Finding Your Penny or Pete

There's more to Top Gun: Maverick than just adrenaline.

I love Top Gun: Maverick.

As it turns out, on several levels. The first time was sheer enjoyment, pure unadulterated release to a movie that spoke to me on every patriotic level. Went back with my youngest son when he was home on leave and even knowing the plot, it was the adrenaline that time. Every time I watch it another layer peels back and I find another reason it resonates with me. This week, I saw it a couple more times on plane flights and now I think I understand why it hits me so hard – and people who know me that I’m not an emotional guy, but it gets me pretty close to where it hurts…

So, I began to think there might be something I was missing.

I think there are people out there who probably feel it, as I do, rather than just watch it. It is more than nostalgia or patriotism, although that is a big piece of it after the decades we have endured since the first one in 1986, and it is more than just wanting to be a hero. Everybody wants to be a hero, even if it is of their own story – some especially if it is their own story.

But the real heroes become so for somebody who matters.

On so many levels, TGM could be seen as just another adrenaline driven action flick, but to dismiss it as such would be to miss the truly heroic characters. Maverick, of course, is one, but without the other, the movie is just another Die Hard bro-flick.

It might surprise you that I think the real hero is Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly). Even though wisdom is seeping in Mav’s head after three decades, without Penny, this Maverick is still a hollow, testosterone laden, shoot-em-up character. These are two people who have lived lives that intersected over 30 years, only to take three decades to understand why they needed each other. Maverick needs to be her hero, but she is his.

Penny is so much smarter and stronger than Mav. She sees a straighter path. She sees him and she knew when the time was right to rescue him from himself, a time when he was ready to sit in the back seat and let someone else pilot the plane. Mav gets the screen time, but Penny is the real star.

We all have a Penny or a Maverick. At least I hope we do.

I certainly have my Penny.

My Penny is my wife of 41 years, the lovely and talented (and pretty damned long suffering and patient), Deborah Catherine Gates Smith.

I’ve never been at the controls of a supersonic aircraft, nor have I ever cheated death while engaged in air-to-air combat but, like Mav, I’ve stepped on my dick with golf spikes in front of an admiral a time or two – and every time I did, my Penny was there to tell me that I would never forgive myself if I lost my pilots. She is the one who told me to get off my ass and find a way to get back in the air, even when she knew the biggest challenge was, and always is, me being me.

I’d like to believe those two fictional characters lived happily ever after. Who knows, Penny Benjamin and Pete Mitchell are characters birthed in the minds of their creators and only they know the end of the story but in real life, there are millions of Penny’s and Pete’s out there, some finding each other, some not.

Yeah, pretty sappy, soi boi of me, right?

So what? I’m complex. It’s part of my charm.

The fact is, I’m damned lucky to have found my Penny, even if I don’t have a P-51 Mustang.

But would it have killed her to come with the Porsche, a sailboat, AND a beach house?