(Last) Weekly Roundup: No Capeshit Here Edition

How deranged is The Current Year? How much time do you have? But here's what the kids call a "leading indicator": The truest, realest movie made for young men in perhaps two decades was created by a pint-sized monomaniacal freak of nature who genuinely believes that aliens crashed a bunch of DC-8s into a mountain 75 million years ago. This long-awaited sequel to Top Gun is better at every level than its predecessor. Supposedly Tom Cruise turned down a nine-figure sum to take it directly to a "streaming service". You have to see this one in a theater, for now.

When you do, there will be a short interlude between the avalanche of advertorials/trailers (27 minutes at my local theater) and the film itself, in which Tom Cruise will thank you for coming to see him. "We have real F-18s, real flying," he says. And he smiles as if it was no big deal to do this film largely for real, like people just get up in the morning and fly F-18s at 500mph a Honda Accord's length away from the ocean with million-dollar cameras hanging off their noses. And then we're off to the races.

"The only problem with the film," one reviewer noted, "is that it is not 7 hours longer." It's hard not to agree with him. Top Gun: Maverick is utterly brilliant. Both for what it is, and for what it is not.

It is not capeshit.

Mild spoilers for the first half of Top Gun:Maverick follow.

Your humble author has railed against capeshit before, in a series of posts that I have had to temporarily vanish during however long I work in the insurance business, but here's a dialed-down precis of my objections to the superhero films that have dominated theaters for years now:

Superhero shows are despicable. Not because they're boring, not because they're childish, and not even because the MCU has become a self-parody where identity politics matter more than the Silver Surfer's difficulties with Galactus. Rather, it's the underlying message that you start life with all your "powers" that makes Capeshit so morally stultifying. Superheroes are born super. They don't earn it. Their parents rigged the game for them. This is even true of Batman and Iron Man; their superpower is being a combination of rich and amoral, said superpower being inherited from their parents.

To watch capeshit is to be dragged through hours of greenscreen CGI slush where people make weird hand gestures and scrunch up their faces while various lightning bolts and outrageous things happen thanks to their "powers". The outcome of every contest is determined in advance by the relative merit of their "powers" and whatever gyrations the screenwriters of their film think should occur along the way. It should be noted that for a significant percentage of Capeshitters their "powers" are activated simply by getting really angry or agitated about something, and their powers become more, er, powerful the angrier they get. Children see this, they take notes, and it affects their behavior. Can't you just see the superpowers waiting to get out of the person below?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDYNVH0U3cs

If life were a movie, that is the precise moment when the beams would come out of her eyes, she would fly up into the sky, Hillary Clinton would be installed as President, and we could have had $7 gas plus a war with Russia all the way back in 2017. This woman thinks being angry and full of rage is a superpower, when in fact being powerlessly filled with rage is sort of an anti-superpower; it destroys your ability to affect the situation in a positive fashion.

By contrast, Top Gun: Maverick is a nonstop affirmation of real-life humanity and its power to improve. There's nothing superhuman about Maverick himself; he is a great test pilot but hopelessly challenged in daily life, still kicking around the Navy solely because his old friend "Iceman" is the Admiral Of The Pacific Fleet and therefore able to get him out of whatever trouble comes up. A situation comes up that will require some hero-style flying. Might be a suicide mission. Is Maverick up for the challenge? Not the challenge of flying the mission, mind you. The challenge of teaching a new generation of Top Guns to take on the mission, and survive it.

The unnamed-but-obviously-Iran enemy has better tech, better missiles, and better planes. This one can't be won by robots or lasers, and it especially can't be won by kids who have never been challenged by real adversity in their lives. There's a great scene where the admiral in charge tells Maverick,

"These are the best pilots in the world," to which Maverick spits,

"And they've been told that their whole careers." It's quickly obvious that these "best pilots" aren't ready for the mission. It's going to take a miracle to get them there in time.

My older readers are not doubt confused right now. Isn't that the plot of pretty much every war movie ever, up to and including the fine Heartbreak Ridge, made when Clint Eastwood was the same age (57) as Tom Cruise in this one, but minus the anti-aging properties of Scientology? Well, of course it is -- but if you're a Millennial or younger, you've never seen any of that stuff. The past fifteen years have been nothing but capeshit and various takes on The Hunger Games, sprinkled liberally with endless Star Wars trash.

(Digression Zero: Is Star Wars capeshit? I'm afraid so. Worse yet, it's capeshit mixed with aristocratic fantasies, as David Brin points out. When George Lucas decided to retcon Luke into being Vader's son, something that happened after Alan Dean Foster wrote Splinter Of The Mind's Eye, the whole story collapsed into "man kills his father to take power", a tale as old as time. And of course you can only really rule in the Star Wars Universe if you are genetically predisposed to use the Force, another Lucas addition-after-the-fact. None of this will keep me from enjoying the original three films, but it's a damned shame.)

(Digression One: Is Matrix capeshit? No but mostly yes. Anybody can learn to be superhuman in the Matrix, but the highest level is reserved for the person born into it, "the One", and without them the victory condition for humanity can't take place.)

There's been some discussion as to whether TG:M is a "right-wing" film. I'm not sure there's been an actual right-wing film in my lifetime. TG:M feels a little right-wing nowadays just because it pays only lip service to the worst of modern cultural requirements. The new group of pilots is exactly as diverse as it needs to be, but it's pretty obvious that when the chips are down it's going to be the handsome white dudes who make it happen. This is largely a story of self-assured white men doing brave stuff, most notably with a star turn for newcomer Glen Powell doing a wonderful job of somehow embodying both a young Tom Cruise and a young Val Kilmer. Well, eighty-six percent of combat-facing pilots are white men. So it's accurate. If you made a movie about the NBA, you wouldn't have most of the characters be white or Hispanic, would you? This is not necessarily political, but people are going to make it political.

I'd say the only "right-wing" aspect of the movie is the idea that human beings can train and improve to do exceptional things without recourse to superpowers or other external authorities. As noted previously, this used to be the central idea behind the majority of movies made for young men, whether we are talking about "The Karate Kid" or "Rad" or "Rocky IV". This idea is now considered to be dangerous. It could lead to young men getting off their couches, closing their laptops, and participating in the real world. Our Uniparty would really rather you sat back and

CONSOOMED

all the capeshit, all the junk food, all the pornography, all the weed, everything that keeps young men from going outside and being exceptional(ly dangerous to the regime). I cannot possibly emphasize enough the difference between capeshit and real movies here. Watching capeshit leaves you feeling entertained at best. Watching "Rocky IV" makes you want to go punch someone, or maybe learn to punch someone. There's a big difference. Kids emulate what they see. If they see that anyone can become a hero pilot, they'll behave accordingly. If they are confronted on a daily basis with a fictional world where only the chosen-at-birth have a say in what's going on, they're going to take their cues from that, as well. That's the danger of Capeshit Land.

I'm sure that a few of my more "seen-it-all" readers will be quick to pop in with stories about how they read a few comics as kids and didn't turn out homeless, but there is a big difference between reading the occasional comic and existing in a world that is absolutely immersed in capeshit. The stories we tell to young men make a big difference in their lives. A significant percentage of them have no effective parenting. They will be parented by the things they read and watch.

It was just lovely to see Kawasaki back on board. The first "Top Gun" film made the GPZ900R, called "Ninja" on these shores, a star. It's joined here by the Ninja H2, which is no faster than my ZX-14R but looks more proportional with a five-foot-seven rider. A few of my military pals have noted that the most unrealistic thing about the movie is Maverick being permitted to ride without all the military-required safety gear. Even with all of our Uniparty Forever Wars (that we eventually lose to a bunch of goat farmers with bolt-action rifles, thus giving the lie to the leftie trope that "you can't hold off a tank with an AR-15") the Armed Forces often lose more soldiers to sportbike crashes in a year than to actual combat, as many as 194 in a single twelve-month period. So the military takes sportbike safety seriously.

There's really only one change I would have made to the film: I would have had less Maverick and more of the new kids. It's their time to shine. Tom Cruise is just on the front end of Generation X, so I know that like me he has experienced a lifetime of Boomers doggedly holding on to everything from leadership positions to control of what gets played on the radio. I hope that he and I can avoid the temptation to do the same ourselves. Any movie about jet pilots, or race car drivers, or any other heroic activity should focus on the young people who are actually in a place to do the thing. A world where Jeff Bridges, Samuel L. Jackson, and Liam Neeson are still doing "action hero" stuff is just embarrassing. At least we got Daniel Craig out of the Bond role at the age of 53, a bit older than Sean Connery was when he did the one-off "Never Say Never Again" largely for charity. This notion that people can be "eternally youthful" is worse than narcissistic; it's openly mocking God.

Tom Cruise is almost an exception, but not quite. He's still ultra-fit, still ultra-handsome, but at some point we all have to be honest with, and about, ourselves. If you ever see me with a head full of grey hair, aging-folk-singer style, you'll know I've reached that point of honesty myself. At least I had about two hours the other day where I could be a kid again, watching a super-cool movie about super-cool planes and pilots. Maybe my son can do it; I was thoroughly myopic by his age but he can call a one-inch target at 75 yards without glasses. Could he be a pilot of the oft-speculated SR-72? Probably not -- but don't confuse that with definitely not. He is definitely not going to shoot laser beams from his eyes or have "strange doctor" powers. Look up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! Well, yes, it's going to have to be a plane.

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For Hagerty, I wrote about a make-believe Porsh and a trip back to 1978.