Top Gun Revelation

        I must confess that I had never seen the movie Top Gun until last night when my boyfriend forced me to watch it (only under the agreement that we could watch my favorite movie, Tangled, another night). I was not impressed with the film at first, mostly because I couldn’t get over my bias against Tom Cruise, but also because the script itself was extremely corny. I’m aware that at the time the film was made, this type of stuff wasn’t corny, but it is to me today, and I strongly disliked the romantic aspect of the film. However, after we watched the movie and I had expressed my distaste in the film, my boyfriend showed me a slip from the film Sleep With Me, in which Quentin Tarantino analyzes Top Gun, claiming that it is the greatest film script ever written. It’s actually an extremely funny clip, and I would recommend it to anyone who has seen Top Gun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSV35A1cQDM

        The subversity in the text, he claims, makes it such a great film because it is not a film about a fighter pilot who goes to flight school, or about his relationship with his instructor. Instead, the film is about a man’s struggle with his sexuality. Tarantino goes on to explain his reasoning, saying that there is sexual tension between Maverick, the protagonist who is played by Tom Cruise, and Iceman, his rival in th flight school. Supposedly, Iceman is tempting Maverick to “go the gay way,” while Charlotte, Maverick’s love interest in the film, is trying desperately to convert him to complete heterosexuality. The best part is that Tarantino's observations actually make sense.
        Tarantino’s analysis of the film is an extreme example of Barthes’ pleasure of the text; while it doesn’t seem as if the film leaves too much room for interpretation when it comes to Maverick’s love life, Tarantino has found a space in the film where it leaves a gap and has given it his own meaning. I hadn't considered Top Gun as a writerly text, but I can see how Tarantino does because it is able to be interpreted differently by many people. While I was watching the movie, I did not completely formulate a romantic subplot between Maverick and Iceman, but I think that Tarantino's analysis makes sense. Tarantino takes great pleasure in filling in these gaps in the text; Barthes calls this jouissance, or the French word for pleasure. Barthes discusses the eroticism behind this filling in of the gaps, saying that this is what the reader takes pleasure in because it gives them freedom to be creative. The interpretation also goes hand-in-hand with Macherey's "Theory of Literary Production," in which he states that what is left out of a work is what is most important, because it allows its readers to make interpretations and to decide for themselves the meaning of a text. Like Barthes, Macherey values the writerly text over the readerly text. I think that what is so entertaining about this clip is that Tarantino does take so much pleasure in his interpretation; he is visibly excited throughout the film clip. I haven't seen Sleep With Me, but if the rest of it is anything like that one clip, then I think I would enjoy it more than I enjoyed Top Gun.