Warning: nothing but spoilers!
The expression “vibe shift” basically means a change in the zeitgeist, which is itself a German word that translates to “spirit of the age.” The spirit of the age—again basically—means the defining characteristics of a particular period of time. The term is useful because it’s wonderfully flexible and wonderfully subjective. One is free to assemble a series of events or cultural artifacts, and, on the basis of that, postulate both an age and a spirit that dominates it. Or, if you prefer, a vibe.
This leads me to Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and what could be called the new sadness.
The first Top Gun movie (1986) was not serious, but it was fun. In that movie, we follow Pete Mitchell (Maverick) through the Navy’s Topgun program. An incredibly talented pilot, Maverick’s technical prowess wins universal admiration, but he has difficulty following orders or working as part of a team. The film’s crisis occurs when Maverick’s friend, Goose, dies, causing Maverick to question his fitness for flying. When his rival, Iceman, is in a desperate dogfight with Soviet MIGs, however, Maverick joins the battle and saves him, shooting down three enemy planes. Offered his choice of assignments, Maverick elects to return to Topgun as an instructor, teaching new pilots the lessons he has learned.
In Top Gun: Maverick, we pick Maverick up more than thirty years later, only to learn that his naval career has stagnated. Presumably because of his difficulty with authority and his determination to challenge limitations, he has never been promoted, and found a place as a test pilot. Even this is threatened, however. His commanding office, Admiral Cain, is convinced drones are the future of flight, and plans to shut the program down. The new world, apparently, will have no place for pilots, or at least pilots who want to test limits.
Maverick’s prospects are revived when he’s recalled to North Island, on the orders of Iceman, who is now a full admiral. He will not be asked to fly a mission, however, but to train a new group of pilots. Here too, however, his history follows him. That group includes Goose’s son, Rooster: Maverick must revisit questions of responsibility for Goose’s death and contemplate sending Rooster on a mission that may lead to his death as well. Maverick reconnects with a former girlfriend, but that is also tinged with regret—a sense of past failure and a life he didn’t have. Finally, he learns that Iceman is dying of cancer.
Even flying is no longer fun. The mission involves destroying a uranium-enriching facility in an unnamed country against an undefined enemy. This facility is in the base of a canyon, and is very well defended with radar and a new kind of jet—called “Generation Five” in the film—that purportedly rivals or exceeds American planes. The approach that Maverick chooses is extremely demanding: it involves flying at low altitudes along a riverbed to avoid radar detection, and then, after bombing the facility, climbing steeply to exit the canyon. This puts incredible stress on the pilots’ bodies. Maverick flies a simulation of the mission to prove that it’s physically possible, and grunts in pain as he twists his plane back and forth while following the twists of the river and comes close to passing out during the final rapid assent. Death is held out as a very real possibility.
The tonality of Top Gun: Maverick reminded me very strongly of Daniel Craig’s James Bond. While those films were definitely a step up in the Bond franchise, the unrelenting grimness of Craig’s Bond ultimately grated, at least for me. At no point does he ever seem to enjoy himself—sexual pleasure is at best a momentary distraction from the business of murder and self-loathing. In the final installment (No Time to Die), Bond literally does die, and because he has become too toxic to live. While Top Gun: Maverick does not go this far, the Maverick at the end of the film is nonetheless left trying to assemble a life from the bits and pieces of his past that are still available.
So, what does this mood express? This is an interpretive question, and answers need to be speculative. An obvious starting point, however, is that the first Top Gun was made during Reagan’s Cold War, and there was a political context for heroism and sacrifice (one point repeatedly made about that film was that it functioned as advertising and promotion for the American military). In the 2022 film, however, the enemy remains vague and the stakes unclear. This leads to a crisis of purpose. If Maverick’s bliss coincided with national security needs in the original Top Gun, here the “need for speed” increasingly seems like an adolescent obsession that prevents adulthood.
A concept that may be useful for understanding Maverick’s peculiar resonance is “hypernormalization.” Adam Curtis has described this as a state in which structures and institutions are in perceptible collapse, but society persists in acting as if that everything is proceeding normally, largely because an alternative to the present order is unimaginable. This awareness infuses life with a sense of artificiality:
The original Top Gun was certainly far from realistic, but its fantasy was grounded in a geopolitical reality. Because those coordinates don’t exist here, character motivation becomes a matter of personality, not necessity. And when Maverick’s desire for excellence loses its sense of larger purpose, it becomes a kind of self-indulgence. This may also explain why Daniel Craig’s Bond was so oddly joyless. If the character of James Bond always behaved badly, the Cold War gave his actions some degree of justification. Absent that context, filmmakers needed to concoct implausible scenarios to create national security emergencies dire enough to excuse that behavior. Because those scenarios were so clearly fabricated, the toxicity of the character became increasingly apparent, to the point where he is finally intolerable even to himself.
Of course, all fiction requires a suspension of disbelief, and the very existence of the fantasy genre proves that works don’t need to be grounded in reality to be affecting. Nonetheless, the retelling of stories from a different time highlights a current crisis of purpose or direction. Maverick’s limited career is itself indicative of these shifting societal realities—people with his disposition no longer have a role. Near the conclusion of the film, Maverick and Goose’s son, Rooster, now reconciled, work together restoring an old plane. It’s an image of retirement, and, given the alternatives, about the best he could hope for. If Admiral Cain is correct, drones will soon be handling all the dangerous missions anyhow.
Travel Only By Night 