SOn paper, going to see with the family a rehash of an old manly film from the 1980s, in VF moreover, didn’t seem like a good idea. Top Gun, it’s not dreamlike Porco Rosso, by Hayao Miyazaki, nor the highly conceptual Vice versa, by Pete Docter. For a time like ours, Top Gun, it’s the foil film par excellence, an ode to vibrating sticks and gendered bodies, entertainment with a very poor carbon footprint where each shot overflows with a humming phallic subtext. In short, an almost deviant object. Here we are, however, at the entrance to the cinema, ready to go and test the 4DX projection room, with seats that move, diffusion of smoke and projection of water in the direction of the participative spectator.
On the poster of Top Gun: Maverick directed by Joseph Kosinski, Tom Cruise, helmet in hand and the setting sun behind his back, strangely seems not to have aged a bit, even though this new opus hits the screens thirty-six years after the first part. In this Hollywood Dorian Gray, the models of fighter planes – and not the paintings – age in his place. Another oddity, it is my children who show themselves to be the most motivated to go see the film, whereas, by virtue of the classic economy of nostalgia, it would be up to me to rush like a starving child on this aeronautical madeleine.
One can see in my sons’ appetite for this film the emblematic manifestation of a strange temporal phenomenon, a kind of hiatus that makes our children today grow up in both the 2020s and the 1980s. multi-decadal split is particularly encouraged by streaming platforms. If these allow you to watch old cult films like Top Gun, ET Where Ghostbusters, they also promote on an industrial scale an aesthetic eighties which infuses in many current productions.
Retro varnish
Take for example the hugely popular series Stranger Things, which appeared on Netflix in 2016: it almost seems like a prequel to an 1980s Spielberg, with its specification of adventurous teenagers riding BMXs, sporting bowl cuts and sleeveless jackets. The soundtrack, with authentic pieces by Kate Bush, Toto or even Wham! inside, colors with a sound varnish also retro the wild adventures of these young people populating the imaginary village of Hawkins. We find this same dynamic in the series glow (Netflix), where wrestlers permed, seeming straight out of the movie flashdance, confront each other in a recomposed past.
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