I watched Top Gun Maverick on Channel Four last night. There was nothing else on TV, I hadn’t seen it before, and I’m still looking for something new to get into. However, I soon started to find what I was watching utterly nauseating: as a film it is crammed with American bravado like sickly sweet ice cream piled onto a cone. It’s essentially about a fighter pilot who seems free to break any rule he wants, training a group of fellow pilots for a seemingly impossible mission against a vague, unnamed enemy. This group is always referred to as ‘the best’, probably just because they’re American, and is shown buzzing around in multi million pound fighter planes like they’re toys.

Look, I know I shouldn’t be too negative; I also know I can’t give any real, in-depth analysis in one short Sunday morning blog entry. But this really was American filmic dick waving*. It came across as a statement that Americans can do whatever they want and get out of any situation simply because they’re American. For example, towards the end of the film, the stranded Tom Cruise Maverick character just steals an enemy fighter plane they’ve just left lying around! It stretched the limits of plausibility far beyond breaking point, but the film treated the characters with such cheesy gusto and reverence that it made me want to puke. I don’t know how much my opinion of this film has been tainted by what I currently think of the USA, but in the current light, such tripe came across as nauseatingly arrogant and infantile.

*We Brits could obviously be accused of doing the same thing with James Bond. Yet it seems to me that, while everyone knows 007 is a mythological remnant of a long-faded empire, this was a reflection of how America actually perceives itself and it’s authority over the wider world.