By Sophie Hu ‘26, Commentary Writer

Anonymous enemy pilot in the midst of battle with Maverick (Paramount Pictures)

The enemy’s fate is sealed with a beep and a push. After weeks of training at the elite school for America’s best fighter pilots, Top Gun, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell locks onto the swerving enemy plane in front of him and pulls the trigger. Bam! The plane explodes in a fiery ball. The audience cheers and unclenches their anxious hands. It’s another win tallied for the good guys! We move on, shedding tears of joy and relief. We don’t feel an ounce of pity or empathy for the dead pilots. If the roles were reversed, the main characters, the “good guys”, dying instead, the movie would become a tragedy. We would moan and gripe about their unfortunate and unnecessary deaths at the hands of dastardly villains. Why, then, can we not feel the same for the ones who were actually killed? Why have we become preconditioned to perceive these lives as worth less? Sure, they’re the enemy. But we do not see in only black and white, good and bad. Another very visual, very subconscious answer makes itself clear: it is because the enemies lack a face.

To clarify, they have faces, but they are covered by a completely black helmet. All dressed in the same black outfit, they look like identical, generic training dummies.  Eyes are the windows to the soul, and the most effective way of getting rid of the soul is to hide the eyes. Therefore, the masked enemies have all lost any sense of humanity.We don’t see their hair color, their eyes, their scars from previous injuries or their 5 o’clock stubble. The masked enemies have lost any sense of humanity. We don’t feel a loss when they die because they never seemed human to us in the first place. They might have children back home, aging parents they need to take care of, a new partner, but to us they are just physical manifestations of the ‘others’ that are threatening us. They are simply vessels for their evil enemy country to wreak havoc on our innocent land. We literally cover their humanity and individuality until they lose all sense of self and become no more than glorified mannequins. 

On the other hand, the good guys, Maverick and Ice Man, have clear visors, so the audience can see every wince and flicker of fear; every frown of concentration. Even the helmets are unique: Maverick has a patriotic red, white, and blue striped helmet with his tag blazoned across it, as if to announce his American goodness to the world. Iceman’s helmet is silver, sliced through with blue lightning bolts. We know who everyone is and we know their stories. We can see and relate to their faces and individuality. Humans are trained to empathize with other humans that we interact with. Black suit and mask wearing bipedal things do not register as human. Therefore, our empathy is not activated, and we are left cold and unfeeling towards these dehumanized humans.

“Top Gun” isn’t the only movie to have faceless enemies ready for the slaughter. Iconic fight scenes are always  They are just numbers in a body count, instead of individuals with their own stories. Marvel movies always end with a cliché CGI battle against an impossibly large host of monsters, who all look just like each other. Video games provide indistinguishable hordes of assailants, whether zombie, beast, human, or alien, for us to mow down as we please. They might not be masked in the literal sense, but their generic appearance is more than enough to mask them to the audience.

Of course, it’s all just fiction. No game developer or movie director is putting in effort to individualize each enemy, only for them to be shot down right after getting introduced. However, the media is usually a reflection of reality. We have to make sure that we understand that our ‘enemies’ are just as human as we are. In real life, there’s always someone under the mask.