Tag: tom cruise
Danziger Draws

Danziger Draws

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.

'Top Gun: Maverick' Success

Desperate Culture Warriors Try To Seize 'Top Gun: Maverick' Success

Right-wing culture warriors are constantly finding new things to get mad about, turn into content, and, if possible, monetize — from the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss to the purported wokeness of Mr. Potato Head. But that machine doesn’t only concoct culture war defeats to rail against — its cogs also need to identify successes.

Enter Top Gun: Maverick, which broke Memorial Day box office records with a $156 million gross over the four-day weekend. A simple but logical explanation for this large audience would be that it is a well-made, critically acclaimed sequel to a beloved property that stars a major movie star flying fighter jets and opened on a holiday weekend opposite no competition. But right-wing culture warriors saw the Tom Cruise vehicle as a nail, whipped out their hammer, and declared that its success is due to its supposedly “anti-woke,” “pro-America” politics. Their implicit argument is that films that don’t share their political views shouldn’t be made in the first place.

The right-wing content mills have all tossed out versions of the same point. Breitbart’s headline was “Masculine, pro-American ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ blasts to $146M opening, towers over woke flops.” Outkick.com went with “‘Top Gun: Maverick’ soars on pro-America, woke-free message.” At the Daily Caller, it was “‘Top Gun: Maverick’ crushes the box office as Americans crave non-woke content.”

By Monday, these arguments had moved from the right-wing digital space to Fox News. On Fox & Friends, guest co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy said the film’s success is because “they didn’t wokeify it. It’s unabashedly patriotic.” Outnumbered co-host Tomi Lahren responded to a quote from the Breitbart piece with “Amen,” adding, “Can we please bring back good movies like this, because the movies that we have had the last couple of years have not been great; they’ve been woke. They’re all about an empty virtue signal for those that make them.”

The right seems to think “wokeness” matters for audiences whenever it is useful for their argument. Breitbart’s John Nolte compared Top Gun: Maverick favorably to the Star Wars sequels, writing that the film “didn’t do what Star Wars did and pervert a romantic-adventure series into a shrill Womyn’s Studies lecture.”

But Top Gun: Maverick is likely to finish with a much smaller audience than those films: The Force Awakens currently holds the all-time domestic box office record, the other two films in the sequel trilogy come in at No. 10 and No. 15, and all three had bigger opening weekends, according to Box Office Mojo. By Nolte’s logic, Americans love “shrill Womyn’s Studies lectures,” though I think it’s more likely that they just love Star Wars films. (I did not personally enjoy any of those films for reasons unrelated to whatever Nolte is talking about.)

I was one of the millions of Americans who saw and enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick over the weekend. If you like well-executed films, fast planes doing cool things, dad vibes, and the theatrical experience, I’d recommend seeing it on the biggest screen possible.

Is the film “anti-woke”? The cast is significantly more diverse than in the original film, with a female naval aviator effectively serving as the next-generation Tom Cruise character. But this isn’t really interrogated — it’s a Hollywood blockbuster. If the film’s box office take had entered the danger zone, it’s easy to imagine the same culture warriors pointing to that diversity as the reason.

Is it “pro-America”? The heroes are U.S. naval aviators, and it’s assumed that their mission is a just one. But there’s no real discussion of America or why America is good – it’s a Hollywood blockbuster. It’s certainly no less patriotic than First Man, the 2018 moon landing film that right-wing culture warriors attacked on specious grounds.

I found Top Gun: Maverick to be an enjoyable movie. But while it’s certainly possible to read hidden depths into its script, it is fairly clear that any such depths are unintentional. As director Joseph Kosinski explained in an interview with Esquire, he saw the film as a character study meant to entertain broad audiences:

The first movie, is a boy becoming a man and I think this story is a man becoming a father. And that's what a Top Gun movie is. It's a rite of passage story that's character-driven but wrapped in this big action movie exterior.

Hopefully that entertains everybody. Regardless of whether or not you're into planes.

In fact, that does entertain everybody — or at least, enough people to break the Memorial Day box office record. The right seems driven to shoehorn its weird political concerns into the film, but the film’s success doesn’t require more complications than that.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Scientology Did It. How Do You Make Your Religion ‘Real’?

Scientology Did It. How Do You Make Your Religion ‘Real’?

Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, which probes into the notoriously opaque and controversial Church of Scientology, aired on HBO Sunday night to an eruption of positive reviews and social media exultation.

In weighing the relative merits of the film and the assiduously researched book upon which it is based, one moment from the movie stands out for its cinematic impact: Scientology leader David Miscavige, standing alone in the center of a stage in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, before an audience of 10,000, exclaiming: “The war is over!” while fireworks explode all around him.

The “war” Miscavige refers to is the 26-year campaign waged by the church against the IRS, using private investigators to discredit the agency and inundating it with litigation. The aim and result of these efforts was to coerce the IRS into recognizing Scientology as a religion and therefore granting its several dozen entities tax-exempt status.

For nearly three decades, the IRS claimed that the church operated and behaved like a business. For any organization, such as a religious institution, to qualify for 501(c)3 status, its “net earnings may not inure to the benefit of any private individual,” a condition not exactly affirmed by the lavish lifestyle of Miscavige or the several highly valuable gifts that the church has bestowed upon its most prominent member, Tom Cruise. Compounded with the long, troubling list of allegations against the church, these facts have led many to suggest that Scientology is not only undeserving of tax exemption, but is simply not a real religion at all. Which only raises the question: When does a religion become “real”?

The First Amendment precludes the U.S. government from privileging any religion; there is no status the state is supposed to confer that validates a faith. Tokens of official recognition for a religion are somewhat scattershot. In 2007, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs began to allow the Wiccan pentacle symbol on veterans’ tombstones, after a 10-year dispute; states permit participants of any number of practices to officiate religious ceremonies that result in legally binding marriages. But tax-exempt status arguably has become the strongest government imprimatur of a religion’s legitimacy. The onus has fallen on the taxman to decide when a religion becomes, for lack of a better word, “real.” As Lawrence Wright, the author of Going Clear, put it in a recent interview with Salon, it’s somewhat incongruous that the IRS is the “only agency empowered to make this distinction,” since it’s “not exactly stocked full of theologians.”

But the 1993 granting of tax-exempt status solidified Scientology’s claim to legitimacy. The State Department had been mum on the issue of religious discrimination against Scientologists abroad, but once the IRS made its determination, that all changed. Beginning in 1993 and continuing into the most recent report, the department mentioned in its International Religious Freedom Report that German state and federal government agencies maintain policies that exclude and diminish the church and its members. The German government continues to maintain that Scientology is a commercial enterprise, not a religion, just as the U.S. did for nearly 30 years.

The IRS cannot make its determinations based on how silly a belief system may or may not be. The agency is given latitude to investigate the church’s assets and organizational structure, but interrogating the wisdom and logic of any faith or practice is outside its purview. In trying to establish whether or not a purported religion is a fake, it is unavailing to examine the ridiculousness of the doctrine. Of course, this doesn’t mean there aren’t scams.

In an especially colorful recent example of fraud, on March 10 a church in Panama City, FL, called The Life Center: A Spiritual Community had its tax-exempt status revoked after officials discovered the church was operating a nightclub called Amnesia: The Tabernacle on the premises. The nominal church, situated in a tax-exempt building, hosted all-night lingerie parties and an event called “Wet ‘n Wild,” which was advertised as “white water meets Tabernacle PCB with a little twerkin’,” according to reporting by the Panama City News Herald. Would-be religions are rarely so unequivocally false. (It’s possible — though admittedly highly dubious — that the church might have squeaked by, had Amnesia claimed nightly raves were part of its sacred practice.)

While tax-exempt status demonstrates government recognition, a religious organization that doesn’t have it is by no means precluded from receiving the same protections and rights granted to those that do. The Church of Satan is not tax-exempt as a matter of preference (so they claim), choosing instead to adhere to founder Anton LaVey’s conviction that all churches should be taxed to “remove the government sanction of religion,” a position shared by other LaVey-influenced sects. (At least one Satanist sect, Satan’s Chapel, is tax-exempt.)

Yet regardless of tax-exempt status, the rights of several different sects of Satanism to practice have been recognized in a wide swath of court decisions. For instance, in 2014, the Satanic Temple (yet another group) won the right to erect a statue of Baphomet on Oklahoma state grounds after a Christian group was allowed to place a Ten Commandments monument in front of the state capitol building.

As for Scientology, the film won’t necessarily enlighten anyone who has read Wright’s book, or any of the other journalistic exposés of the last decade or so. If you need a refresher on Scientology’s risible theology, the South Park episode “Trapped In The Closet” offers an arguably more cogent, and certainly more entertaining, explanation. But Gibney’s documentary draws its considerable power from the personal narratives of several apostates, some of whom worked in the church’s highest echelons, whose disclosures form the film’s backbone.

And in another neat trick that only a movie can pull off, Gibney juxtaposes archive footage of church executives denying the accusations leveled at Scientology with new interviews of those same former executives, contrite and owning up to the church’s deceptive practices. The meaning is clear: Whatever Scientology is, it is not what it claims to be.

Photo courtesy of HBO