It’s a really hot day in Texas. Sweltering in the 105 F heat, I retreated into Mabank, Texas’s infamous Hometown Cinemas — known for its stale popcorn and concerningly thick slurpees — to see the box office’s newest hit. I didn’t realize I was about to be recruited for the military.
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“Top Gun: Maverick,” starring (eye candy) Tom Cruise, took just 31 days to pass the $1 billion mark to become the highest grossing movie in Cruise’s famed career. Critics are raving about the film, lauding its “extraordinarily tense” action shots and “instantly timeless” beach volleyball scene. But beyond all the jet flying, Cruise’s latest blockbuster cannot help but recall the Cold War-era sentiments of its prequel, “Top Gun” (1986), as it becomes the latest movie to build upon the pervasive and flourishing military-entertainment-complex.
The Hollywood-Pentagon relationship peaked during World War II with the creation of the temporary Office of War Information (OWI) and its Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP). With Hollywood revered as a critical war industry and the world’s most robust propaganda tool, the BMP screened over 1,600 scripts during its short existence.
Getting the Department of Defense (DOD) on board with a production is not without compromise: Films seeking financial assistance must promote recruitment for the military services and may not cast the U.S. government in a negative light, even if the accounts are factual. It’s a strict rubric, and documents detailing communications between production companies and the DOD reveal that some movies were rejected for their less savory representations of the armed forces while others were wholly supported for their unambiguously positive depictions.
With such strict guidelines in place, it isn’t immediately clear why movies, such as “Top Gun: Maverick,” let themselves be commandeered by the DOD. But the unlikely partnership between the Pentagon and Hollywood is symbiotic in nature, rooted in production companies’ commitment to depicting militaristic realism in their films, thereby attracting audiences. Films centered around intense action or alternative realities rely on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Some producers, such as Marvel, use strong narrative techniques to persuade the audiences to enter a world that is not their own — hyper-realism removes this need for entrancing storytelling. For non-franchise action films like “Top Gun: Maverick,” production companies don’t work to get the audience to suspend their disbelief: They try to prevent disbelief from arising in the first place. The problem is, they need help.
Even with a $170 million budget, Paramount couldn’t front the cost for just three of the F-18s the movie’s stars are seen piloting. To save some money and because the Pentagon’s regulation prohibits civilian personnel from operating the machines, the DOD rented out the planes for a “mere” $11,373 per hour and threw in some aircraft carrier and technical assistance to pull off the film’s stunts. With Paramount being a repeat customer, the Pentagon-mandated storyline changes from the prequel were already baked into “Top Gun: Maverick,” including the omission of a mid-air collision because the Navy wanted to minimize public concern with increasingly frequent crashes.
These DOD-backed films often serve a specific purpose: “Top Gun: Maverick’s” is to get more people in the cockpit. The new film follows a group of elite Navy aviators led by Pete “Maverick” Mitchell as they train for a mission to blow up a uranium enrichment facility in what we’re supposed to assume is Iran (or some other adversary that the U.S. fears will proliferate). The viewer — i.e., the recruit — is immersed with “shot-from-the-cockpit dogfights” and close-formation, low-altitude team maneuvers that glorify the aviator — rare scenes only made possible by Paramount’s unfettered access to military resources.
And, making sure to assuage any hesitancy in these would-be recruits, this near-impossible mission is a massive success, representing a stark — and nearly laughable — contrast to the last time the U.S. invaded a country that possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The implications are far-reaching: Because the DOD decided not to produce a Top Gun sequel back in the ‘90s, the Navy lost what could have been another 500% increase in aviator applications. Now, the Navy faces a shortage of pilots.
With the production of “Top Gun: Maverick,” recruitment tents are being set up inside theaters across the country, and “high-speed, adrenaline-pumping” Air Force ads precede each showing. The DOD is leaving no stone unturned to ensure that this box office hit creates the calculated boom in future aviators.
But recruitment efforts go beyond high-speed planes and exhilarating dog-fight scenes, as the movie works to restore faith and support for the American military. The sequel’s glorification of the armed forces plays a crucial role in the cultural rehabilitation of the military’s image, which first suffered from its failure in Vietnam, and now from its delayed retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan. The 2022 film also humanizes the increasingly digitized and seemingly distant armed forces. As drone pilots speak about the horrors of the job and civilian lives are lost to miscalculated strikes, the focus on manned aircraft in a combat environment serves to distract from recent controversies.
The timing of “Top Gun: Maverick” is significant, too. With American forces not presently engaged in direct fighting, the enemy in these films remains loosely defined, allowing the DOD-Hollywood partnership to thrive even in times of peace. In 1986, the Cold War-era message was clear: Patriotism must be cultivated to defend from communism. But now, the enemy is both unnamed and unknown. The vagueness of enemy and absence of material goals suspends the country in a perpetual state of war and traps Americans in a cycle of militarized fear. So while it’s tempting to relegate propagandistic fervor to bygone eras, movies like “Top Gun: Maverick” are merely contemporary reruns of classics with blurred out enemies that are cast to be just as sinister.
As threats to American hegemony evolve, so too does the Pentagon’s pro-military messaging in American films. There is no longer any certainty in winning or losing. The message is now woefully ambiguous: we must prepare for whatever is next.
All that said, and easy as it is to rant about the Pentagon’s smoking-gun rhetoric infiltrating popular media, is the Pentagon’s interference in film really so problematic? I mean, is it really that deep?
Elmer Davis, former director of the OWI, certainly thought so, once arguing that “the easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture, where they do not realise that they are being propagandised.”
But here’s the thing: everyone does this. PepsiCo isn’t uniquely devilish for showing creative, though often disturbing, Mountain Dew ads during the Super Bowl, and the Pentagon isn’t violating Americans’ freedom by trying to encourage enlistments through Hollywood films. Sure, movie night with your family isn’t exactly where you would anticipate needing to guard yourself from government propaganda — I just wanted to escape the heat when I saw “Top Gun: Maverick.”
But even if people believe that the state is intruding into private life and grossly romanticizing the armed forces (which is fair), this isn’t the right place to fight back against American militarism: The movies that are DOD-sponsored probably weren’t going to critically analyze the military anyways.
The ethical difference maker is veracity: Pro-cigarette ads during the Super Bowl would and should spark controversy, and state-influenced media that inaccurately represents American troop actions or disingenuously and offensively portrays foreign nations and peoples should be criticized. To be clear, this sort of anti-truth coercion does occur. The CIA worked on the production of “Zero Dark Thirty,” a film detailing the hunt for Osama bin Laden, where the agency leveraged its resources to ensure that any morally unsound details about the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques were left out. In such cases, Americans are justified in feeling duped and should seek reparations, both from their government and the Hollywood film industry.
Filmmakers and production companies then have an obligation to uphold script sovereignty, and must hold strong against compromising on their narrative for some shiny props. Some part of the onus is on us to be informed consumers of media who can discern reality from — you know — movies.
At the end of the day, the Pentagon deserves some credit. If the content is uncensored and authentic (which is an admittedly big if), then good marketing is good marketing.
Look, Miles Teller’s sexiness isn’t incidental. The story and characters that have captured America’s heart are one weapon in the Pentagon’s expansive arsenal used to project U.S. military power — and that, broadly speaking, is okay.
I’m not saying don’t go see the movie. Just watch critically.
Image by Creative Hatti is licensed under the Pixabay License.
