Top Gun Recut
This mashup has become hugely popular on Youtube, viewed over a million times. The remixer re-imagines a trailer for the 1980′s blockbuster hit Top Gun creating a new narrative in which the very straight macho fighter jet pilots Maverick and Iceman have a romantic and sexual relationship. We consider this remix “queer-positive” because it subverts the fictional “all heterosexual” world of Top Gun by imposing queer relationships into the story.
By now we are all familiar with this remix phenomenon where creators take heterosexual TV and movie characters and than re-cut the footage to create queer relationships. These videos come in many forms but by far the most popular are the remixed Brokeback trailers, of which there are literally hundreds online. Although this remix is not really classified as a “vid”, in the vidding world this type of sexuality re-framing is called slash or femslash (which we will talk about in more detail in a later post).
We think these works are of political importance because they are critical of and expose how the mass media makes straight characters and relationships the standard social norm while queer relationships and lifestyles are often excluded, marginalization or demonized.
On this site we look critically at these remixes and place them in two camps, queer-positive and queer-negative. We define “queer-negative” remixes as those that encourage the viewer to laugh at the re-framed sexuality frequently by queering oddball, weird or quirky fictional characters (like the Brokeback to the Future mash-up). We don’t often post these because they are often tinged with homophobic humor. In contrast, we define “queer-positive” remixes as those that invite the viewer to identify with, sympathize with or celebrate the newly created queer relationship. Often these works remix the stereotypical and highly gendered roles of straight characters in mass media. Its a very fine line with a lot of gray area and not always clear but we at least use this as our lens for viewing these types of remixes.
So in short, queer-positive remixes attempt to subvert heteronormativity, while queer-negative ones mocks characters that aren’t portrayed as “normal.”
Category: movie trailer
