Maybe Top Gun (1986) is Not-So-Secretly a Film About Tony Scott’s Relationship With His Brother

Note: I couldn’t avoid mentioning the one big spoiler from Top Gun in today’s newsletter. I assume you’ve probably seen Top Gun if you’ve read this, but if not, at least you’ve been warned.

Reader, today is my birthday. And the biggest movie in America on the day of my birth was Top Gun. Perhaps I was destined to write about this film eventually, even though I hadn’t seen it in a good 20+ years before this week. But the surprisingly positive reception for Top Gun: Maverick at Cannes has me curious, and I was overdue for a revisit. So here I am, fulfilling my destiny by writing about Top Gun.

But I don’t want to talk about my relationship to Top Gun.* I want to write about Tony Scott’s relationship to his brother, Ridley Scott.

There are lots of brotherly filmmaking duos throughout the history of cinema. The Coen Brothers and the Dardenne Brothers are among the most celebrated filmmakers of the past half-century. The Safdie Brothers are on the rise and have the potential to be truly great. The Farrelly Brothers also exist and have made motion pictures together. Hell, the Lumière Brothers pretty much invented the art form.

But it’s always been curious to me that Ridley and Tony Scott, who have each given us legitimate classics, chose to blaze their own separate trails. To my knowledge, they never directed a film together despite making more than 40 features between the two of them.

This is not to say that they did not like each other, of course. They formed not one but two production companies together, the first specializing in TV commercials that they worked on in tandem. (The second, of course, is Scott Free Productions.) And as I learned from a lovely tribute to Tony and Ridley’s relationship by The Daily Beast, Tony’s first taste of the film life was starring in one of Ridley’s short films when they were just 16 and 22 respectively.

From there, Ridley, as The Daily Beast said, “would continue to offer key advice and career guidance…while Tony would provide a kind of ballast for Ridley’s creativity and relentless ambition.” If you put their careers side by side, this certainly tracks. They both studied at London’s Royal College of Art, they both cut their teeth on commercials for big brands, and they even both had their debut feature films premiere at Cannes.

But Tony didn’t quite make the jump to Hollywood as smoothly as Ridley did. Yes, The Hunger did premiere at Cannes in 1983, but it didn’t make much of a splash at the box office or with the critics, which had Tony (and others in the industry) thinking that he’d missed his shot in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Ridley had already made Alien and Blade Runner by this point, which maybe hadn’t quite established him as a box-office juggernaut but had certainly propelled him into the discussion of directors to watch.

Here’s where Top Gun comes in. Tony didn’t write the script, but I do think he saw something familiar in the bromance between Maverick and Goose, two fighter pilots who have been in cahoots, as Maverick says, “since puberty.”**

The thing about the dynamic between Maverick and Goose is that, while they love each other, they both understand that they’re not on equal ground. Maverick is consistently hailed by his peers and instructors as the chosen one, the potential top gun of Top Gun, while Goose is, as his commanding officer puts it, “lucky to be here.” I was already starting to see the film as Tony’s interpretation of (or simply tribute to) his relationship with Ridley, but then Maverick said one line that solidified this reading in my mind: “You’re the only family I’ve got.”

I think that maybe Tony knew this was his last chance to make it in Hollywood. And I think that, though he knew not what the outcome would be, he wanted to honor his brother in a significant way. Whether or not his career was to take off from there (no pun intended), he wanted to acknowledge that he wouldn’t even have had the opportunity if not for big brother shepherding him along.

This is where today’s newsletter gets sad. Because once you see Top Gun through this lens of brotherly love, you cannot separate it from the most haunting parallel between Tony and Goose that eventually came to be: Not only did they both fly in the shadow of their copilot, they both died tragically young. And given how close Tony and Ridley were, I imagine Maverick’s sorrow only scratches the surface of what Ridley went through almost a decade ago.

But now is not the time to be sad, folks. Because Ridley is still making great films*** and Tony’s work lives on, especially now that there’s a new legasequel to his most popular film. I bet we’ll even get a tribute to Tony in the new film. And I’m really looking forward to that.

*Mostly because I don’t really have one. I think Top Gun is a good and fun movie, but so many of you either believe it to be a bona fide classic or overrated trash, and I can’t get behind either of those camps.

**Many people have pointed out that Top Gun is pretty gay, and while I think there’s merit to that assessment, I don’t necessarily think Maverick and Goose are in love with each other. More importantly, I don’t think Tony Scott thought this either.

***The Last Duel was actually one of my favorite films of 2022. Please give it a watch if you’ve been putting it off. Tremendous stuff.

Top Gun is available on Netflix and Paramount+, and it’s available to rent elsewhere. (Note: It’s leaving Netflix at the end of the month!)