do you have any thoughts on how mav gets to parallel charlie in tgm especially during the first hour or so. it’s his turn to get hit on in the bar and then do a cool walk up to the podium to teach class :) and then his turn to say call signs and names until only rank is enough to get someone’s attention (maverick, maverick, lieutenant -> bradley, rooster, lieutenant bradshaw)
(being fully serious) I think there’s a real queer reading of Top Gun Maverick you can make re: Maverick himself. Like his position within the movie itself is queer. I don’t mean Maverick the character is gay or queer or etc, that’s irrelevant, I mean his position within the story is someone who has an unsettled relationship to heterosexuality, and the Charlie parallel is a great example of that
Maverick is at a social and emotional deficit relative to someone like Iceman (his only real peer/equal), who is an admiral, married to a woman, and lives in a beautiful home with his family. Maverick is a “mere captain” (his low rank is repeated multiple times throughout the movie) and a middle aged bachelor who lives alone in a hangar secluded from the rest of society - he’s a spinster, effectively, someone who is past their prime, constantly called old & no longer useful, and is in a permanent state of social stagnation because of this. Rooster calls attention to this: “no wife, no kids, nobody to mourn you when you burn in.” The quasi-paternal relationships Maverick does have with Rooster and Amelia are troubled by the fact that neither of them are his biological children - his sense of obligation and affection towards them is placed outside of nuclear expectations of familial responsibility, and he’s denied full access to them as ‘his children’ on those grounds. And the grief that keeps Maverick from moving on and properly accessing the ‘spoils’ of a long successful career (wife, kids, white picket fence) is the death of his male best friend Goose, whose ghost he speaks to repeatedly in the film.
And when we see Maverick interfacing with heterosexuality directly, he’s consistently placed on the ‘receiving’ end; Penny is the active and dominant party in all their interactions, including when she publicly humiliates him by having the entire bar participate in tossing him out (a rough parallel to what Maverick and Goose do to Charlie - she becomes the public object of attention in a male-dominated space). Penny is also positioned as knowing more than Maverick - on their date she stands behind him at the wheel and teaches him how to sail. It’s not presented in a patronising way, but there’s this element of Maverick being the doe-eyed, passive, less knowledgeable party within their relationship. And when they finally DO sleep together, it’s Penny who initiates.
There’s also a consistent way that Maverick is objectified by the camera. Like Tom Cruise looks soooooooo so so fucking good in this movie - and not just in an abstract, sexless Ken Doll way like you see with the Dagger Squad in the football scene. There is a lot of attention paid to the way Maverick moves (he enters the film with his back to the camera and his fucking ass wags as he walks into the hangar !!!!! He’s swaggering!!!!!), the clothes he wears (tight jeans and shirts only), his body and his nudity. We linger on his form as he moves, especially alone in his hangar. The film invites you to participate in enjoying the spectacle of Tom Cruise’s body, but his body is an object of sexuality, not an active agent.
AND!!! Like you said, Maverick parallels Charlie in the beginning of the film as the instructor you meet at the bar - right down to Hangman & Co seeing Maverick walk into the classroom the next day and sighing to themselves. Charlie is an outsider to the Navy, a civilian contractor, and Maverick is an outsider to Top Gun itself.
So Maverick is positioned in the film as an outsider, someone who doesn’t fit in despite Top Gun/the Navy being the core element of his identity, but the way the movie depicts that not-fitting-in is through his troubled relationship to heterosexual expectations regarding family, marriage, and sexual pursuits. So I think the Charlie parallel is a useful shorthand for reading Maverick’s ‘queer’ (in both the technical and critical sense) position within the film
