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Top Gun: The Lost Pilot

Maverick, my father and me

By Erica WagnerPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 6 min read
Top Story - May 2022
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Top Gun: Maverick — image courtesy Paramount Pictures

Who doesn’t want to be Maverick? In Tony Scott’s Top Gun Pete Mitchell was the epitome of the glorious warrior, as skilled as he was wild. Who doesn’t want to question authority, live beyond the rules, fly too close to the Sun? That’s the catch of course: Maverick is also Icarus, Maverick is Achilles, the hero felled by his own flaw — though it’s his best friend, Goose, who falls from the sky. Cruise, it’s worth noting, has wondered whether a contemporary studio would tolerate Goose’s death, if the movie were made today. “Can you imagine? Today, you’d have a hard time killing Goose,” he has said. “There would be a lot of discussion about killing Goose. You’d go to test screenings, and they would tell us, ‘They hate it when Goose dies! He’s such a likeable character! You’ve got to cut that out of the movie.’”

But it wasn’t cut out of the movie; it’s one of the chief reasons that Top Gun endures, that it’s more than macho competition and beach volleyball. It’s a film about love and loyalty and paying the price. So in Top Gun: Maverick — released in the USA on May 24 — the filmmakers have leaned heavily into Goose’s afterlife, with Miles Teller (who manages an eerie resemblance to Anthony Edwards in the first film) as Rooster, Goose’s son. How can Maverick best serve a man who lost his father because of him?

We are in the realm of myth here. Mitchell/Maverick is the Fisher King, the hero whose wound will not heal. After all these years he’s still plain Captain Pete Mitchell — while his old pal Iceman has long been promoted to admiral. It’s Ice who saves his bacon (not once, but again and again) when Mav gets into trouble — again and again. But test pilots are supposed to blow up zillion-dollar, state of the art aircraft, aren’t they? Well, aren’t they?

No, it’s hardly credible; but legends work by different measures than dull old realism. Top Gun: Maverick is shockingly effective as a story of redemption told against the roar of afterburners. The movie walks a fine line between blasting us out of our seats with the most astonishing flying sequences ever filmed (the young actors, Cruise has said “were always vomiting”) and allowing Maverick to mature into something, well, human.

I was eighteen when Top Gun came out in 1986. I’d just learned — taught myself — to go the movies in my own, discovering that it was simpler, sometimes, not to feel responsible for other people’s happiness. (And yes, I still struggle with that one.) I sat in the dark at the lip of my adult life, and was sucked into a vortex of power, brotherhood, jet fuel. I wanted the hero’s journey to be mine: as strong as that, as fast as that.

My father, around 1943

Because my Dad, you see, was a pilot. He was born in 1924; he’d flown B-29s in the Second World War, the Superfortress: the high-altitude precision bomber that was the most advanced aircraft of its day. The plane that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima, on Nagasaki, a great silver engine of unimaginable tragedy and destruction. My Dad, I knew, had flown in the Pacific; but he’d never talk about his war. Who could blame him, or any of the men of his generation? There were a couple of stories. A co-pilot, killed by flak as he sat beside my father in the cockpit. A difficult landing. Time to change the subject. Yet I was drawn to it, the idea of it, my father in the air, the competence, the skill. The almost-melding with metal to become something other. I wanted to feel that, very badly, in a way I didn’t then understand.

Top Gun offered me connection to that nameless desire. Those men and their beautiful, powerful machines. Growing up I’m afraid I never questioned why I didn’t see women in those hero’s roles: I imagined myself into them and my hidden masculinity felt like a superpower. I can’t explain it: that’s just how it was and is. Sure, in Top Gun: Maverick we have a female member of the team in Monica Barbaro’s Phoenix, now that women can be combat pilots too. Which is great, of course. I mean, if you think there should be combat at all, a question this film — which is also a love song and paean to the Navy — chooses not to ask. But Phoenix is still a member of what we recognise as a brotherhood. She’s not a female pilot. She’s a pilot.

Monica Barbaro as Phoenix — image courtesy Paramount Pictures

A pilot, a man made free by physics, by lift and drag. My son teases me because I won’t ride a rollercoaster — I’m terrified, I hate them. Fear to no purpose. But put me in a stunt plane, roll me round the sky until, yes, I vomit, and I am in bliss. But Mom, my son says. Rollercoasters are safe. Stunt planes are actually dangerous. To which I say, with Maverick: it’s not the plane, it’s the pilot in the box.

My Dad was a pilot, I said. I grew up with that story, and my mother’s adoration of the past he would not discuss. Although my Dad never flew an airplane with a jet engine, flew bombers rather than fighters, watching Top Gun I considered the distance between what I saw on the screen and what he might have experienced and it did not seem so great to me. Therefore the distance between the film’s ideals — courage, companionship, risk, flight, escape, a pure world narrowed to speed, thrust, altitude — and myself seemed bridgeable too.

But three decades later we sit in the dark again with Maverick, and things are much less simple than they were. The engines of those F/A-18s can’t quite blast away the thought of a war in Ukraine, of wars all over the world, of the dreadful price exacted by the human need to tell the story of the hero’s journey. Those engines themselves are fuelled by the destruction of the very Earth itself, our only home, my longing for flight more costly than I ever thought it would be, thirty years ago.

And here’s something else. My Dad wasn’t a pilot. After he died I discovered the story I’d grown up with was just that, a story. Another word for a story is a lie. Sometimes it’s easy for me to understand the nature of that lie, the reasons for it; on other days it’s less clear. It didn’t harm anyone, not really, this story that got told because my mother — a storyteller herself — wanted a certain kind of hero in her life.

Maybe you’re thinking: Erica, you say this story, this story of your father the pilot, never harmed anyone. But did it harm you? I am careful with the word ‘harm’. The story, the lie — it makes me sad, it puzzles me sometimes. I wish I knew more about my father, about what his life before I knew him had truly been like. But that is in the past and cannot be retrieved. And I know enough. That he loved Boston cream pie and celery tonic. That he could fix almost anything. That his strong, square hands looked like mine do now. That he adored my mother. And me. And my husband, and our son. That 15 years after his death I know I could have told him about all the changes in my life this last year — changes that have come so fast sometimes I feel myself pulling enough G’s to black out — and that he would have listened, and understood.

A pilot’s velocity. The centrepiece of Top Gun: Maverick is a treacherous mountain run, seemingly impossible, a target deep in a ring of rock, hidden like a giant’s treasure. Don’t think, just do, Maverick says. And yet he does both, somehow, thinking about those he cares for as he hurtles through the air — and so the wound is healed. How we crave it, to see how fast we can go, how high we can fly. I can’t help myself. Those men and their flaming, deadly machines, how I would become them, if I could. Come on, sweetheart. One last ride.

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About the Creator

Erica Wagner

Lead Editorial Innovator, Vocal. Author, critic, friend, parent, cook. New book: Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge. Twitter: @EricaWgnr, Insta: @ericawgnr

Reader insights

Nice work

Very well written. Keep up the good work!

Top insights

  1. Easy to read and follow

    Well-structured & engaging content

  2. Excellent storytelling

    Original narrative & well developed characters

  3. Heartfelt and relatable

    The story invoked strong personal emotions

  1. Masterful proofreading

    Zero grammar & spelling mistakes

  2. On-point and relevant

    Writing reflected the title & theme

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Comments (2)

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  • Mike Singleton - Mikeydred11 months ago

    Excellent article on a movie I still haven't seen but I will get round to it and the follow up at some point

  • E M2 years ago

    Hi Erica, Wow this really touched me. I wasn’t expecting the way it unfolded. I liked how you intertwined your feelings on the movie and how it has impacted your life. Very well written and I enjoyed reading it. Thanks for sharing 😊

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