San Diego is too smart for 'Top Gun'

Watching “Top Gun: Maverick” made me feel sad — for San Diego.

San Franciscans have Alfred Hitchcock’s ”Vertigo,” a classic of cinematic heights and existential falls, to define their city by the bay. Los Angeles explains its fundamental fatalism about corruption and power through Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.

But San Diego — a beautiful place full of people who have thought and fought for their country — has long had to settle for 1986’s “Top Gun,” a dumb, jingoistic, and misogynistic Tom Cruise vehicle about Naval aviators, as its cinematic signature.

The arrival of a “Top Gun” sequel — after 36 years — certainly doesn’t solve the problem, even if it is a box office hit. This ludicrous film mirrors American decline, while misrepresenting San Diego in the process.

“Top Gun: Maverick” is premised entirely on an error of fact, pretending that the school for Navy fighter pilots operates out of the North Island Naval Air Station.

But the real-life Topgun was relocated from San Diego’s Miramar Naval Air Station to Fallon, Nevada, back in 1996. It’s not coming back.

Except in the movies — because a vapid film wants to tap into the magic of San Diego.

Part of that magic is the city’s beauty. So, the movie shows us Point Loma, Coronado, and a tourism-bureau-approved scene of Cruise and Jennifer Connelly sailing across the bay.

Another piece of that magic is San Diego’s role as a protector of America. San Diego is California’s most American city, a contrast to Los Angeles and San Francisco, which see themselves as global metropolises, proudly out of step with the rest of the United States.

While other Californians debate whether to stand for the national anthem, San Diegans sing the song themselves while flying flags outside their front doors. And the longstanding presence of the military provides the city with a deep well of patriotic renewal.

“Top Gun: Maverick” seeks to mine this well, but ultimately undermines it. When the movie taps into San Diego’s patriotism, it does the city a disservice.

While the original “Top Gun” was full of memorable, funny one-liners (“I feel the need, the need for speed” and “No points for second place”), the sequel decides to champion the line, “Don’t think — just do.”

The phrase isn’t just clunky. It reads as an indictment of both the film’s idiotic denouement (a “Star Wars” rip-off, with jets flying through a steep canyon to get off a miracle shot in the climactic moment) and of the United States itself.

“Don’t think” all too perfectly describes a country that thoughtlessly fails to vaccinate or wear masks — and ends up with more than one million people dead from COVID, apparently the highest death tally in the world. “Don’t think” fits an America that responds to gun violence by loosening restrictions on guns, making mass shootings routine. “Don’t think — just do” mirrors the American foreign policy that has kept us at war, in one place or another, for decades.

Pity San Diego, or any place else with a mission of defending such a country. Because so much of the time, to defend America is to defend the indefensible.

Which is why the movie is so unfair to San Diego. While military and aerospace are still highly visible in San Diego, the place is hardly dominated by these industries.

And San Diego actually does quite a lot of thinking.

In the original “Top Gun,” Cruise’s love interest was a mathematician with a PhD who worked for the Department of Defense; in the sequel, his love interest owns a bar. But San Diego, unlike Cruise’s cinematic partners, has become smarter over the past generation. It’s one of the country’s most educated cities, by measures that combine college degree attainment with the quality of its schools. It’s a leader in inventing new health and medical devices. Its remaining military installations are deeply grounded in science and tech. It’s a force in trade. And it just opened a new trolley line to its leading university, UC San Diego.

The film ignores this context, instead projecting its idiocy onto the city.

That’s too bad. San Diego deserves a cinematic touchstone as smart as it is.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: San Diego is too smart for 'Top Gun'