ABSTRACT
The big-budget productions of Jerry Bruckheimer exemplify the mainstreaming of the pop score, in the way that they move youth-identifi ed music beyond the teen or youth genre in the 1980s and 1990s. Top Gun (1986) capitalized on strategies that Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films had previously used for both Flashdance (1983) and Beverly Hills Cop (1984). Like its predecessors, it exemplifi ed what 1980s Hollywood called synergy, the multimedia approach to fi lmmaking and marketing whereby “movies + soundtrack + video = $$$.” 2 Number one fi lm of the year, with a soundtrack that went multi-platinum, Top Gun combined a coming-of-age story with war and action genres. Revisiting the most successful aspects of the production team’s previous two fi lms and directing them to the cause of U.S. militarism, Top Gun achieved a $350 million box offi ce worldwide with its combination of youth-identifi ed popular music, technologized spectacle, and promotional use of music video. 3
Plenty of films have since availed themselves of the Top Gun formula to feed “the public’s need for the loud and the proud,” 4 but the name most commonly associated with such films is Jerry Bruckheimer. Following the success of Top Gun , Bruckheimer, until the end of 1996 in partnership with Don Simpson and henceforward the head of Jerry Bruckheimer Films, continued to be a prolific producer in the action genre. He is often compared to old-style Hollywood studio bosses for his hands-on approach and commitment to brand (“Brand identification,” Bruckheimer says, “that’s what we strive to do”). 5 Also reminiscent of studio-era Hollywood is the way Bruckheimer has collaborated with favorite directors-especially the late Tony Scott and Michael Bay; 6 they, like Bruckheimer, got their start making television commercials, thus learning how to “take the air out” and “keep the story moving.” 7 The “Bruckheimer film,” summed up by USA Today reviewer Claudia Puig in 1998, is “high on concept, long on action and
features macho heroes backed by amped-up rock music.” 8 As Puig observes, one of the elements of Bruckheimer’s “brand” is music, especially guitardriven rock. Even the television franchise CSI: Crime Scene Investigation , 9 described by creator Anthony E. Zuiker as “a show about thinking and watching people think,” 10 has as its trademark big, brash anthems by 1970s British rockers, The Who. 11
In the case of Top Gun , which was part of what Lawrence Grossberg observes to be an “explosion” in youth films during the 1980s, 12 music expresses the film’s particular version of the youth genre’s “dialectic between . . . alienation and a struggle for empowerment.” 13 In doing so, Top Gun influenced the way that future action films used popular music, especially guitar-driven rock, so much so that by 1993, the formula of spectacular action-plus-electric-guitar was recognizable as a cliché available for gentle parody by the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Last Action Hero . In drawing on intertextual associations between rock rebellion and masculine display, as well as visual tropes of action cinema, Top Gun highlighted rock culture’s and action cinema’s shared investment in spectacular masculinities, even as it reoriented action film themes in terms of rock musical constructions of gender, youth, pleasure, and empowerment. In these terms, the 1980s industrial strategy of synergy was ultimately about more than just marketing. Rock music as we see and hear it used in the Bruckheimer film helped to shape contemporary Hollywood masculinities-and the image of the U.S. military-according to the imagination of youth and music cultures. And even years after the success of Top Gun , this audiovisual representation of masculinity-once innovative, now obvious and clichéd-persisted as an element of Bruckheimer productions and their construction of heroic action. From the cartoonish Armageddon (1998) to Ridley Scott’s somber, elegiac historical reconstruction Black Hawk Down (2002), rock musical constructions of action masculinity continued to anchor Bruckheimer-produced depictions of the U.S. military and its world mission.
