Summer Movie Memories: An Awkward Encounter with 'Top Gun'
Everyone has a beloved summer movie memory. But sometimes it’s not so much about the film as it is about where you were and who you were when you saw it. Yahoo Movies asked some of our favorite writers to recall the summer movie that meant the most to them, and why.
Lawrence, Kansas. 1986. The ugly superplex hadn’t yet blistered up out past the Dillons Grocery, and we were still watching movies as God intended: in terrible seats, on tiny screens in one of the three theaters in town.
Of course, when I say “we,” I didn’t mean “us.” My parents are pretty modernity-averse, which meant no pop music, no movies, and no TV watching, except for the occasional dad-sanctioned golf tournament. (Immune to Jack Nicklaus’s charms, my sister and I watched these for the ads.) But the summer before I turned 10, there was a Khrushchev-style thaw. When my sister (then 13), my father, and I were left home alone for a week, ’80s-era comedy-parenting ensued — laundry undone, lawn a mess. Already dazed by a diet of Frito pie (chili and Fritos, scallions to taste), we were stunned when Pop announced we were off to the movies. The Granada Theater downtown was playing Top Gun.
In one jet-engine roar, 10 years of liberal, pacifist, zero-media child-raising collapsed into a sudden passion for the armed forces. I remember a dazzlement so intense that I would later only accept braces because the orthodontist said they would let me wear a jet-pilot oxygen mask. Most of all though, I remember the scene — you’re thinking about it too — of Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis’s backlit Night of Love. Maverick is late for dinner. Charlie wears an amazing white shirt. And then bang: The lights are supersaturated, the curtains billow, everybody’s in profile, and Berlin is crooning to a crescendo. “Watching in slow motion?” I’ll say.
Nine-year-old me suddenly dropped into an abyss of self-consciousness; even now, I can still feel stomach-churning embarrassment. The first time we three sat in a movie theater together, and it was pornography? Why so much kissing? Why so much synthesizer? I could have ducked out to the bathroom. I could have sat silently, assuming everyone else was handling it. But my father wasn’t handling it, so my sister and I dealt with our mortification in the way we understood best. We whispered. We howled with laughter. We ducked. We covered our eyes. “Blue scene! Blue scene!” we shouted, as my sister tried to evaporate. No, it wasn’t your usual coming-of-age moment, and my sister, understandably, is still cheesed off. But for me, it’s actually a sacred memory. Humiliation, it turned out, could be cured with noise and hilarity. That lesson came in awfully handy — adolescence would have been an unrecoverable flat spin without it.
Photo credit: © Everett Collection
