Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Media Studies

Reader 1

Jennifer Friedlander

Reader 2

Ryan Engley

Reader 3

Sabrina Ovan

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

2025 Amy N Phan

Abstract

This paper takes the form of a critical analysis of the individual films in the Top Gun series and comments on the over-simplistic binary categorizations of media being either positively or negatively impactful. Moreover, I examine the ideological frameworks involved in the production of the series and the political landscape of the films during their creation and release to analyze the differing ways that the films present the nation, US military, and war to national and international audiences. Additionally, I further complicate positively versus negatively impactful binary categorizations of media by highlighting that Top Gun: Maverick (2022) had a positive cultural impact after the COVID-19 pandemic and represents a positive shift in multicultural media. Finally, I engage with scholarly research on the necessity of media literacy and contrastingly with scholarly research on the resiliency of the audience’s reception and interpretation of dominant media to argue that media can simply be consumed for enjoyment without being critically analyzed.

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