25 Years Later, How 'Top Gun' Made America Love War

Americans are souring on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military budget is under siege as Congress looks for spending to cut. And the Army is reporting record suicide rates among soldiers. So who does the Pentagon enlist for help in such painful circumstances?

Hollywood.

In June, the Army negotiated a first-of-its-kind sponsorship deal with the producers of "X-Men: First Class," backing it up with ads telling potential recruits that they could live out superhero fantasies on real-life battlefields. Then, in recent days, word leaked that the White House has been working with Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow on an election-year film chronicling the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

A country questioning its overall military posture, and a military establishment engaging in a counter-campaign for hearts and minds -- if this feels like deja vu, that's because it's taking place on the 25th anniversary of the release of "Top Gun."

That Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster, made in collaboration with the Pentagon, came out in the mid-1980s, when polls showed many Americans expressing doubts about the post-Vietnam military and about the constant saber rattling from the White House. But the movie's celebration of sweat-shined martial machismo generated $344 million at the box office and proved to be a major force in resuscitating the military's image.

Not only did enlistment spike when "Top Gun" was released, and not only did the Navy set up recruitment tables at theaters playing the movie, but polls soon showed rising confidence in the military. With Ronald Reagan wrapping military adventurism in the flag, with the armed forces scoring low-risk but high-profile victories in Libya and Grenada, America fell in love with Maverick, Iceman and other high-fivin' silver-screen super-pilots as they traveled Mach 2 while screaming about "the need for speed."

Today, "Top Gun" lives on in cable reruns, in the American psyche and, most important, in how it turned the Hollywood-Pentagon relationship into a full-on Mav-Goose bromance that ideologically slants films from their inception.

The 1986 movie, starring Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis, was the template for a new Military-Entertainment Complex. During production, the Pentagon worked hand-in-hand with the filmmakers, reportedly charging Paramount Pictures just $1.8 million for the use of its warplanes and aircraft carriers. But that taxpayer-subsidized discount came at a price -- the filmmakers were required to submit their script to Pentagon brass for meticulous line edits aimed at casting the military in the most positive light. (One example: Time magazine reported that Goose's death was changed from a midair collision to an ejection scene, because "the Navy complained that too many pilots were crashing.")

Although "Top Gun" was not the first movie to exchange creative input for Pentagon assistance and resources, its success set that bargain as a standard for other filmmakers, who began deluging the Pentagon with requests for collaboration. By the time the 1991 Persian Gulf War began, Phil Strub, the Pentagon's liaison to the movie industry, told the Hollywood Reporter that he'd seen a 70 percent increase in the number of requests from filmmakers for assistance -- effectively changing the way Hollywood works.

As Mace Neufeld, the producer of the 1990 film "The Hunt for Red October," later recounted to Variety, studios in the post-"Top Gun" era instituted an unstated rule telling screenwriters and directors to get military cooperation "or forget about making the picture." Economics drives that directive, Time magazine reported in 1986. "Without such billion-dollar props, producers [have to] spend an inordinate amount of time and money searching for substitutes" and therefore might not be able to make the movie at all, the magazine noted.

Emboldened by Hollywood's obsequiousness, military officials became increasingly blunt about how they deploy the carrot of subsidized hardware and the stick of denied access to get what they want. Strub described the approval process to Variety in 1994: "The main criteria we use is . . . how could the proposed production benefit the military . . . could it help in recruiting [and] is it in sync with present policy?"

Robert Anderson, the Navy's Hollywood point person, put it even more clearly to PBS in 2006: "If you want full cooperation from the Navy, we have a considerable amount of power, because it's our ships, it's our cooperation, and until the script is in a form that we can approve, then the production doesn't go forward."

The result is an entertainment culture rigged to produce relatively few antiwar movies and dozens of blockbusters that glorify the military. For every "Hurt Locker" -- a successful and critical war film made without Pentagon assistance -- American moviegoers get a flood of pro-war agitprop, from "Armageddon," to "Pearl Harbor," to "Battle Los Angeles" to "X-Men." And save for filmmakers' obligatory thank you to the Pentagon in the credits, audiences are rarely aware that they may be watching government-subsidized propaganda.

Until this year, this Top Gun Effect seemed set in stone. But a quarter-century after that hagiographic tribute to the military's "best of the best," an odd alignment of partisan interests has prompted some in Congress to question the arrangement.

Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, recently sent letters to the CIA and the Defense Department demanding an investigation of the upcoming Bin Laden movie. He criticized the practice of granting ideologically compliant filmmakers access to government property and information that he says should be available to all. The "alleged collaboration belies a desire of transparency in favor of a cinematographic view of history," he argued.

Considering King's previous silence on such issues, it's not clear whether he's standing on principle; more likely, he is trying to prevent a particular piece of propaganda from aiding a political opponent. Yet, even if inadvertent, King's efforts make possible a broader look at how the U.S. government uses taxpayer resources to suffuse popular culture with militarism.

If and when King holds hearings on the matter, we could finally get to the important questions: Why does the Pentagon treat public hardware as private property? Why does the government grant and deny access to that hardware based on a filmmaker's willingness to let the Pentagon influence the script? And doesn't such a practice violate the First Amendment's prohibition against government abridging freedom of speech?