The Man Behind the Curtain: Exploring the Intersection of Empire and Entertainment

By Brendan J. Garanyi

By the mid-1980s, the American electorate had developed a distinct distaste for warfare. The last forty years of so-called “Pax Americana” had not been kind to those that enlisted, with each decade seeming to bring a new catastrophic war with it. The result? Nearly four hundred thousand dead since the beginning of 1942. In the wake of this, dreams of the anti-war movement still seemed almost palpable—maybe the thought would prevail the human price of global militarism just wasn’t worth it. With forty-eight percent of voters in 1985 thinking military spending was too high, it certainly seemed that was the case.[i] For Washington, this idea was unacceptable. The freshly triumphant Reagan administration had won the Oval Office in a landslide on the back of the kind of rhetoric that had dominated the American right since the depression: Strength. Vigilance. Glory. None of this was to be obtained if that forty-eight percent had their way. Something had to be done to rehabilitate the public perception of the United States armed forces.

Enter Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986), affectionately titled after the 1969 Navy Fighter Weapons School program that helped drop seven and a half million tons of ordinance on Vietnam and its people.[ii] From the beginning, the film was to be like no war-flick before it. The time had come to forget the sappy poetic waxing of Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)or Johnny Got his Gun (Dalton Trumbo, 1971)— producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson had no time for the nuances of international conflict. They realized a universal truth that was begging for a blockbuster: fighter jets are cool.

            For the producers, Top Gun was a golden ticket to success in Hollywood—it had bar-setting pyrotechnics, huge stars such as Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis, and some of the most visually stunning military hardware to ever hit the cineplex. It was as big as blockbusters got, if not bigger, and it sure paid off: raking in a whopping three hundred and sixty million dollars across its storied theatrical release.[iii] It made the careers of Simpson and Bruckheimer, and permanently changed the rules of the game when it came to action flicks—for better or much, much worse.

For the US Military, it was everything they hoped and more—the exact medicine the American people needed to get them hyped up for another international peace-keeping mission. That is to say, the results were nothing less than spectacular. Reception of not only the film, but the military itself, was so positive that the Navy began setting up recruiting booths outside of auditoriums.[iv] One year later, recruitment was up five hundred percent, and for the first time since Reagan took office, opinions on military spending were trending towards “too little” rather than “too much.”[v]

This was never going to be a one-night stand. After Top Gun turned out to be so beneficial for all involved parties, it was impossible not to make more. Bruckheimer was on his way to being a billionaire, and the Department of Defense (DoD) had a winning strategy that brought in as many fresh-faced pilots as they wanted for Operation Desert Storm. In fact, the sequel to Top Gun, which has been in production since 2018, was revealed to be so closely under wraps by the US Navy that they reserved final call on the casting of all “actors, extras, doubles, and stunt personnel,” according to leaked internal documents surrounding the making of the film.[vi] This may seem shocking, but this kind of tight-fisted military oversight has become all too common in contemporary Hollywood, especially in a few places where one might not expect it.

In the present day, Robert Downey Junior’s titular Iron Man (John Favreau, 2008) is a national hero. One would be pretty hard-pressed these days to find a household where Tony Stark is not celebrated and commiserated in equal measure as the face of the famous Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Stark made his on-screen retirement with 2019’s Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo; Joe Russo, 2019), his sacrifice being the culmination and final climax of a whopping sixty-four-hour cinematic canon that spanned a decade in its making. From this, it can be accurately gathered that Stark was indeed the dramatic center of the MCU’s undertaking, and that Marvel and its corporate-Disney leash holders were all too aware of their hero’s pop-culture gravity. The question now is: how did this come to be? And what does the Department of Defense have to do with it? To answer that, one must understand the film that started Marvel’s engorged catalog of tie-ins, as well as the nation into which it was birthed.

It was May of 2008; year seven of the American war in Afghanistan. The previous month, tens of thousands throughout the United States had marched in protest of the ongoing and seemingly unending invasion. Later that same year, Barack Obama would win a sweeping victory in the White House and Capitol Building as the candidate most rejecting Bush-Era Neoconservatism. One did not need the analysis of D.C.’s punditry to understand that, once again, the American public were turning their noses away from state-sanctioned violence.

Circumstantially, into this climate wanders the heroic Tony Stark: a multi-billionaire weapons developer and military contractor á la any of the various shadowy figures that captained Boeing or Lockheed Martin in the driver’s seat of the American war-machine. Early in the film, Tony is captured by “terrorist forces” that studiously sum-up western civilization’s esoteric enemies overseas. That is to say the film’s portrayal of Arabs is utterly devoid of nuance, reflecting instead a horde of appalling caricatures of color, forever bent upon destroying all things vaguely American. They torture the noble arms-dealer, forcing him to do menial tasks and develop weapons for them from within a cave-turned-cell as they taunt and abuse him.

To anyone who lived through the opening of the twenty-first century or has a good grasp on what happened in those early years, the irony should be apparent. Fifteen years later, it is obvious that America was not the captive victim in the middle east as much as they were the grim reaper. Many of the tortures that Tony endures at the hands of his tormentors, such as waterboarding, were notoriously favorites of American interrogators in reality.[vii] When Stark finally frees himself, thanks in no small part to his innovative mind and expertise in creating weapons of mass destruction, he flies around like an archangel on a mission of holy vengeance. John Favreau gleefully shows those nasty terrorists and their Humvees being blown to smithereens like little brown ants as heroic music swells. Seeing it as an adolescent, I was cheering. Watching it now, all I can think of are those words at the end of the credits: “Special thanks to the United States Department of Defense.”

But where are we now? Is this a phenomenon dedicated to the past? True as it may be that America is still, to some degree, a nation at war, the US Military has yet to enter a new large-scale conflict since the Iraq war of 2003. Does the DoD still have a reason to rent out fighter jets and naval bases to Hollywood?

To say yes would understate it. At this point, the superhero phenomenon of the past fifteen years has become so intertwined with military oversight that the two may as well be permanently ubiquitous. To see this in perfect detail, one needs to look no further than their local Walmart DVD value bin to find 2017’s Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017).

It is a film as overtly imperialist as it is confusing. In the age of internet fandom, filmmakers are very wary of straying too far from source material, lest the mob be levied against them. In keeping with this, Wonder Woman tries to stick to the World War I backdrop that many of the comics it is based off of are set in. Herein the conflict clearly lies, as the boogeymen of the post-Reagan world—that being those with Russian, Chinese, or Arab characteristics—are wholly unaccounted for in the lineup of America’s enemies in 1917. In 2021, it’s clear that if the state military apparatus is going to help out with a project, it in some way needs to help serve their public relations campaigns in the here and now. Wonder Woman goes to absurd lengths to satisfy both the vultures circling it—the growling Redditors who have parasocially latched onto the franchise for years andthe board room of government suits who helped jam the thing into production.

The result is frankly dizzying. The film is indeed still set in the First World War, but the Kaiser’s men are depicted with the vitriol and ideological frenzy of the most passionately deranged blackshirts. As for Wonder Woman herself, who is purportedly fighting for global peace, every action sequence sees her cleaving through conscripted Prussians like tissue paper. Perhaps most notorious of all is a ten-minute chunk wherein the demi-goddess joins her friends in the Entente to carry out a bombing run on a Palestinian chemical factory. This raises more eyebrows than any other part of the film, as leading lady Gal Gadot was herself a trooper in the Israeli Defense Force during the 2006 Lebanon War.[viii] Indeed, in a film set during a conflict wherein Americans and Ottomans never came close to each other in the trenches, Hollywood still found a way to bomb the middle east.

In a way, the modern militarism of the superhero blockbuster feels almost more cynical than something like Top Gun. Nobody walked into that movie expecting to see anything other than cool American jets blowing up the state’s enemies. Compared to Wonder Woman or Iron Man or any number of other comic book adaptations that were not listed here, something as on-the-nose as Top Gun feels downright quaint. No, the ghoulishness of today’s military-entertainment complex is felt in its stealth; minor as it may be. Both of the aforementioned heroes are poster children for multi-billion-dollar franchises. They’re on toothbrushes, bed sheets—on the Happy Meals at McDonald’s. It is impossible not to see the point of this: That the children of the information age are set to grow up idolizing aggressive intervention without even realizing it. One is forced to ultimately ask the question: is there any value to this art? Could it be that the largest releases of the year, the cornerstone of contemporary Hollywood, are meant only to breed the next generation of Green Berets? Most terrifying of all, the idea now seems for the first time entirely reasonable that should America’s next conflict come before change does, the public eye might not even notice it, and the horrors of war may be forever obstructed by the silver screen.

Brendan Jakob Garanyi is a third-year student at the University of North Georgia majoring in Film and Digital Media. He opposes imperialism in all forms.  

[i] Gallup. “Military and National Defense.” Gallup.com. Gallup, November 11, 2021. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1666/military-national-defense.aspx.

[ii] Thomas, Cooper. “Bombing Missions of the Vietnam War.” ArcGIS StoryMaps. Esri, December 14, 2021. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/2eae918ca40a4bd7a55390bba4735cdb.

[iii] “Top Gun.” Box Office Mojo. Accessed December 20, 2021. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl444040705/weekly/.

[iv] Campbell, Duncan. “Top Gun versus Sergeant Bilko? No Contest, Says the Pentagon.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, August 29, 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/aug/29/media.filmnews.

[v] Gunning, Cathal. “How Top Gun Impacted Navy Recruiting in Real Life.” ScreenRant, September 12, 2021. https://screenrant.com/top-gun-us-navy-recruiting-applications-increase/.

[vi] Trevithick, Joseph. “Top Gun: Maverick’s Massive Support from the U.S. Military Is Laid out in These Documents.” The Drive. The Drive, November 17, 2021. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43168/top-gun-2s-extensive-support-from-the-u-s-military-is-all-laid-out-in-these-documents.

[vii] McDermott, Terry. “Waterboarding of Detainees Was so Gruesome That Even CIA Officials Wept.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2020. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-01-22/ksm-waterboarding-guantanamo-testimony.

[viii] Keogh, Joey. “Here’s What Gal Gadot Really Did in the Israeli Army.” TheList.com. The List, August 29, 2019. https://www.thelist.com/164323/heres-what-gal-gadot-really-did-in-the-israeli-army/.