Alright, so this is similar to a post I made about 80s music, because I was listening to it again and there are a lot of videos that come with cool 80s movie compilations along with the music. Anyway, the compilation was pretty violent (as Robocop is a violent movie) but it made sense for the most part. I mean, Robocop’s character in the movie is a new technology, this almost indestructible cop, and the villians of the movie of course will try to deal with him as if he’s human (i.e. SHOOT HER! SHOOOOOOT HER! (go see Jurassic Park if that didn’t make sense to you)). So they are unloading A TON of ammo on this cyborg, to little or no effect, but I imagine as a henchman you could get away with participating in a group activity like that, some dumb herd mentality thing and maybe they each think that they are far enough away or isolated that Robocop will not target them with his super-sensitive robotic targeting system and absolutely destroy them (even though he’s just shot a bunch of others like that).

However, the outlier guy at 4:15 (let’s call him John Snow), the guy with the machine gun, he, after seeing 8-10 of his comrades blown away and Robocop not suffering any visible damage despite being shot 50 times with multiple types of guns, John decides to move close to Robocop and start shooting as if it’s the straw that will break Robocop’s titanium back. Why? Have you learned nothing John Snow? Why not just run away? Henchmen are stubborn, that was the overall message of this post. I guess that’s the downside of undying (until they die) loyalty in a criminal organization.

 

Much as sidekicks or “staff” in groups of good guy organizations are marginalized, so too are henchmen marginalized in bad guy organizations. Minor characters seem to have no value, no part to play, but they are the unsung heroes of fiction and the world. Sure, everyone knows famous people, but it’s very rare for people to know of the support group of said famous person. They will know a comedian, but not the guy that hooks up the sound or the lighting, or the person that is hosting that comedian, or the sitter that watches the comedian’s kids. These minor characters, we don’t even know their last names, and sometimes we don’t even name them at all.

 

The homeless person on the street or ANY person on the street is just another face in the crowd. Unless we know them, it’s very hard to identify with anything that happens to them. As much as we are a social species, I think the flaw of humanity is that unless you are part of our “tribe” or to refer to above, unless you are a central character in the story of our life, then it’s very hard to have true empathy. It’s devastating that right now there are so many people dying in mass shootings, but to the shooters it’s almost as if the people they gun down are all just faces in the crowd, nothing compared to the central characters or themes in their own life story. And in very much the same way the reaction to these events takes a faceless, “Oh it’s another mass shooter” type of mentality, again marginalizing the person/people, not trying to understand why it happened, but just treating it like an inevitable outcome that can’t be changed. We are all minor characters, but all of us can change the world to being a better (in the sense that fewer people are suffering) place just by trying to understand other people and empathize with them. Don’t be like the henchman that blindly follows the others in his tribe to destruction. Understand Robocop.