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February 12, 2007
Deconstructing Maverick
I just learned today about the cool new-to-me film blog, CineFile Video, and wanted to mention Hadrian's post on a video highlighting the homosexual content in Top Gun, appropriately called "Gay Top Gun." Mixing Top Gun clips with footage from the otherwise forgettable Eric Stoltz-slacker comedy, Sleep with Me (remember when Eric Stoltz films constituted their own genre?), "Gay Top Gun" performs what Hardian calls "video-form film criticism" on Top Gun. Arguably, of course, the video is also performing video criticism on Sleep with Me, reading Tarantino's cameo and his drunken grad-student commentary on Top Gun.
The video is lots of fun, but I think Hadrian is right to point out that identifying "latent homosexual subtext" is relatively easy to do, espeically in male-bonding films such as Top Gun (I hesitate to describe anything about Top Gun as "latent," and there is, in fact, a whole genre of YouTube vids that perform this form of deconstruction of Top Gun). Hadrian offers an interesting reading of why such readings are so commonplace, but I'm even more intrigued by the editing of the sequence from Sleep with Me, in which Tarantino's character misrepresents several key bits of dialogue from Top Gun in his conversation with the other partygoer (played by Todd Field), in part because Tarantino's reading of the film now seems relatively obvious. Not sure I have much to add right now, but Hadrian's reading of the video is well worth checking out.
Posted by chuck at February 12, 2007 5:30 PM
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Comments
Love this. Haven't thought about Sleep With Me for years.
Posted by: zp at February 13, 2007 9:51 AM