Maverick routes around ideology in Hollywood. By Steve Sailer.
The problem: reality is not diverse enough for the political commissars:
White male aircraft carrier fighter pilots were the heroes of the 1986 hit movie Top Gun. But today, white men are the designated villains in our culture. Yet the profession of carrier fighter pilot remains almost 93 percent white male, as Military.com reported in 2018:
Data provided to Military.com from the Navy shows that of the 1,404 pilots who fly Navy F/A-18 Hornets, only 26 are black and only 71 belong to any minority. There are only 33 female Hornet pilots in the Navy, according to the demographics, and just one is non-white.
After all, what have American white men ever contributed to aviation? I mean, besides inventing it in 1903, winning the Battle of Midway, going to the moon, and achieving global air supremacy over the past half century…
How then could Tom Cruise make a sequel to his It’s Morning in America Era blockbuster without betraying either the spirit of this age or the reality of naval aviation?
The solution:
Well, he’s Tom Cruise, and as he’s proved over his remarkably extended career, he’s adept at presiding over the delivery of consistently above-average action movies. Tom Cruise’s name above the title is your assurance that he’s assembled outstanding experts and made sure they’ve all given it their best shot.
What Cruise’s brain trust came up with for Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel arriving a remarkable 36 years after the original, is to have plenty of diversity casting — for instance, the final mission to blow up an under-construction nuclear weapons facility in an enemy country, which demands the best of the best the Navy has, is comprised half of Aviators of Diversity.
But, and here’s the brilliance, the diversity casting is solely in fungible supporting roles, while the great majority of the film’s considerable drama consists of the main six white male dinosaurs butting heads.
The result:
The striking result: Everybody loves Top Gun: Maverick, with the film earning $296 million domestically through its first two weekends, drawing back to movie theaters huge numbers of over-35-year-olds for the first time since Covid. Critics were near unanimous in giving it their thumbs-up. …
Probably not the first time this sort of thing has happened:
A myth has since emerged that during the Reagan Era, Hollywood was out-of-the-closet conservative.
But it’s likely that little has changed: In both eras, the movie industry imagined itself as indignantly progressive. Yet so many of its most memorable movies then and now are conservative tales of heroes.
