Top Gun: Maverick, Ready Player One and the Weaponization of Wokeness

I remember that when the press announced that Top Gun 2 (Top Gun: Maverick) was out of the development hell where it had languished for three decades and going into production I was skeptical about its box office prospects, and later surprised at how high it soared--grossing over $700 million in North America, a figure which would have been stellar even before the pandemic, and was that much more so after COVID-19 dealt a structural blow to the theater business. Of course, hits like that tend to not "just happen," and in this case the film was helped by at least two advantages, namely the relatively weak competition in the summer of 2022 compared with more crowded summer seasons, and the media cheerleading for the film. The latter was evident in the extremely positive reviews (the Rotten Tomatoes' Top Critics score was 99 percent--versus the 56 percent score they gave the original back in 1986, even though it was pretty much the same film), but also in what was evident in those glowing reviews, the critics giving much that they sometimes find objectionable a pass. This certainly went for how the film held up from the standpoint of "wokeness," and indeed a comparison of the response to Top Gun 2 with the response to Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One not much earlier is revealing.

After all, consider what those who attacked Ready Player One with such vitriol had against it, its trafficking in nostalgia for '80s pop culture. Many would not see anything inherently offensive about that. (I didn't then--and frankly still don't.) But some see the fact that Ernest Cline's book simply happened to be a love letter to things mostly enjoyed by males of a certain ethnic background as infuriating because of their demand for the "decentering" of that perspective and desire for the "centering" of other perspectives (non-male, non-White, LGBTQ+, etc.) in its place--to the point of demonizing pop cultural nostalgia of Cline's type. Rounding out the attack on that front those taking this line nit-picked his book from the standpoint of its failings with regard to "diversity" and "inclusion"--again, hyperbolically I thought, Cline seeming to me to have gone out of his way to offer exactly that in such characters as Aech, and Art3mis, only for those critics to dismiss them as superficial concessions (quite unfairly, in this reader's view, given the "moving the goalposts" of the implicit and very unreasonable demand for High Literature-level characterization in an unabashedly non-Literary novel). However, Top Gun 2 (Top Gun: Maverick), no less a piece of '80s nostalgia than Cline's book in intent and execution, seems to have caught nothing like such flak on that account. Equally those who were so hostile to Ready Player One did not raise any objections to the nods to diversity in Top Gun 2 having been rather more vulnerable to dismissal as "superficial concessions" than in Cline's book and its film adaptation, all as those prone to be fire-breathing about LGBTQ+ inclusiveness and "body positivity" did not raise a hue and cry about the self-described "fat," "old" and "age-appropriate" Kelly McGillis being out in favor of a slimmer and younger Jennifer Connelly as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell's love interest this time around.

Considering the difference one could argue that the summer of 2022 was not the spring of 2018, that passions about these issues may have cooled somewhat by that point--and that Cline's Ready Player One may simply have been unlucky in that one book and film's subjection to the whole weight of the identity politics' practitioners' fury over pop culture broadly, so that it ended up the object of what became a mindless pile-on in that way that so happens in political life as its detractors loaded it with a burden no one work can fairly be made to bear. However, that does not seem to me the whole story, especially in light of the media's Rah-Rah attitude toward Top Gun--and the plain and simple fact that wokeness was far from dead then. (Just consider the reception Barbie got a whole year later.) Rather it seems that the differences in the content of the two works matter immensely. After all, the entertainment press being what it is it is not without reasons for despising Ready Player One, and encouraging the public to do so. Most obviously, if that book's politics were often confused (with its thoroughly right-wing cult of the self-made tech billionaire, its evocation of Ayn Rand and her ideology by way of Rush's allusions, etc.), it still featured an ecologically ruined neoliberal dystopia where corporate scum who enslave the hapless are intent on controlling and enshittifying the Internet, with the heroes those who fight against them--and at the climax of the story, their not doing so in a singlehanded, individualistic way but literally rallying the whole online world's people to fight to keep the commons that is the only thing enabling them to get through the day in their hands and out of those of the grasping capitalists in what by twenty-first century standards could seem October 1917, all as Cline gave the middle finger to the copyright Nazis dominating the media over and over again. Don't think for a moment that any of this went over well with the neolibs and neocons who dominate the conventional wisdom--even with the film watering down what oppositional content the original possessed. By contrast Top Gun 2 was an old-fashioned flag-waving armed forces-singing right-wing movie all the way down--and don't think for a moment that this didn't go over well with the neolibs and neocons who dominate the conventional wisdom, for whom this was not Red October but the Hunt for it. That made all the difference in their attitude--and specifically in the weaponization of the wokeness that, for the millionth time, is not a left-wing but an essentially anti-leftist political outlook very readily deployed against anything that can smack of the left in that way that accounts for a very great deal in the politics of our time, even on Big Media's review pages.