The profound uncoolness of R.E.M.’s 1994 album *Monster* was placed in sharp relief earlier this year in David Robert Mitchell’s thriller *Under the Silver Lake*, in which the callow, self-styled private eye played by Andrew Garfield invites a much-younger girl to dance to "What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?" It’s Oldies Night below Hollywood Forever and Garfield’s Sam is feeling his age. "I don’t know this song," admits his date, popping a red balloon as if to literally burst his bubble. Their exchange could be a millennial update of Steely Dan’s comically Nabokovian "Hey Nineteen" except that they definitely can dance together. We cut to a fish-eye lens to watch our thirty-something hero peaking to a nameless drug, abjectly and shamelessly pogoing away to Peter Buck’s chunky power chords. It’s more than a feeling when he hears that old song they used to play.

 "I’d studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines," sings Michael Stipe amidst the stream-of-consciousness wordplay of *Monster's* lead single.  In a movie whose pop cultural signifiers have been obsessively curated, "What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?" pulls double duty as an I-Love-the-90s punchline and also an aural corollary to the protagonist’s paranoiac headspace. Stipe  famously derived the song’s lyrical hook from the mantra of a mentally ill man who physically assaulted CBS anchor Dan Rather on the streets of New York; the assailant was allegedly in search of some grand unified theory to tune into, the frequency of those in the know.  The track’s symbolic utility in a thriller tethered to an unreliable, impulsively violent narrator is readily apparent; the query "what’s the frequency, Kenneth?" is unanswerable, even as it suggests some deeper conspiracy to be untangled, or some subliminal wavelength to hang ten upon.

 Hitting radio in the wake of *Automatic For the People’s* majestic, empathetic anthems, "Kenneth’s" buzz was like a fly in the one-song-heals all ointment R.E.M. had been rubbing all over everybody’s hurts. The second verse quotes Richard Linklater’s hipster-ethnographic classic *Slacker* (1991), observing that "to withdraw in disgust is not the same as apathy." Translation: just because you hate everything doesn’t mean that you don’t care. In lieu of communion, its narrator opts to marinate in his own hallucinatory confusion. "I never understood," he confesses in the final line; "don’t fuck with me." Hold on: was that an F-bomb from America’s most huggable rock star? "Oh no, I know a dirty word," Kurt Cobain snarked three years earlier on "Smells Like Teen Spirit," as if anticipating his future pal’s enfeebled stab at profanity.

*Monster's* uncoolness, then and now, was and is a byproduct of its attempted coolness, an approximation that makes it an outlier in a catalogue mostly unconcerned with such superficialities. R.E.M.’s grand narrative in the 80s had always been a coercion of the mainstream to meet the band on their own oddball terms; even by the time of "Losing My Religion" the foursome was still cultivating a Southern Gothic sensibility (stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but that title is just a little bit of Athens slang for catching feelings). The bleak, gorgeous, death-tinged folk of *Automatic For the People* slotted in nicely alongside Seattle’s various flannel-clad complainers, and was also a natural outgrowth of the more mid-tempo austerity that the band had developed while under contract to Warners with *Green and Out of Time*.

*Monster's* louder, riffier approach was intended as camouflage and commentary on the nascent grunge movement, a cycle whose leading lights dutifully evinced admiration for R.E.M.’s work ("they’re the greatest," fawned avowed fanboy Kurt) while encroaching significantly on their market share. The story was that the group had embraced a harder, amped-up sound organically, but there was clearly calculation in the record’s contents and rollout. When asked about the inherent goofiness of "Shiny Happy People" or "Stand," Stipe would say that they were experiments in R.E.M. playing a "cartoon band" like the Archies or the Banana Splits, yet he wouldn’t cop to such motives with *Monster*. Instead, the album’s startling visual and sonic metamorphosis, beginning with the singer’s newly shorn scalp and extending to more eccentric, aggressive physical postures and wardrobe choices across the board (i.e. Mike Mills’ Nudie Suits) demanded to be taken at face value.

At literal face value circa 1994 — let’s call it at least fifteen bucks a CD and ten per cassette in the U.S.— *Monster* was worthy enough to sell four million copies, less than *Out of Time* or *Automatic* but still a lot. The joke goes that that probably two million of them were eventually stranded at used-record stores: all those blurry orange-and-black bears staring out forlornly from resale racks and bargain-bins like Cordoroy, forming a metaphor for the hardcore fans accrued and alienated as their college-rock heroes crossed over into hockey arenas once and for all.  (When you literally sell out Madison Square Garden, it means you’ve sold out figuratively — that’s the math.)

It’s not that people thought the record was *bad*, exactly, but even the reviewers who got what Stipe was doing with all that posturing had to point out that there was, for the first time, something to get with a band whose very name implied the unconscious, involuntary, revelatory quality of dreaming. *Monster’s* thoroughly received aesthetic, a glam pastiche layered over grunge thunder, represented something new and unwelcome: a dread self-consciousness. "I don’t sleep, I dream," Stipe insisted, a bit too coyly. Those fluttering eyelids were now frozen in a wink, the musical equivalent of sleeping with one eye open.

There are a few unguarded moments on *Monster*, and at least one deep cut is open enough to signal permeability in its title. During interviews, Stipe spoke with uncharacteristic directness about "Let Me In" as plea "to, for, and about" Kurt Cobain, whose suicide serves to contextualize the song’s every aspect: the murky guitar; the desperate lyric sheet; the choked air of despair. In terms of tempo and melody, the lovelorn "Strange Currencies" is *Monster’s* sequel to "Everybody Hurts," a blue-eyed soul shuffle with a sing-along chorus that works equally well when addressed to God, your girlfriend, or a ceiling mirror.  But it’s "Let Me In" that revises the earlier hit in a meaningfulway, concluding that sometimes reaching out to touch somebody is not enough. It’s futile for everybody if the somebody who’s hurting won’t reach back. "He gathered up his loved ones and he brought them all around to say goodbye/nice try," Stipe mumbles in the tone of a detached depressive; later, on the final chorus, he adopts a keening falsetto that cuts through the album’s almost uniformly deadpan vocal performances and elevates the song’s careening melody into the stratosphere.

It’s fair to say that *Monster* as a whole is haunted by Cobain, and so is *Under the Silver Lake*. Sam’s love for Nirvana is such that it actually compels him to commit murder. In Mitchell’s most inspired scene, he comes face to face with a mysterious, ancient composer who claims to be the secret brains behind countless top 40 hits — a spectre modelled on Phil Spector who tickles the ivories with the Invisible Hand of the Market. His story insinuates that the pop music that’s catalyzed the most radical individual and collective revolutions has only ever been industry formula, including the Gen X rallying cry of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." "That song was not written on a distorted guitar... I wrote it, here, somewhere between a blow job and an omelette... there is no rebellion, there’s only me earning a paycheck." Mitchell’s conceptual gambit is cleverly rooted in Cobain’s own self-deprecating claim that he nicked the riff for "Teen Spirit" from Boston’s "More Than a Feeling," a song that is explicitly about the visceral, full-bodied joy of hearing a beloved melody on the radio. What Sam has for Nirvana is more than a feeling, but the Composer is telling him to eat crow. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" isn’t an homage, or even a copy. It’s a forgery. Oh well, whatever. Nevermind.

"Exploding Head," R.E.M. thought of calling *Monster*. If they had, then the gory, fatal money shot of Sam’s meeting with the composer could have been another in-joke in the most reference-infested American movie in years (comparisons to *the Big Lebowski* and *Inherent Vice*, themselves hugely allusive works, only scratch the surface of *Under the Silver Lake's* exhaustive annotations). When our hero bludgeons the pop-industrial Moloch with a replica of Kurt’s own electric guitar, it is an act of vengeance to subsume Stipe’s gesture of mourning in "Let Me In"; it provides a righteous gross-out giggle that catches in the throat. Does his this-machine-kills-fascists gesture re-inscribe significance to Nirvana’s signature song, or does it suggest something more bathetic, a murderous fury wielded on behalf of an ersatz anthem?

"Let me in" could be Sam’s mantra as he cruises through the Valley like a fuckboi Philip Marlowe, and so could "what’s the frequency, kenneth?" What he wants is access to a hidden world (and its spoils) as a salve for the existential pain of being on the outside looking in, which presents here asaging out of coolness and so clinging to the idea that the things he loved as a teenager actually *mean* something. As a parody of male savior-narratives in which the missing femme fatale doesn’t actually want to be found or rescued by her shady one-night stand, *Under the Silver Lake* is a swing and a miss, attempting the old Lynchian trick (and this is the only way in which its mostly bland surrealism is actually Lynchian) of being about misogyny and female exploitation while indulging in it. (See also: *Eyes Wide Shut*, which Mitchell probably has a billion times. I’m guessing mostly on VHS.) Where it’s sort of revelatory anyway is in its timeliness as an Epstein movie (the secret global sex cult is real and only the super-rich need apply!) as well as its Reddit-level understanding of how desperately we narrativize our experiences and seek synchronicity. The search for meaning in entertainment becomes jaggedly double-edged.  In the end, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" *does* mean something, just not what Sam thinks. It’s not a gesture of resistance, but the byproduct of a music-industrial mind control project flattering every generation into thinking their own personal heroes invented rock n’roll. (Here we are now, entertain us.)

The issue of whether or not the Composer was behind any of R.E.M.’s mid-90s hits is never raised in *Under the Silver Lake*, and that’s fair enough. There’s nothing epochal about *Monster*, which may have been the first R.E.M. record 1) to seem anything less than, and 2) certainly the last about which anybody would have even tried to make the claim. (Actually, 1996’s focused, greyscale *New Adventures in Hi-Fi* is 1) better and 2) a masterpiece, but that’s an essay for a different 25th anniversary.) There’s also probably nothing epochal about *Under the Silver Lake*, which won’t likely stand the test of time alongside other cult classics because 1) it’s literally the end of the world as we know it and 2) it’s already been fully reclaimed, a beneficiary (or is it a casualty?) of an ever-accelerating cycle of hype, backlash and explanation. To give Mitchell credit, it’s these very same topics —i.e. incipient apocalypse and the yearning for something that’ll endure — that make the film impossible to dismiss (compared to the Coens and PTA, the director is all thumbs, but he’s got at least one on the pulse). If nothing else, the sensation of being seen as Garfield lip-syncs with eyes wide shut to Stipe’s nonsense poetry, briefly luxuriating in a coolness that’s long gone and was also never really there in the first place, will stick with me like something out of a horror movie. Turns out that there’s a *Monster* at the end of this essay, and it’s me.

Oldies Night: *Monster* at 25

There is a line in Woody Allen’s *Hannah and Her Sisters *where Frederick, a crusty, hermetically shut-in intellectual played by Max Von Sydow (clearly standing in for his crusty, hermetically shut-in creator) cites professional wrestling in a litany of all of the horrible things he sees when he turns on his television. 57 channels and nothing’s on, as Bruce Springsteen might say, except that Frederick probably doesn’t listen to the Boss. (Also that song wouldn’t be written for another six years. I’m not an idiot, I’m just trying to make a point.)

"Can you imagine," he asks his live-in-mentee-slash-fuckbuddy Lee (Barbara Hershey), "the level of a mind that watches wrestling?"

*Hannah and Her Sisters *goes out of its way to savage forms of cultural expression other than Cole Porter: "[they] look like they’re going to stab their mothers," observes Allen’s onscreen surrogate about a punk group at CBGB’s. Frederick’s criticism of wrestling is a rhetorical throwaway, lent extra gravitas coming from a guy who was smart enough to play chess with Death (a scenario parodied in Woody’s 2005 play *Death Knocks, *which substitutes gin rummy for chess and Kew Gardens for Medieval Sweden). In truth, it’s not that Frederick (or Woody Allen) can’t imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling; they just don’t *want *to.

This aversion is a missed opportunity for guys whose fondest wish would be to lord their intellect over everybody else. Being demonstrably smart about supposedly stupid things is a fundamental tenet of contemporary academia, which is forever trying to strip-mine the superculture for rich ore of meaning. When I was in grad school at the University of Toronto, I had a film studies professor who, in addition to publishing work on race and representation in American cinema, edited a collection of essays called *Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling. *I went and bought it as quickly as I could. It’s a pretty good book whose contributors take pains—and precious little pleasure—to be as thoughtful and erudite as possible on their subject, writing not as fans but detached chroniclers thinking through the implications of an entertainment form that obliges its patrons to check their brains at the door. ("Arguments that swell over the simple fluff and shallow violence and pry deeper into the wet, sticky blood of the antagonists," promises one notable blurb,"...an unparalleled look at the cultural interaction wrestling has with history and the world.")  Not only can this well-tenured roll call of writers and deep thinkers imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling, they can sympathize and even identify with it.

There is a long tradition of writing about sports from a cultural or sociological perspective, but because sports are unpredictable—because they’re competitive and uncertain in terms of their actual outcome—they tend to be more interestingly handicapped or reported on than analyzed in terms of their "deeper" meaning or themes. ESPN’s recent MJ hagiography *The Last Dance *is an example of trying to imbue sports journalism with mythic significance. I liked seeing Gary Payton talk shit but on the whole, it did not get there.

*Steel Chair to the Head *features a piece by wrestling superfan Roland Barthes, whose 1957 essay "The World of Wrestling" is ground zero for an intellectual approach to the subject, unfurling its argument with speed and clarity. It argues that professional wrestling—as opposed to amateur wrestling, with its direct links to ancient, Olympian tradition—is a craft integrating athletics and theatre. In the late 1950s, as pro wrestling migrated onto television, it was easier—and more urgent—to consider its popularity and presentation as narrative spectacle. Barthes’ essay is filled with talk of heroes and villains, victory, defeat, each as a form of specialized ritual; of expectations set up and fulfilled, or else cruelly dashed so as to whet the spectator’s appetite for a more satisfying finish in the next match, or on the next card. "Wrestling," Barthes writes, "presents man’s suffering with all of the amplifications of tragic masks." This rather epic conception sounds pretty good to my adult self even as it describes what I know I was responding to more naturally—and maybe more honestly—as a seven-year-old dragging my Dad to Maple Leaf Gardens to watch Demolition defend their tag team titles against The Colossal Connection: a desire to to see the good guys win.

There are a lot of ways to "win" in professional wrestling. (I am excluding from the following inventory any kind of "moral victory," which could be the subject of a completely different essay should *Steel Chair to the Head 2 *ever become a thing.)  The most common and decisive "finish" in a wrestling match is a pinfall, whereby one wrestler pins the other’s shoulders to the mat for a count of three (or incapacitates him/her so that getting up before the third count is not a possibility). There are also submissions, where one wrestler applies a hold that compels the other to tap out (in an "I Quit" match, this humiliation is made mandatory). Less definitively, a match can end in a count-out (a wrestler is stranded outside the ring for 10 seconds), or a disqualification (a wrestler breaks the rules). These two outcomes can also be doubled to affect both participants at the same time and are generally considered to be disappointing.

Within the staged, scripted reality of professional wrestling—a reality commonly referred to in the business as "kayfabe" for reasons that have rarely been well elucidated in terms of etymology—these rules are inviolable and administered by officially appointed referees. Barthes famously writes  that wrestling, like theatre, is based on a sign system, and that every wrestler does his part to signify within it; their physiques, their gestures, and their characterizations must be precise, they must (literally) embody "absolute clarity, since the spectator must always understand everything on the spot." And this is no less true—and arguably even more crucial—in the case of referees, since they must embody that same clarity in the service of seeming like they understand nothing. A lot of the time, the confusion of the pro wrestling referee is what lends absolute clarity to the drama unfolding around him.

Within the context of kayfabe, pro wrestling referees are worse at their job than any other group of employees imaginable. Their incompetence is so predictable, in fact, that professional wrestling in all its iterations, from the mainstream spectacle presented weekly on television by the WWE to the independent bingo-hall circuit dramatized in Darren Aronofsky’s tragicomic film *The Wrestler *(2008)*,* is unthinkable without it. Professional wrestling referees make a habit of missing things that their jobs should require them to catch. All the time. At the beginning of some matches, the referee will theatrically search the grapplers’ tights for foreign objects or other verboten items. This only happens when one of the wrestlers is hiding something, and only ever ends with the revelation that the referee’s search failed to discover the item in question—call it Chekhov’s roll of quarters.

When the referee’s back is turned—which happens a lot, in a lot of different ways, some more credible than others—or when he is unconscious (which also happens a lot, in a lot of different ways, some more credible than others)—the object will be used to gain a decisive advantage for the cheating party. And then the referee will turn around just in time to obliviously render a tainted three-count. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of variations on this basic, dramatic irony drenched scenario, and each of these has its own counter-variations (the cheating is discovered; the signs of cheating are wrongly attributed to the wrong wrestler and he is disqualified), but it remains the primal scene of modern professional wrestling. Something happens that is outside of the rules of the match, and everybody in the arena—ninety thousand people in the Pontiac silverdome or 250 people in a public-school gymnasium—knows it. Except, of course, for the referee, whose job it is to know, and who apparently has learned nothing from his past failures.

In reality, the job of a professional wrestling referee requires a high degree of physical skill. Many wrestling referees are initially trained in wrestling schools, and if their bodies are comparatively less well-developed, look closely at their physiques: they’re stocky or wiry, carrying themselves with the subtle grace of athletes. Or else they’re so comically shrimpy that they’ve clearly been cast under the sign of *typage* (a word that I guarantee you Woody Allen knows) and then trained to take the "bumps" that so often leave them fallen in the line of duty. Like wrestlers, referees are performing precisely choreographed routines while also indicating things with their hands, their eyes, their mouths—the same instruments as any actor; even if they’re watching the moves instead of performing them, they’re just as deftly playing to the camera and the rafters, both at the same time.

If, pace Barthes, wrestling is a drama, then referees are, ideally, supposed to be supporting players: nobody ever bought a ticket to see a ref.  But the ostensible power they hold over the actual stars and the outcomes of the stars’ matches makes them something else. Sometimes, the referee appears as a deus ex machina; he runs to the ring to either replace a felled comrade or to reverse an incorrect decision: in the 1980s, the latter was known as a "Dusty Finish," after the corpulent southern champion-slash-promoter Dusty Rhodes, who loved to tease crowds with definitive endings and then unwrite them by having a second referee upend the verdict. Sometimes, referees suffer the fate of messengers in Greek drama and get beaten up for delivering the bad news to a wrestler that he’s lost or been disqualified, which is either a cue to cheer (if the wrestler is a good guy unjustly screwed over) or boo (if he’s a bad guy throwing a tantrum).

Occasionally, referees become leading players in the drama, too. In an angle (angle means storyline) that upset me deeply as a seven-year-old in 1988, senior WWF official Dave Hebner inexplicably counted Hulk Hogan’s shoulders down for three in a nationally televised championship match against Andre the Giant when it was clear—to me, to the announcers, the crowd, everyone—that Hogan had "kicked out" of the count at one.  Was it a mistake? It turned out that it was the kickoff to a great soap-opera story in which Hebner—a familiar face to fans, though never gifted with a backstory or character development—had been locked in a closet by the heel known as The Million Dollar Man, Ted Dibiase, and replaced for the match with his twin brother, Earl Hebner, who had been paid off to count the decision for Andre, who in turn sold the ill-gotten championship belt to Dibiase, thus negating the need for the latter to ever beat Hogan fair and square (because of course he couldn’t).

"How much did they pay for the plastic surgery?!" Hogan blubbered backstage in the aftermath to interviewer "Mean" Gene Okerlund, trying to wrap his mind around such a vile conspiracy. For fans sick of the Hulkster’s repetitive hero act, seeing him humiliated on national television was a form of subversive pleasure; ditto for those who enjoyed DiBiase’s venal-playboy act, which was widely understood by insiders as a combination tribute-parody to the WWF’s real-life owner/television figurehead Vince McMahon, a million-dollar man who reshaped the business by throwing money at problems and opportunities alike. From concept to execution to presentation, the Hebner Affair was a great angle, close to the apex of "Golden Era" WWF booking, not least of all because it addressed something that all wrestling fans felt unconsciously: that decisions were at the whim of referees whose motives could easily be clouded and whose authority could be corrupted. The angle was also notable, historically speaking, because of how it finally put a referee front-and-center and made us admire his skill as a performer. Rushing in from the back after breaking free of his dressing-room prison, gesturing wildly at the good guys and the bad guys alike in a pantomime of indignance, Dave Hebner, all five-foot-nothing of him, cut as dynamic and dramatic a figure as the Hulkster and the Giant. Meanwhile, his identical twin Earl, skulking in cowardice in the company of the villains, appeared as a physically indistinguishable and yet somehow utterly alien vision of corruption and collusion and moral rot. Two brothers; two referees; two sides of the same coin; I guess pain and pleasure, if you wanted to get academic about it.

Ten years later, Earl Hebner—the "bad" Hebner, for the record—participated in what was to that point (and maybe still is) the most audacious reshuffling of the kayfabe-real life dynamic in wrestling history. In his capacity as a WWF employee, Hebner presided over the infamous 1997 match in Montreal where Canadian World Champion Bret "The Hitman" Hart was placed in his own signature sharpshooter hold by his hated rival Shawn Michaels, and then, in a moment so amazing it had a whole feature documentary made about it, called for the timekeeper to ring the bell. Hebner claimed that Hart had "submitted" although that was not the finish that "The Hitman"  had been expecting, or had consented to—consent being the commodity that makes wrestling work.

Hebner’s actions were ordered by McMahon as a way of writing Bret out of the company’s storyline and humiliating him before he departed for a rival promotion, and ensuring that he didn’t take the company’s championship belt with him (a forbidden act with some precedent in a bitterly competitive era where live television ratings were the greatest measuring stick for success).  "The Montreal Screwjob'' was a genuinely ignoble, corrupt, and unfair ending that went against Barthes’ dictum of absolute clarity because for the people in attendance, as well as those watching on television, as well as at least one of the stars in the ring, there was no absolute, or even partial clarity. By exercising actual, powerful authority in a situation that everyone watching and participating were expecting to be cozily predetermined, Hebner lived up to the "evil referee" role in a way that was authentically, instead of ritualistically, shocking.

The Montreal Screwjob was a turning point for North American pro wrestling. It introduced the very real possibility of very real life intruding on the safely bracketed fantasy reality of kayfabe, opening the product up to scandalous and exhilarating new dramatic possibilities.  In the decades since, wrestling has gradually and at times ingeniously embraced these contradictions in a way that has arguably improved the product. The popularity of censor-baiting, anti-authority loudmouths like Steve Austin and C.M. Punk—characters who deliberately called attention to their status as players within a drama and raged at the wizards behind the curtain, including McMahon—emanates directly from this fissure, as did 2020’s multiple, Covid-inspired forays into "cinematic wrestling": conflicts unapologetically shot and edited like action or horror movies, cutting out the middlemen of a live audience and athletic plausibility once and for all. (The best of these was a surreal, self-reflexive "Firefly Funhouse" match pitting the masked psychological terrorist The Fiend against WWE poster boy—and would-be Hollywood movie star—John Cena, probably the closest thing to avant-garde storytelling in wrestling history.)

 Even if wrestling’s dramaturgy is no longer as clear cut as it was at the time of Barthes’ essay—or even the Montreal Screwjob, which has since itself passed into the rarified air of myth, the same basic dynamic persists: the vicarious enjoyment of watching oversized, fantasy projections of ourselves work out their differences in ways unavailable to us in our daily lives. In this sense, I find professional wrestling referees incredibly suggestive in terms of how they fit into Barthes’ proposed sign system. If wrestling’s heroes and villains —and more recently, its antiheroes, subversives, rabble-rousers, and sociopaths—suggest a wide gallery of human types, the referees, in their obliviousness and rank corruptibility, signify the unlikeliness that any of these combatants are ever going to get a fair shake, skill and determination notwithstanding. What’s far more likely, in fact, is that every wrestler, whether face, heel, or somewhere in between, will get screwed over at some point or another because the people charged with upholding the rules are deaf, dumb, and as blind as the statue of justice holding her scales (sound familiar?). Incompetence is inevitable, and in its way, fair enough—the great leveller in a cosmic screwjob.

Screwjob

###### 1. Tom Cruise is playing himself

Right: Tom Cruise always plays himself. He has been playing himself since *All the Right Moves, *a movie about how his character has them. Every so often, Cruise plays himself in ways that strike a chord or scrape the zeitgeist or result in Oscar nominations: the ass-wiggling ingénue of *Risky Business; *the beautifully rumpled white-collar striver of *Jerry Maguire; *the bewildered, speculative cuck of *Eyes Wide Shut. *In *Edge of Tomorrow, *he plays a guy who’s so determined to get his intergalactic mission right that he keeps killing himself, over and over again—the performance of a lifetime, and maybe the ultimate Cruise-ian allegory, except of course for the *Top Gun *duology. No Cruise character feels more like self-performance—and self-revelation—than Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, who in 1986 was in the exact same position as the guy playing him—an ascendant, Nautilized hotshot turning figure-eights in the sky above the rest of us. Maverick remains tethered to his actor twenty-five years later, a figure simultaneously commanding respect, deference, and a bit of bemusement at his steadfast refusal to change—with the times, to act his age, etc. The basic message of *Top Gun: Maverick *is the same as *Interview With the Vampire, *which is that Tom Cruise is eternal, but now we don’t need makeup, special effects, or supernatural pretense.

&nbsp;

###### 2. Tom Cruise is a great actor

Tom Cruise is not a great actor in the sense that he can “disappear into a role”—a critical cliché that doesn’t really apply to too many actors, especially not recognizable ones of above-the-title stature. (I’m hard pressed to think of one, anyway.) Rather, in conversation with my first point about Tom Cruise always playing Tom Cruise, I’d say that greatness here is more a matter of always keeping himself visible, which in turn contextualizes the roles in surprising and emotive ways. In one of the best scenes in *Top Gun: Maverick, *Pete goes to an Air Force bar and tenderly observes a gaggle of hardbodied younglings clowning around the way he did in his own cocksure youth; the formula works because we can’t divorce the character’s mix of yearning, envy, and melancholy from what I imagine to be Cruise’s own as he stares down his sixtieth birthday. Cruise isn’t really historically a Method actor, and he doesn’t talk about sense memories or Stanislavski or technique. It may be that the similarly self-mesmerizing precepts of Scientology do the same trick for him. Some of his best performances have been for obviously great directors, like Stanley Kubrick, but Joseph Kosinski isn’t Stanley Kubrick and Cruise is still great in *Top Gun: Maverick. *Credit where it’s due.

&nbsp;

###### 3. Joseph Kosinski is a good director even if he’s not Stanley Kubrick

Tom Cruise keeps directors as pets these days. For the *Mission: Impossible *series—all good to great movies, and examples par excellence of how Cruise has finessed his obvious suicidal ideation into an on-the-job ethos and an onscreen alter ego—he’s employed the one-time Oscar winner Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie also did *Jack Reacher, *which was less successful at fusing star and character together because as anyone who’s read the Jack Reacher books knows, Jack Reacher is, in a fashion, relaxed; he’s a hulking, nomadic killing machine but he’s comfortable in his own skin and doesn’t need to be liked. Tom Cruise is not relaxed and needs to be liked like Tracy Flick did in *Election *(he could have played Tracey Flick to great acclaim). McQuarrie, who is not a particularly gifted director, knows his job, which is to hone, refine, and benignly weaponize the ruling tensions of his friend’s self-image. He has figured it out, and his reward will be generational wealth for himself and his family. Joseph Kosinski is more of a pure action director than McQuarrie, and because he isn’t the steward of a single running character like Ethan Hunt, but rather the facilitator of a more free-floating Cruise persona, he has a bit more freedom to show off his chops. His *Tron *remake, which did not feature Cruise, was a sleek, beautifully designed exercise in legacy aesthetics that re-created the original film’s imagery (and characters) while pulsating with serene confidence. *Oblivion, *starring Cruise as humanity’s last hope against alien invaders and their high-tech drones, elegantly incorporated color schemes and hardware from *2001: A Space Odyssey *as if giving its headliner another, posthumous opportunity to work with Kubrick. *Top Gun: Maverick *is filled with nods to the “warnographic” style of the late Tony Scott, but its clean, precise physical and aeronautical blocking is recognizably Kosinski’s, and so are its coolly adoring, contractually obligated Cruise close-ups. Admittedly, it has not been a great year for new American movies, but if I were voting for the Oscars right now, Kosinski would get Best Director.

&nbsp;

###### 4. Miles Teller is actually pretty good

The first time I actively enjoyed Miles Teller was in Nicolas Winding Refn’s insane, hypnagogic Amazon Prime crime series *Too Old to Die Young, *where he played a sullen, possibly fascistic LAPD officer who comes to a spectacularly brutal end. *Top Gun: Maverick *is the second time that I have actively enjoyed Teller, who plays the son of the late, lamented Goose from the original *Top Gun. *Having never had any reason to think about whether or not Teller resembles Anthony Edwards, I did not see the brilliance of this casting coming, but while Teller is physically very different than the erstwhile Dr. Mark Green—a thick-lipped, broad-shouldered, dead-eyed hulk—the combination of Navy whites and a beautifully considered mustache complete a seamless illusion. The relationship between Maverick and Rooster (the perfect callsign for Goose’s son) recalls the displaced paternal pathos play of *Creed, *which is the movie *Top Gun: Maverick *most resembles, even more than the original *Top Gun, *which, being a slick, superficial piece of opportunism conceived and financed by coke fiends, had no emotional component to speak of, and certainly no metaphysical dimension. The metaphysical dimensions of *Creed *and *Top Gun: Maverick *pertain to the conjoined durability and fragility of American institutions, icons and intellectual property. When Goose dies in *Top Gun, *it’s a plot point; when Maverick saves Rooster’s life in *Top Gun: Maverick *it’s mythic retribution, as well as a hint that Miles Teller can’t replace Cruise so much as be his hand-picked wingman. The fact that these events are completely obvious and mechanical somehow only heightens their effect. It helps also that, as I said, Teller is very good in the part, and if we’re being honest, he was the one who made me cry.

&nbsp;

###### 5. Jennifer Connelly is very good

The character that Jennifer Connelly plays in *Top Gun: Maverick *is probably the funniest thing about the movie, insofar as she’s been manufactured to give Pete an age-appropriate, long-suffering romantic partner who *feels *like a carryover from Scott’s movie but isn’t. Because Kelly McGillis is now 60 and has aged like a normal person, there was no chance of her returning; Connelly, who at 51 is virtually indistinguishable from her younger self, matches perfectly with Cruise as a resident of the flesh-and-blood uncanny valley and is also a gifted, resourceful light comedienne who can parry and deflect his innate ridiculousness. Her Penny is your average, flawlessly preserved American small business owner, smilingly presiding over the aforementioned Air Force bar and its revolving door constituency of wannabe flying aces. When Pete shows up at the bar, there is a five-minute dialogue scene in which it’s revealed—with the same flat, expository affect as stereo instructions—that Penny has been the great love of his life since precisely the moment *Top Gun *ended, and they’ve had all kinds of exchanges and experiences over the years, and she has a teenage daughter who dotes on him, and it’s only a matter of time before he has to choose between what’s left of his career and a life piloting yachts and picking up tabs with her. As the movie goes on, she proves that she’s worth it by always being in the right place at the right time, which is about twenty yards from Pete, in flattering beachwear, bearing sympathetic witness to every phase of his self-actualization, including, of course, shirtless touch football on the beach. This all works in the same way that almost all of *Top Gun: Maverick *works, which is via a grateful suspension of disbelief that, inasmuch as it’s possible to earn such a thing, is earned by the skill and professionalism of all involved.

&nbsp;

###### 6. It’s better that we don’t see Tom Cruise have sex

Many reviewers and social media commentators have singled out the scene—or rather, the lack of a scene—in which Pete and Penny rekindle their love affair. Pete drives Penny home on the back of his motorcycle; she walks into her perfect little cluttered beachside house and pointedly leaves the door open; he follows her in; and then Kosinski cross-fades into an ostensibly post-coital shot of the two of them laughing and talking (silently) in bed. It’s hilariously chaste, but it’s ok because Cruise is so supremely narcissistic at this point that watching him have sex would be difficult, like looking directly into the sun. Kubrick understood this in *Eyes Wide Shut, *which is at its core a comedy about Tom Cruise *not *having sex, sometimes due to circumstance, sometimes due to his own cowardice, and always in a perpetual rhythm of *coitus interruptus *that only humourless, Paulette-style critics could fail to laugh at (which explains the film’s lousy reception in 1999, when humourless, Paulette-style critics had most of the staff jobs in American media). Note also that in *Eyes Wide Shut, *Cruise is plagued by mental visions of Nicole Kidman—who, as if you need reminding, was not only his onscreen wife but his *actual *wife, once again cinching the idea that he was playing himself—fucking a guy in Maverick-style military dress whites. I am fairly certain that this, like every other funny thing in *Eyes Wide Shut, *was intentional.

&nbsp;

###### 7. John Hamm is a TV actor

Speaking of intentional: the CO who most wants to bust Maverick’s ass is played by Jon Hamm, who became famous too late in his career to be the next Tom Cruise and is also widely considered to be a “better”—or more “nuanced”—actor than Cruise owing to the Emmys he won for *Mad Men *(a show I have not watched all the way through). Whenever I see Hamm in movies, I see, fairly or not, the Face of Prestige Television (which was not true of James Gandolfini, a great actor regardless of medium), and so his scenes with Cruise are rife with subtext. Other people have analyzed *Top Gun: Maverick *as an allegory in which Pete Mitchell is not only the only guy who can fly Mach 10, train a team of pilots to blow up an Enemy uranium stronghold, and tame Jennifer Connelly, but he’s also a symbolic figure holding the line against the dronification of warfare, which is to say, the dronification of moviemaking itself. When he stares down Ed Harris, it’s a reference to the latter’s performance as John Glenn in *The Right Stuff; *when he stares down John Hamm, however, he’s defending the honor of old-fashioned, self-contained, money-at-the-concession-stand movies—which Tom Cruise loves—against the luxurious, insidious passivity of serialized, longform, visually drab Prestige Television. Eventually, Hamm’s character sees the light, but he’s not one of the film’s many heroes; he’s an avatar of an inferior entertainment-delivery device who gets put in his place; Tom Cruise, who supposedly goes to every new release in disguise in order to sample the wares, doesn’t even own a TV. This is what gives him his edge.

&nbsp;

###### 8. Giorgio Moroder > Lady Gaga

I cannot hum “Take My Hand,” Gaga’s torpid, strangely hookless contribution to the *Top Gun: Maverick *soundtrack. The Instagram photos of Gaga with “big fan” Tom Cruise are of course remarkable. I can hum—and sing, credibly— Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” and will be able to do so for years to come. One of these songs has already stood the test of the time, and the other one won’t. Some other sub-observations about the soundtrack here. The original, neo-Wagnerian *Top Gun *theme by Harold Faltermeyer, interpolated into Hans Zimmer’s new score, owns in a way that bypasses I-Love-the-80s-irony. The deployment of “Danger Zone” for the opening overture is lame—a cheesy example of I-Love-the-80s-Irony— but at least it’s the original song and not some nu-rock cover, like Nonpoint’s non-essential version of “In the Air Tonight” in *Miami Vice. *

&nbsp;

###### 9. *Top Gun: Maverick* is fascist

Oliver Stone called the first *Top Gun *“fascist,” and so it stands to reason—assuming you believe good old left-hook-throwing Oliver Stone, last seen hagiographizing Edward Snowden—that a virtual replay of its contents would be the same. (In 1986, *Top Gun *made the most money of any US movie at the box office while Stone’s *Platoon *won Best Picture, powered by a performance by Charlie Sheen, who went on to impersonate Cruise in *Hot Shots.*) Both *Top Gun *movies exult fetishistically in shows of American military power and hardware, supplied pro bono by the weapons manufacturers themselves; the same script approval granted to the Navy in ‘86 applies here, which may be why nobody mentions Iran or Russia, only “The Enemy,” which lends the narrative an absurd, Orwellian dimension. (We have always been at war with The Enemy, and we always will.) Kosinski’s rapturous, great-man-of-history angles on Cruise only add to the delirium. (If it wasn’t so tasteless to call him Cruise’s Riefenstahl, I would, and I guess I sort of just did, though I’m also sure Kosinski voted for Biden.) In her recent Cannes roundup for *Film Comment, *the excellent critic Devika Girish described the movie’s “American-exceptionalist fervour,” and noted its below-the-line complicity with the Navy, before concluding—adroitly, I think—that “[*Maverick*] isn’t ‘a good film *but *with bad politics’; it’s a good film in part *because *of its bad politics, and it requires that we interrogate what we experience, often in spite of ourselves, as ‘good’ art.” The only thing here to take issue with, hypothetically, is that this movie even requires interrogation, since the bad politics are put across with the same cheerful grin that Cruise uses to sell everything. The last thing that this very smartly engineered movie is is oblivious: rather, it’s confident, and shameless, and it deserves to be, because it puts its—again, fascist, while also, paradoxically, strictly apolitical— agenda across without any hesitation, bashfulness, or compromise.

&nbsp;

###### 10. Tom Cruise only wants the best for us

Cruise is the engine of the film’s confidence, and the starting and end point for how to think about what the film is, and what it means. I have thought a lot about it—and him—in the days since, and whether it’s possible to square an affection based on his being the Last Real Movie Star with my suspicion that he has almost certainly condoned slave labor in his various palatial homes. The extent to which one of the more consistently mud-slung celebrities of my lifetime has gone clear, PR-wise, in the last few years is genuinely astonishing and while it can’t all be due to him delivering the goods onscreen, that’s gotta be part of it. (If Mel Gibson came back with *Lethal Weapon: Riggs *instead of mouthing anti-woke talking points for S Craig Zahler, I think people would go for it.) Cruise appears in promo bumpers before *Top Gun: Maverick, *as if personally welcoming us to the theater and thanking us for our time and hard-earned money, money that could have gone to gas or groceries or opioids or whatever else. Tom Cruise knows the value of a dollar. I’m pretty sure that if you could prove, under oath—or under the influence of sodium pentathol—that you were somehow not entertained by *Top Gun: Maverick, *Cruise would privately scourge his flesh with barbed wire, *First Reformed*-style, as penance. It would sting, but not as much as the idea that he failed to deliver the goods. I won’t perjure myself here, however. I had a great time.

R

E

C

L

I

N

E

R

>

[MENU]