Top Gun, James Bond, and the Myth of Obsolete Heroes
Tom Cruise as Maverick in Top Gun.
When should heroes retire? If you’re Tom Cruise, the answer may be never. In Top Gun: Maverick, the new sequel to the 1986 smash-hit original, Maverick, now a fifty-seven-year-old captain, is remarkably unscathed by the three decades of test-flights he’s flown since the first Top Gun—as is Tom Cruise, now sixty, from the thirty-six years of movie stunts he’s logged since he first played Maverick at age twenty-four.
But Cruise’s physique isn’t the only thing Top Gun 2 preserves from the original. The plot reprises most major elements from the 1984 storyline: Maverick throws out the rulebook, overcomes doubts from superiors and compatriots, plays sports on the beach, rides his motorcycle by the runway, and dogfights in wicked-cool airplanes. The jets are faster, the special effects more sophisticated, the weapons systems more advanced, but sixty-year-old Tom Cruise is still the best of the best. He out-maneuvers pilots half his age, shoots down airplanes twice his speed, commands a life-or-death mission against impossible odds, redeems his past mistakes, and soars off into the San Diego sunset with his dream girl in the backseat. Neither time nor technological progress can outrace America’s beloved fighter-jock-hero. Maverick is the rare Boomer who gets better at using technology the older he gets.
Nostalgia sells. At the start of July, Maverick had earned over $578 in the domestic box office and $1.1 billion worldwide, selling more tickets than any other real-world action movie except Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight. But if Top Gun 2 is exceptional for its box office stats and unbeatable optimism, it’s not the first big-franchise, big-budget action-hero movie in recent years to ask if national heroes can become obsolete. Ten years ago, Skyfall, the first James Bond film directed by Sam Mendes and the third starring Daniel Craig, explored a near-identical set of questions about heroes, technology, and progress: Can Cold-War icons survive the twenty-first century? When do technological advances displace old-fashioned methods? Which ultimately matters more, the man or the machine?
Daniel Craig as James Bond.
Opposite Maverick, Skyfall gives a set of strikingly different answers to these questions. The clash between the different films—and the different national characters and historical sensibilities they represent—challenges Top Gun’s implicit claims that old norms can adapt to a new technological age, seemingly without a cost.
In major plot-points, Maverick and Skyfall are almost the same movie:
The film opens with our veteran hero flunking a high-stakes mission after he follows his own roguish instincts instead of following orders.
Everyone thinks the hero is dead, but he somehow manages to survive. He enters a state of semi-exile.
The hero is haunted by ghosts from the past: Maverick feels guilt for the flying accident that caused Goose’s death in the first Top Gun; Bond is weighed down by a long career of licensed killing pro patria.
The hero is called out of exile, partially against his will, to fight a new, high-tech enemy that only he has the skill and experience to beat. Maverick takes on ultra-advanced “fifth-generation fighters” that defend an enemy nuclear enrichment plant. Bond takes on Mr. Silva, the MI6-agent-turned-computer-hacking terrorist with a vendetta against Bond’s boss, M.
Over the course of the mission, the hero must confront his demons and adapt his “old ways” to a world that operates with new rules and unfamiliar technology.
The hero wrestles with self-doubt and doubts from others. He and his methods seem outdated. We wonder if the hero is too far past his prime to succeed.
But completing the mission, we discover, requires more than simply advanced technology. The hero must return to his roots. He trains new allies in his old-fashioned ways and uses the classic methods to defeat the enemy against all odds. Maverick shoots down the fifth-generation fighters in his old F-14 Tomcat with Goose’s son in the backseat; Bond takes out Silva with a hunting knife on the ancient family estate, Skyfall.
The hero and his nation prove that they can still hold their own, even in this brave new world. Both films end with the national icon reinstated, redeemed, and ready for the next adventure.
Both Maverick and Skyfall encourage us to read the life of the nation in the life of the hero. Both characters, after all, are military men. Beyond that, they’re national pop-culture icons, created sometime during the Cold War, to some extent representative of their culture’s heroic ideal: the suave, sophisticated spy-womanizer Bond, written by writer Ian Fleming in 1953; the cocky rebel fighter-jock Maverick, created by screenwriters Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. in 1986. Stylistically, both films repeat fan-favorite shots, props, soundtracks, and slogans from previous iterations of the franchise, which create a shared language between the characters and the viewers—a kind of iconography that elevates the story into a shared national myth.
The upshot is that when we watch Bond take on Silva with a gun and radio, we’re also watching the golden age of espionage take on the new age of terrorism and cyberwarfare. Ditto for Maverick taking on the new age of hypersonic jets and automated guns in his F-14 Tomcat. This personal-historical parallel raises the stakes of each movie. Asking, “Which agent will survive?” or “Which pilot will win?” is really asking, “Which technological paradigm is better?” When we talk about the course of the hero’s life, we’re also talking about history.
From this point, it’s easy to see how both Maverick and Skyfall share what we might call a neo-Romantic critique of technology. In neither film does fancy new tech completely oust the old hero. In the box office, so in the story: nostalgia triumphs. Unsurprisingly, the point has a rich history in Anglo-American culture. Maverick and Skyfall reprise similar anti-modernist critiques that took root across the 19th-century Anglosphere in the work of Victorian social critics like John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, William Morris, and G.K. Chesterton, as well as American writers like Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe. Though they differed in important ways, these poets and philosophers were all broadly allied against any definition of “progress” that was strictly technological or scientific. They saw the mechanization of society—the replacement of man by machine and human interaction by depersonalized bureaucratic, mechanical, or social systems—as one of the great tragedies of the modern age. They sought, through various strategies and with various degrees of success, to salvage old ideals of chivalry, heroism, and humanism against the onslaught of the ever-more ruthlessly efficient machine. One can imagine the whole group erupting in cheers when Bond and Maverick, the two Cold-War cavaliers, triumph over fifth-generation fighters and computer hackers with a 1970-vintage aircraft and a hunting knife. Even technological progress, it seems, has its limits.
But despite a shared critical tradition that agrees about what progress is not, Maverick and Skyfall end with near-opposite ideas of what progress actually is. In the next article, we’ll explore how history seems to move differently on either side of the Atlantic—and what that means for trying to salvage old heroic ideals in a new technological age.
Lauren Spohn is a Rhodes Scholar pursuing a PhD in History at the University of Oxford. A private pilot and avid runner, she has worked in tech and finance and writes about philosophy, culture, and technology for a variety of outlets.