  They are tropes for a reason.  They work.  They press the right buttons in our reactionary brain.  This ain’t high art. I did however have a problem with the emotional beats.  Reviewers were saying how it brought them to tears.  Unfortunately I forgot most of what the 1986 ‘Top Gun’ was about and again, had no intention of re-watching it.  Rather than invest in developing these new characters, this film more relied on the nostalgia  of characters from the 1986 film which I mostly forgot and so when something feely happened it just didn’t impact me.  They even did the offspring of the  tragic character in the original trope, ‘Goose’ who I had mostly forgot.  Mainly because he wasn’t played by Kelly Mcgillis.   This is not my ‘Top Gun’

The other thing is the soundtrack.  1986 ‘Top Gun’, my ‘Top Gun’ had some really strong music.  There was the ‘Top Gun’ theme, Kenny Logins ‘Danger Zone’ and ‘Playing with the Boys’ and of course the chart topping ‘Take My Breath Away’.  ‘Top Gun Maverick’ seemed to rely on the nostalgia of the theme, it threw in ‘Danger Zone’ and the stuff for this movie just wasn’t memorable.  I’m probably biased because it isn’t my ‘Top Gun’.

The mission itself was a bit computer game like.  It was fine.  The ariel stunts were fine.  The last act was the most fun for me.  It fed the action hungry part of my brain and gave me some thrills.  I don’t think it’s a bad movie it’s just not my ‘Top Gun’

I’m going to end with the villains.  The film carefully avoids stating any country, or group are the villains and avoids specific geographic locations.  The only differences between the heroes and the villains is, the machinery, the villains use is all black stuff and we are told it’s more advanced than the American machinery (Hand over mouth laughing.).  Even though the American machinery is not as advanced, the Americans have pluck and beat the villains through sheer skill.  The villains are faceless, just fodder to be killed and sploded.  The Americans have cool names and colourful equipment and we see their faces.  There is even a part with Maverick and Penny riding a motorbike without a helmet.  I was a bit fuming.  Brain injury is real, wear a helmet unless you’re Nathan Hunt and you have to make a quick getaway.  The villains did not attack these American heroes or America, or anywhere.  The Americans made a pre-emptive attack on the villains who used their black equipment to defend themselves.  What did the villains do wrong?  They were building a facility to store Uranium.  Something the American Heroes with inferior equipment would never do.  It seems just being American makes you the hero and justifies any offensive action. 

Anyway on that note back to ‘Stranger Things’ season 4 which I’m enjoying a lot more because…  that was not my ‘Top Gun’

Until next time this is Whakapai signing off.

Stalker   Adrei Tarkovsky   (USSR 1979) Alexander Kaidanovski Alisa Freindlich

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 26 May 2022

Retrocrit: Sliding into this watery domain did you get wet…?

The response to Stalker, as to most of Tarkovsky’s (T) work is in a subjectivity.

What T achieves in Stalker is to create the filmic conditions where it is the viewer who moves, who is on the journey into the Zone. In one sense the viewer is the star of the film. The defining features of the way Stalker has been filmed: the length of its shots and the shot composition, the tracking shots either over the shoulder or composed through the wreckage of the Zone, create spacio-temporal conditions for the audience to have to define and understand what is going on for themselves and world of meaning in which they locate themselves.

The film is constructed to work dynamically with the viewer. It is the viewer who is the affected. To view is to engage. It is only possible to view Stalker if you are able to attune consciousness to the visual and temporal stimulae expressed in the film.   Stalker is about state of mind: your state of mind. Dream – allegory – hallucination.

Stalker creates possible worlds with which we have to engage and enter. If we can’t do this, we either leave the movie or the movie will leave us.

The world of ‘Stalker’ is built on a few simple precepts, like the rules of a simple game. There is a forbidden area called the Zone; in the Zone is a room which if you enter you will be granted what you desire. You need the stalker to enter and to traverse the Zone. The Zone is not constant in form, but changes in response to human presence. Only the stalker knows how to find the room. These elements are rich enough to sustain and enrich a number of different orders of allegorical readings and priorities.

In ‘Stalker’ the eponymous guide is the Holy Fool. Like one blessed by God whose vision penetrates into and beyond the myriad manifestations that present on the surface of existence. In the Zone, the Holy Fool is our guide to ‘seeing’; but in accepting the Holy Fool as guide we enter unknowingly into a epistemological compact which becomes increasingly difficult for us to accept.  Like the viewers, the Writer and the Scientist are slaves to Reason. The seeing and the utterances of the Holy Fool aren’t grounded in the rationality that defines the life and identity of 21^st century citizen. Like John of Patmos (author of the Book of Revelation – the Apocalypse) Holy Fool speaks revelation, vision and intuition, a language that casts reason to the dogs, undermining the foundation of our being in the world. The Holy Fool is mad and dangerous. After initial infatuation with his novelty, the Writer and the Scientists block him off, their aggrieved egos reject him and all he stands for. The mechanics of Marx’ dialectic may be dead; but we are not able to follow the Holy Fool . That is our dilemma: we live in a world without meaning, neither within nor without time. ‘Stalker’ is a mystical statement directed at the deadness of the ideology that sustained the USSR.

Cuckoo Cuckoo! The eidetic sound of the cuckoo is interspersed throughout T’s soundtrack. The emblematic bird call that mocks man and all his designs, bids him harken to the natural world, which is of course here to be found in the devastation of the ‘Zone’.

The characteristic natural element of ‘Stalker’ is water. Water is everywhere: seen – heard – experienced. Like life it is never still. It flows falls ripples spreads covers, often disturbed and perturbed by man.   The Zone is world of wetness where boundaries are not mediated by definite form but by a liquid soluble contiguousness. A world where things merge rather than separate. A world mostly covered in a unifying aqueous layering. A world where the viewer gets wet, slips into a primordial wetness. A toxic baptism.

T’s camera probes beneath the surface of the world. We pass through cosmological miracles of light and dark, snow rain and broken surfaces. As the camera glides through the water a gold fish appears from nowhere, and we notice colours transmitted in the details of submerged objects that are as intense as any Russian icon. A world that is poisoned yet like Russia still reveals traces of an overwhelming aesthetic imperative. A trace of faith in the middle of the dead environment. The journey to the room has no end. The Stalker will not enter the room, he is beyond desire; his need is to approach to guide: nothing more – an act of obeisance to another higher order. The writer seeks renewal, the scientist destruction. Neither finds what they desire; neither as far as we know enters the room.

The Stalker exhausted returns home lies down as if to die. His wife testifies that he is a good man, a worthwhile man. His daughter, crippled, sits before a table. In front of on the table there are a number of vessels. They start to move of their own accord, sliding across the surface until one drops of its edge. We read into it what we will: chance – telekinetic powers – a final parable.

“….and he showed me a pure river of water of life as clear as crystal and proceeding out of the throne of God…” (The Revelation of John the Devine)

As I progressed into Stalker the notion arose that I was being led into a sort of inverted twisted Book of Revelations. A negative vision of Jerusalem cruelly stripped of God and the yearning for the kingdom of heaven. The apocalypse had happened but it was man made: not the creation of the demiurge. All that remains are our desires and they will not save us from ourselves. The film invokes subjectivity in the viewer (for which it was forcefully attacked by Soviet critics) but for me ‘Stalker’ points to the fact that subjectivities are of little use on the journey to understand ourselves.

Stalker was the last movie T made in the Soviet Union. It is a fateful marker. T left during the last days of the Soviet Empire to explore the psychic detritus of the West. Some think that the filming of Stalker on location in the polluted poisoned water of an abandoned chemical plant in Estonia caused the bronchial cancers that cost him, his wife, Larissa and the actor Anatoly Solonitsyn, their lives. Another school of thought imagines him killed by the KGB as a dangerous cultural renegade.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk