/lit/ - Literature

>It features MTV motivation: I pose, therefore I am. The strapping Kelly McGillis is an astrophysicist employed to teach the elite fighter pilots in training at San Diego's Miramar Naval Air Station; she sidles into rooms and slouches, so she won't overpower her co-star, the relatively diminutive Tom Cruise, who is supposed to be the most daring of her students. When McGillis is offscreen, the movie is a shiny homoerotic commercial: the pilots strut around the locker room, towels hanging precariously from their waists. It's as if masculinity had been redefined as how a young man looks with his clothes half off, and as if narcissism is what being a warrior is all about. In between the bare-chested maneuvers, there's footage of ugly snub-nosed jets taking off, whooshing around in the sky, and landing while the sound track calls up Armageddon and the Second Coming--though what we're seeing is training exercises. What is the movie selling? It's just selling, because that's what the producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and the director, Tony ("Make It Glow") Scott, know how to do. Selling is what they think moviemaking is about. The result is a new "art" form: the self-referential commercial.