Gage Skidmore
Audio By Carbonatix
A lot can be understood about an era in history based on the art it produced. In a time when cinema is still dominant, films are often essential to understanding the cultural legacy of an American president. Was there a better take on the scandals that rocked the tenure of Bill Clinton’s years in office than the clever political satire Primary Colors? Did any film examine the grim reality of escalation and post-9/11 terrorism under George W. Bush better than The Dark Knight? Did anything speak to the frank realities of foreign policy in the Obama years more than Zero Dark Thirty? Was it just a coincidence that Get Out deconstructed the myth of a “post-racial” America when Trump was first put in power?
President Joe Biden’s successor will be revealed this week, presumably, and selecting just one film that represents his four years in office comes as a unique challenge. Certainly, theatrical movie-going was under duress during much of this time due to COVID-related lockdowns. There was also a rise in streaming content, and the aftermath of the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. Considering that prestige television like Succession and Shogun seemed to dominate the discourse during these four years, there’s even an argument to be made that film as an art form simply fell out of favor with audiences.
That said, there’s been some truly excellent cinema released since the nation nearly imploded in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Given David Lowery’s spiritual medieval adventure The Green Knight, Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical coming-of-age story The Fabelmans, Christopher Nolan’s grandiose biopic Oppenheimer and Brady Corbet’s upcoming American epic The Brutalist, it’s been a great time for arthouse film fans.
Biden was elected no doubt in part to an agreeable, relatively sensible espousing of a “Can’t we all get along?” sentiment. The former VP was someone people could agree on, even if he had evoked a nostalgia for an era that never really existed. It’s for these reasons that the most defining film of the Biden era is Top Gun: Maverick.
Top Gun: Maverick was the biggest film of the last four years. It wasn’t the top-grossing; worldwide, its impressive haul was surpassed by Avatar: The Way of Water, Spider-Man: No Way Home and this summer’s Inside Out 2. However, the strength of Top Gun: Maverick was the same one that Biden posessed – it converted the moderates. The movie managed to convince a generation of older moviegoers who had turned their back on the theater to sit back in a dark room for two hours and let Tom Cruise take them away on an epic adventure. It also energized young people, many of whom had been stuck watching streaming shows during the pandemic, and showed them why big-screen viewing is always superior.
The politics in Top Gun: Maverick are superfluous. While the original Top Gun received criticism in its own time for appearing to lionize the work of the military, Top Gun: Maverick honors traits like heroism, loyalty and honor without directly correlating it with any nationalist rhetoric. The unknown enemy that Maverick and his team go after is never given a name or country of origin that could spark division; the final aerial combat scene has much more in common with the trench run sequence from the original Star Wars than any straightforward military action thriller.
There’s an old-fashioned chivalry in Top Gun: Maverick, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its gender and racial norms are antiquated. It may be easy to call out the fact that the real military is not the progressive, diverse collection of pilots that’s depicted in Top Gun: Maverick, but the film’s reality exists closer to that of Star Trek, in which the world has simply moved past the point where bigotry is commonplace. Even if both Biden’s term and Cruise’s biggest film in years were ultimately about celebrating how cool it was to be a straight white man, there was a reasonable enough segment dedicated to a largely underappreciated woman. In Jennifer Connelly’s character Penny, Cruise finally had a female co-star of an appropriate age, and certainly one who could provide the sharp comebacks needed to keep him thinking straight.
The promise of Biden’s early campaign tugged at our optimism after years of division and hate speech. His promise of unity would came back to bite him later on, but Top Gun: Maverick succeeded by being a welcome alternative to a murky rival. In an era when so many blockbuster titles depended on knowing previously existing properties or spinoff streaming shows, Top Gun: Maverick offered a pure, straightforward story about the good guys prevailing that was very approachable.
Like Biden, Top Gun: Maverick was always going to be more of an anomaly than a trendsetter. The film did not necessarily initiate a new era in Cruise’s career, as Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning Part One was released to a disappointing global box office haul the next summer. Ironically, it was completely outmatched by Barbie, the more progressive, challenging work that connected with a diverse audience. In the same way that Biden gracefully stepped away, Top Gun: Maverick is unlikely to start a franchise unless Jerry Bruckheimer has his way.
There have been more probing films about the last four years, and it’s hard to watch historical dramas like Killers of the Flower Moon or The Zone of Interest without thinking about the war crimes being committed in the Middle East. However, any positivity to be found within America’s 46th presidency is best distilled in the image of Maverick flying directly into the skyline with faith that the future is bright.
