By Roger Stahl May 30, 2022 3:15 AM PT
As this country commemorates Memorial Day, many will head to theaters to bathe in the nostalgia of “Top Gun: Maverick,” which opened Friday. With Tom Cruise on screen, the multiplex will crack with high-fives and roar with F-18 fighter jets, those sleek emblems of American power.The film’s F-18s and other military gear are courtesy of the Pentagon. This is the job of the U.S. Defense Department’s Entertainment Media Office, which allows use of such assets in exchange for control of the script. Each military branch — except for the Marine Corps, which operates out of Camp Pendleton in San Diego County — maintains satellite offices along Wilshire Boulevard to do outreach with the entertainment industry. The original 1986 “Top Gun,” which was intimately guided by the Navy, has long represented the military’s capabilities when it comes to steering pop culture.Until recently, the scholarly consensus had been that this phenomenon was isolated to perhaps a couple of hundred films. In the past five years, however, my small group of researchers has acquired 30,000 pages of internal Defense Department documents through Freedom of Information Act requests and newly available archives at Georgetown University, which show that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows. These discoveries raise questions about the government’s reach at a time when deciphering propaganda from fact has become increasingly difficult.
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