How Gay is Top Gun?
I’m guessing I wouldn’t be alone if I said the only thing I remember about Sleep With Me, Rory Kelly’s 1994 independent romantic comedy–so generic it starred Eric Stoltz–is the brilliant deconstruction of Top Gun that Quentin Tarantino wandered onto the set to deliver. It’s funny and shrewd, and exactly the kind of thing video store clerks love to monologue about when you put a beer in their hand. Which is apparently how this bit was born. Tarantino acknowledges it was actually Roger Avery’s brainchild, but claims the two built the bit into feverish longform at parties and bars together, a believable story if there ever was one.
For me, videos like this one, by Dale Hersh and Mike Heim, should be the future of film criticism. With minimal text and a couple bits of a Tarantino explication, it demonstrates it points largely through excerpts of the film itself. Of course, Hersh & Heim (sounds like a candy company, or something), are probably less concerned with the nature of video-form film criticism than with making us laugh. They’re both comedy writers who’ve actually worked this premise–that Top Gun is gay–into a successful full-length Airplane-esque sketch show in West Hollywood, Gay Top Gun.
Style aside, I have mixed feelings about the commentary itself. Latent homosexual subtext is one of the easiest of grad-humour reinterpretations, and sometimes feels like it could be used almost ubiquitously, like the way Slavoj Zizek can do Freudian interpretations, ad infinitum. And though these riffs may be easy, and fun, like pop-level Freud, I have serious doubts about their veracity.
So why are they easy and fun? Well, let’s start with “fun”. I think the humor of them springs largely from the viewer/joker’s own mild homosexual panic. In my experience, the most common purveyors of these humorous reinterpretations are liberal-minded straight men. Yes, Mark Rappaport made Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, a feature-length video-essay about queer subtext, but I don’t think it’s a joke to him. Humor springs from the things in life we are uncomfortable with (think scatalogy), but basically find harmless. Bad, but not really bad, simultaneously. Like how Quentin Tarantino feels about homosexuality (let’s not get started on Bruce Willis’ segment of Pulp Fiction). And, if we’re willing to be honest, a lot of straight liberal guys like me.
And why easy? Because male bonding and fraternal love is everywhere. Every “buddy” movie, you could say. Batman and Robin. Lone Ranger and Tonto. Huck Finn and Jim. All of which have been queer theorized. Not to say that one couldn’t view these easily through pink-colored glasses, but to do so is to willfully misunderstand them for humorous effect (double meanings and misunderstandings are also fun). It seems more likely to me, that the real subtext of these stories is infantile, presexual. The reason the female relationships are so unimportant in these films is arrested development, a fantasy of an extended idyllic boyhood of make-believe, in which we are free from adult worries. Like, you know, women. It’s like the Little Rascal’s “He-Man Woman Haters Club”.
All that said, Top Gun is pretty gay. I mean, look at it.
P.S. Did you know that “Tom Cruise” is, in some circles, actually slang for homosexual. At least according to definitions 23 & 24 on urbandictionary.com.
February 12th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
I really like this reading of the video. I used to teach that segment from Sleep with Me in my freshman composition classes when I first started grad school because it’s interesting as a form of argument–is the Tarantino character’s evidence convincing? What scenes does he omit? Does he misrepresent anything in Top Gun? Uesd to provoke some interesting discussions. But yeah, when there are slash videos for pretty much every TV show and character ever known on YouTube, shouldn’t we start thinking about alternative modes of video-form film criticism?
February 12th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Looking for alternative modes of video-form criticism is what I would really like to be blogging about. The real problem is how long it takes. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how much video the Daily Show uses, alters, analyzes, and generally culture-jams. In some ways, they are quietly doing the most cutting edge video criticism around…it’s just so smooth and entertaining we take it for granted.
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