Weekend Retreat

Amidst filming a short film for class my weekend still saw the inclusion of two classic films. Kubrick’s bold 1964 military satire Dr. Strangelove is the late director’s final black and white film and boasts an intelligence noticeably absent in Tony Scott’s sophomore feature of 1986, Top Gun. The latter is a glamorized and dramatic jet fighter commercial. Kubrick is an incontrovertibly established filmmaker whose oeuvre consistently probed under the surface and in the case of Strangelove seems a bit too relevant with the questions it asks about a species who can easily and unintentionally bring about its own demise. (Let me add here the eleventh hour inclusion of Michael Bay’s almost unwatchable Armageddon, of which a watched half, as another film who toys with the theme of extinction but appropriately skips over the issue in favor of big explosions and bad dialogue.) This is perhaps his scariest film, in which ordering a nuclear strike is much easier than calling it off and the main issues and the decisions that affect the entire world are made by a round table of isolated madmen. Top Gun is only less scary in its romanticized view of midair combat and bravura showmanship with cocky attention seekers behind the controls of $30 million war machines.

While my weekend had not aimed to be saturated far more than necessary in combat it proved an interesting reflection on the duality of war films. On the one hand we have the natural and cinematic inquisition to probe into an unfamiliar and brutal environment. Compare this to the detriments of hand-to-hand, gun-to-gun, or bomb to bomb combat that becomes engaging, exciting, and at times fun. And while some films point out the inherent irony of killing our own species others highlight the fun in challenging another human to the high stakes game of training and skill. The problem is that the two conflict with one another; when something becomes action-packed gunfire, explosions, escapes, and headshots it is immediately fun and engaging. We are promoting our own demise as entertainment: a natural progression to snuff film. Conversely, we could reflect on the dangers of fighting amongst ourselves fueled by greed of possession and intolerance of ideas. The existence of a war-glamorizing film immediately challenges the psychological debate posed by other films whose intent falls more along the lines of, say, questioning the ethics of war when both sides are really the same side.
So does this mean that a carefully delivered and socially conscious Strangelove discredits a flashy Top Gun in terms of cinematic appeal? Hardly. They are both visual and thematic escapist fare that may diverge in terms of depth and content but the fact of the matter is they are both still movies. They are movies with different statements, goals, and quite assuredly different longevity.