Boy Movies #74

Happy second birthday, Boy Movies <3

You’re reading Boy Movies, a newsletter that is officially two years old. Wow!

Little baby Boy Movies becomes a toddler

On October 4, 2022, my apartment’s heat and hot water were out during a particularly cold and rainy beginning of fall in New York City, I saw Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster on Broadway in The Music Man, and I sent out the first issue of Boy Movies.¹ Excuse me for being a week late in wishing my dear child a happy birthday (I was busy physically and mentally preparing to see Joker: Folie a Deux last Friday), and excuse me for being one of those mothers who insists on extending their snot-nosed kid’s birthday into a month-long celebration, but I would be remiss to let this moment go unacknowledged.

As someone who loves giving up, it is frankly unbelievable to me that I have been doing this (more or less) consistently for two years. I have basically never done anything for two years, other than, like, living and going to work and stuff. Hobbies are hard for me to maintain (not to sound like a girlboss, but you mean to tell me I’m putting effort into something for “fun”?), but so much of the reason Boy Movies has remained enjoyable is because of all the gorgeous geniuses who read it. When I started writing this newsletter I felt prematurely defensive about the concept, afraid that people wouldn’t understand that it is, at all times, 80% tongue in cheek and 20% serious. I’ve been lucky enough to attract readers who very much Get It and have never once accused me of, like, participating in the girl dinner trend of yore or whatever the fuck.

Today’s post marks 74 issues of this thing, sometimes with the help of many brilliant friends. It’s an honor that anyone wants to attach their name to Boy Movies, honestly. I’m not sure that I thank you all enough for being here with me, so if I haven’t made it clear: THANK YOU so much for subscribing and reading. Thank you for selling me out of stickers², thank you for always leaving thoughtful comments (they are a highlight of every issue!!!), and thank you for being down to laugh with me. Whether you’ve been a subscriber since October 4, 2022 or this is your first issue, I’m so happy to have you.

Please allow me to introduce myself

I’ve been receiving a steady stream of new subscribers in recent weeks, and if you found yourself here at the recommendation of someone else and regularly find yourself wondering what all this is about: Hi! I’m Allison. I’m a writer from the great state of New Jersey, you can follow me on Letterboxd, and I look like this irl:

Jk I actually look like this:

Here’s how I described the Boy Movies objective in that first issue two years ago: “What if I, a girlie, watched boy movies and wrote about them through the lens of understanding that they were made with absolutely zero interest in catering to my viewing experience? What discoveries could be made? Could I learn anything about this subsection of film that I have cherished and privately examined for so long? I’m going to attempt to answer those questions, and hopefully more, here.” I don’t know if it’s necessarily about answering those questions anymore, but it’s also not not, you know? In any case, I take it a lot less seriously now, a pivot that has been for the best. Like, this is Substack, not the New York Times. (Which Boy Movies was once mentioned in…) If you’re new here and are interested in catching up on The Essential Boy Movies, here are my top 10 favorite issues:

Maybe this will be the year Boy Movies gets bought out by Dua Lipa’s Service95 (longtime readers will remember that this is my dream), but until then, we’ll continue having unsponsored fun as a community. (Though I have a Ko-fi if you ever want to support me financially… tbh…)

I heard a story, a girl, she once told me

For the Boy Movies two-year anniversary issue, I decided to honor the theme of seconds by revisiting Top Gun: Maverick, the movie that started it all. Without Maverick, this newsletter would quite literally not exist. To think I was once such a Tom Cruise anti and I now owe him my life and livelihood…

This, according to Letterboxd, was my sixth viewing of Maverick, the second outside of a movie theater and the first from my home. That first viewing remains one of the most exciting theater-going experiences of my life. About fifteen minutes in, Bashir Salahuddin’s Hondo earnestly calls Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell “the fastest man alive,” which was all it took for me to give myself over to the movie’s many charms and thrills. I’ve sort of come to hate the question of whether or not works of art “hold up,” especially in the context of boy movies. I’m unconcerned with what does or does not hold up; much of my fascination with boy movies lies in the evolution of the genre, anyway.

The original Top Gun, directed by Tony Scott and released in 1986, is the epitome of ‘80s all-American masculinity, which so wholeheartedly leans into its own machismo that it shifts, quite famously, into homoeroticism in the way only movies produced before the year 2000 could. Joseph Kosinski’s 2022 sequel knows it’s working with dated material, but it doesn’t stretch to recapture that oh so ‘80s feel of the original. Instead, it embraces the years gone by in the only way it can: by turning the young hotshot Maverick, once an aggressively ambitious daredevil with a megawatt smile, into the loneliest guy in the world, and a man out of time. This is what a lot of legacy sequels do (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice just did it with Lydia Deetz, once the coolest girl alive, now a hapless TV personality whose daughter hates her), and Maverick didn’t allow itself to get left behind in the name of capitalizing on nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.

There’s a fragility to Maverick that wasn’t present in the original Top Gun, which is all about guys being dudes flying planes. The suddenness of Goose’s (​​Anthony Edwards) death in the first film forever changes the cocksure Maverick into someone all too aware of his own mortality and the mortality of those around him. He’s been nursing his grief and guilt for decades, haunted and hollowed out. His main conflict comes from his dynamic with Goose’s son Rooster (Miles Teller), who’s up for a spot in the mission Maverick is tasked with training young Top Gun graduates for, and who Maverick once tried to prevent from becoming a pilot, at the bitter expense of their relationship. But he’d rather Rooster hate him than see him suffer the same fate as Goose.

On this rewatch, I was floored anew by the interactions between Maverick and Rooster, and how Cruise and Teller play them. Maverick, who gets on the nerves of everyone he encounters with his brashness, is hobbled by his love for Rooster, and as a result is achingly reserved with him. Subdued until he’s not, he lets Rooster ignore him and snap at him. He lets Rooster be angry and accepts the force of his anger. As the film goes on, that spikiness softens into tenderness. When the two veer off course during the mission and find themselves being pursued by enemy aircrafts, Maverick begins to resign himself to giving up. Rooster insists, “You would go after them if I wasn’t here,” to which Maverick replies, “But you are here.” For Maverick, putting Rooster’s life at risk is out of the question. Maverick, as the film makes painfully clear, would rather die himself.

Upon Maverick’s release, plenty dismissed it as military propaganda and criticized it for its dated jingoism. It’s hard to blame them: Watching the U.S. Navy being exalted isn’t, like, a huge passion of mine either. It’s just as hard to be like, “Except…” but, I mean, yeah! Except! Intentional or not, the film’s fragility extends to its patriotism. Maverick is frequently reminded by his superiors that guys like him are a dying breed, well on their way to being cast aside. “The end is inevitable, Maverick,” Cain (Ed Harris) tells him. “Your kind is headed for extinction.” Soon enough, these planes won’t even need pilots, prone as they are to having feelings and/or dying. In 2024, Maverick endures not because of the reverence it holds for America, but because of its understanding of the tragedy of the waning nature of humanity. Its ending, a euphoric celebration after Maverick and Rooster are rescued from the brink of death by the redeemed Hangman (Glen Powell), provides its own version of hope, though: Our kind is headed for extinction, but that’s no reason to stop living while we’re still here.

1. Can any of you astrology bitches tell me what it means that Boy Movies is a Libra? Is that good???

2. Hypothetically, if I did another merch drop, what sort of Boy Movies merch would you most want to see?