Social media has made me realize that, when subtext is clear, people will fight it because it disturbs their sense of identity.
A good example of this is the movie Top Gun.
Top Gun is a gay movie.
This isn’t up for debate. In interviews, director Tony Scott confirmed that the whole aesthetic was inspired but the photography of Bruce Weber—known for his book of homoerotic models.
Scott told Paramount that he wanted to capture “the intent of the eyes” and the physical allure of Bruce Weber’s models.
He went further. In the 30th-anniversary interview, he specifically said:
“I got the guys to get all their gear off and their pants and sprayed them in baby oil… I just shot the shit out of it.”
Mind you, conservative commentators bristle at the suggestion that Top Gun is a gay movie. They point to the romance between Maverick and Charlie. And they insist that the movie later reveals that Iceman is eventually shown as a family man.
This is supposed to be conclusive proof of Top Gun’s heterosexuality.
But remember, this is the 80s. Of course there has to be plausible deniability. And there’s actually a term for when gay characters have heterosexual love interests: “narrative beard”.
In the 1980s, if you wanted your gay film to be commercially viable as a blockbuster, the narrative beard was mandatory. The script, therefore, is mostly heterosexual.
However, in cinema, the script may tell the plot—but the camera tells the truth. And the camera isn’t interested in Maverick and Iceman’s domestic lives. It’s obsessed with the sweat, the proximity, and the “intent of the eyes” between the men.
The “family man” defence is just a post-hoc justification to sanitize a film that owes its entire existence to a Bruce Weber’s gay photography book.
https://consequence.net/2016/05/top-gun-and-the-end-of-the-homoerotic-action-movie/
