A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

I was feeling a bit crook yesterday afternoon – I’d been cutting the weeds at the kerb before the truck could come for the green bin. I’d been out in the sun and humidity for about ten minutes, and clearly that was too long.

I came in. It was early enough in the afternoon to be able to watch Coriolanus. Because it’s about demagoguery I wanted to understand it, but it sends me to sleep at the same moment every time, like Le Samourai with Alain Delon and The Makioka Sisters. I looked at the streaming options.

And there, like an exhaled breath and a great bath of relief, was Top Gun Maverick. Tom Cruise charming, half-smile utterly disarming –

This time he’s a US Navy test-pilot. We don't know where he lives: he first appears alone, in a hangar in a desert. The hangar is a perfection of focus and intention, a cathedral of space and peg-boarded tools and the mechanics of kinetic transcendence – a mid-restoration P49, a heavy motorbike. Per a DOD contract, he’s scheduled to take the latest fighter prototype to Mach 9 today.

He wears a white t-shirt and jeans; he gets his leather jacket from a metal closet; he picks up his keyring, a winged insignia and one key. (Dressing/arming the hero, at least as old as The Iliad.)

He takes the bike and to the bike – the closest thing to flying without leaving the ground – flies helmetless along the road beside the airstrip, unencumbered as a god.

The rest of the movie, the test flight in spite of a rear admiral’s plan to junk manned flight, the triumph of Mach 10 and the disaster of Mach 10.2, the new impossible assignment instead of dishonourable discharge, the personal and mission-specification-driven tensions, the old flame, the new marriage (Hermes-Hestia), the defeats, the victories and reconciliations, are all remarkably slick and well-handled. It’s The Dam Busters and Star Wars and Mission Impossible feats of running, all in IMAX.

TGM is a very late version of the military sub-subgenre of the subgenre America Dea – movies treating the United States of America as a not quite secular religion, Washington and Lincoln its formative angels. The civilian version produced Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

TGM is a lovely and dangerous fantasy, where the machines sing together like Blake’s morning stars, a captain can beat jealous and narrow-minded admirals, the government is great and good, the enemy is defeated despite its technological superiority.

The intermittent musical theme sounds at first as though it could be a handful of muted horns, in a soft, slightly jaunty military register: it is actually very softly and skillfully voiced choral music, a smooth and quiet undertone, a bedrock of quiet reverence.

The enemy has no justification for doing what they’re doing; what they’re doing is wrong: the enemy is a number of undifferentiated silhouettes, bad guys bad because they’re opposing the United States.

There’s racial diversity, often in the background in the bar scenes, more visible in the IMDB credits than in the movie. The people who make the running are the white guys. The conflicts and struggles and victories, the characters who create the framework of the plot, the ones in positions of real emphasis, are the white guys.

It’s a very Trumpian flick: a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and vice versa.

Aah, security

Alarm at 3. Taxi at 4, airport at 4:30 because Alaska strongly suggested we “needed” to be at the airport 2 hours before the flight. There might be long lines at Security.

Ah, Security... Shoes off, the raincoat you’re carrying into the basket, also, if you’re less than 75 years old, your black plastic vest into the basket, also, phone, keys. No, no iPad, tablet, laptop hidden in the bag, only the phone. Step this way into the x-ray chamber. Feet on the yellow footsteps (i.e., legs apart). Hands meeting above your head.

"Step over here. You alarmed the machine in these areas." Yellow circles on the shoulders of the outline I suppose is mine. "So I’m going to have to pat you down."

My shoulders contained, surface to centre: cotton shirt with cotton seam-stitching, no metal studs; camisole shoulder strap, black, indestructible, with perishing spandex, possibly made from recycled milk cartons; skin, sub-surface skin layers, veins, capillaries, layers of tissue, bone, bone marrow.

The girl pulled my shirt sleeves up to my armpit, both arms, and found: nothing up my sleeves, nothing under my arms.

So, firstly: the machines don’t work. Giving false positives isn't "working."

Secondly (looking around): this is an industry.

Thirdly: the industry’s primary purpose is to make money for the manufacturers of the machines. Michael Chertoff – remember him? Heckuva job Brownie’s best friend? Dubya's Administration? – had invested in that company. If the machines don’t work, i.e., if they give false positives all the time, then their primary purpose cannot be to detect explosives. The only thing they do do, unfailingly, all the time, is cost money. So costing money has to be their primary purpose.

Fourthly: the industry’s next purpose is to make you understand that officialdom can do whatever it likes. To you and to anything else.

And tangentially, lastly, but not leastly: Homeland really doesn’t mind if whatever you’ve inserted into your Nike heels blows up in a Social Security Office. SoSec offices have metal detectors, but no transparent, feet-in-the-yellow-circles x-ray chambers.