I’ve never been much of a movie-goer, even before the neverending pandemic lockdown theatre landed on us in 2020, so the chances of me going to see something like Top Gun: Maverick were pretty low (especially as I never bothered to watch the original, back in the day). Paul Wells is in the middle of a European trip, so he did what every travelling North American would do somewhere on the continent of history and culture: he watched a current-release American movie:

The mystery of Maverick is why, by next weekend, it will pass Doctor Strange in the Convolution of Fan Service as the year’s biggest movie, why it is the biggest film of Tom Cruise’s charmed life — why it strikes such a chord in this moment, even though its premises, visual vocabulary and soundtrack are 36 years old. In terms of chronological distance from the original Top Gun, it’s as though the top-grossing movie of 1986 had been a sequel to 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun. (“And there has never been a star as sensational as Betty Hutton!” Annie‘s trailer proclaims. Switch Tom Cruise in for poor Betty and suddenly the claim may actually be true.)

The simplest hypothesis is that Maverick is just big and loud, so you can leave your brain at home and enjoy the spectacle. But lots of lousy movies nobody watched were big and loud, including Matrix: Resolutions and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, so there must be some fuller explanation.

This being a Substack newsletter, I suspect I’m contractually encouraged to argue that Maverick wins because it isn’t woke. I’m afraid I can’t oblige. I mean, the movie definitely makes only the barest acknowledgment of taking place in the 21st century. None of the hotshot young recruits pauses from the action to specify their pronouns. None decorates their flight helmets with empty square brackets to acknowledge their privilege. The film’s few concessions to cultural change since the MTV era have the effect, not of engaging today’s fights on provocatively old-fashioned terms, but of declining to engage. Joseph Kosinski, the journeyman special-effects technician brought in to direct this film in note-perfect homage to the style of the original Top Gun director Tony Scott, doesn’t even bother to make the film’s racial politics as minimally complex as Scott did in 1995’s Crimson Tide. Maverick‘s young recruits, diverse in gender and ethnicity, are awesomely interchangeable in every other way. One smirks, one has a moustache; the others have no identifying characteristics. (When half the recruits get cut from the big mission at the 90-minute mark, there is no dramatic payoff because it’s impossible to tell these people apart. “Sorry, Component A, I’ve decided to go with Component B.”) Nobody under 30 in this film has sex for either pleasure or procreation. Yearning for intimate touch is plainly something only old people do, like writing in cursive script or owning books.

As a cultural argument, Maverick is so close to being tabula rasa that there’s no real point interrogating it. But on another front, it succeeds resoundingly in popular art’s primary function of tantalizing simplification. It started to make sense when I realized that Cruise’s character, despite the denial inherent in his call sign, is a career civil servant.

This is a movie about the action of a large modern state. It’s a film about public policy. Its central claim is a cathartic feat of Avengers-level denial. Just as the superhero movies offer us a made-up universe in which we have any hope of telling the good characters and the evil characters apart, Maverick posits a world in which modern governments can get anything done at all.

I may be influenced in this reading by the fact that I work in contemporary Ottawa. I’ve been writing variations on a simple question — Can Justin Trudeau get big things built? — since 2017. I’m hardly alone. And it’s hardly just a question about Trudeau, Ottawa or Canada. It’s been fun reading about chaos at Toronto’s Pearson airport, but last week the Financial Times ran a “big read” feature story about global airport chaos that didn’t even mention Pearson, Toronto or Canada. Joe Biden promised to Build Back Better. It’s not going great. Here in France, Emmanuel Macron is the first president to be re-elected in 20 years, a genuine feat, but it’s not going great. Brexit? Don’t ask.

A generic term for the ability of governments to do stuff is “state capacity”, and there’s a vague sense in the quasi-academic literature that it’s in decline, although, the real world being the real world, every element of this claim — that state capacity is declining, that it can be measured, that it even exists in any measurable form — is open to dispute. Still, it feels true, don’t it? The world was never great. In important ways it was worse than today. But it used to feel like it was possible to improve the thing, and now it just feels like everyone’s just firing blind and hoping for the best. COVID is a dynamite demonstration of this. Three successive Canadian federal health ministers were told, by a prime minister who prides himself on his ability to read the room, to get cracking on plain-paper packaging for tobacco products. And then the biggest public-health disaster of our lifetimes opened up its jumbo can of whup-ass, and it wasn’t even in the mandate letters. And it’s hard to blame anyone involved. All the chaos that has ensued had its roots in the original chaos. Real life doesn’t have a plot. As Homer Simpson said, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens.