You thought this one was going to be number one, didn’t you?
Any of the top three could have been in the number one position: we’ve hit the rarified-air portion of our program. There is, and I want to say this emphatically, nothing not to love about The Incredibles, except, you know, for that one terrible thing. And that one terrible thing? I’ll get to that in a minute. The fact that there are two other off-brand superhero movies I love more than I love The Incredibles is my problem, ultimately, not yours. Please don’t get yourself worked up about it.
The one terrible thing is not that The Incredibles is terribly derivative, though it is. Superheroes, by definition, always are. Even Superman, the first superhero, stole much of his schtick (including the name and location of his secret hideout) from earlier pulp heroes like Doc Savage. Longtime comic book fans have noted a very strong similarity between The Incredibles and the original quibbling superhero family, Marvel’s Fantastic Four — down to the costume design and the power set (though the powers are distributed differently among the family members — the mom’s power in The Incredibles is the dad’s power in Fantastic Four, etc). The imitation (shall we call it “borrowing?”) doesn’t end there, though. There’s a bit of Watchmen in the governmental clampdown on superheroics, too. Director Brad Bird knows the superhero genre treasure chest well enough to know exactly what to steal, when, and in every case his crime does pay. The very first scene, for example, is an homage to Christopher Reeves saving a cat from a tree — though Mr. Incredible’s methods are more harried and desperate and direct. Bird’s star turn as Edna Mode, fashion designer to the truly super superstars, puts him in a position to comment on the ridiculousness of the genre’s conventions (“No capes, dahlink!”) while celebrating them at the same time. It is not parody, but it is also not not parody. I think.
The one terrible thing is the overall theme.
“When everybody is special, nobody is,” several characters say during the course of the film. It is the explicit goal of the villain, ultimately, to “make everybody special — so nobody will be!” And so on. This is just an indirect way for the filmmakers to say: “some people are naturally better than others, and we shouldn’t try to pretend otherwise.”
That sounds okay if you’re, say, a talented graphic designer comparing the way you and your friends rock the hipster t-shirts at the local brew pub versus the losers from down the street at the other brew pub who look stupid and unswell. Sure, you’re better than they are. Kudos. It’s not as interesting or defensible a position to take if you’re, say, a talented money market manager squeezing profit out of your clients using legal but shady derivative trading (you can — so you should!), or if you’re a hulking bully from the less-trendy brew pub down the street kicking the ass of t-shirted hipsters (because they’re fucking annoying, which they are, and, besides, you can). It’s downright anti-civilized, this idea that superior people should be allowed to use their superiority however they see fit. Maybe this, too, comes from the superhero genre itself — I have no doubt that that’s the case. But it’s not subtexty enough for me. It’s explicit and proud.
You think I’m reading too much into this? Maybe so. I wouldn’t try to defend my position on the film’s undemocratic impulses as an academic thesis. It feels icky, though, the Randian/Nietzchean uberlord thing. Not icky enough for me to hate the movie! I love the movie. The movie is a movie of moments, and every moment is awesome. I do mean that. I can’t think of an unawesome moment. But the ickiness is there, all the same, right alongside and mingled up within the awesome.
What do you think?
This is definitely in my top 5 superhero movies. Period. Off-brand or otherwise. I can see your point about Syndrome’s plot, but you also have to remember that it is the villain’s plot.
It’s the villain’s plot to make everybody special. It’s the Heroes’ goal to remain uniquely empowered. That’s puts the heroes solidly in the Randian camp, with the villain as the populist/social progressive.
Still, fantastic movie.
Actually, I disliked the movie solely because it was little more than a Fantastic Four remix. I mean, it’s still OKAY, but when the best part of the movie is babysitter and Jack-Jack (with a hilarious short included on the DVD) I just can’t bring myself to agree it deserved the laudes it received.
I will say I think you’re reading too much into the hero/villain Rand/socialist bit, though. LOL. Maybe I should re-watch it (I absolutely hated UP because the villain wasn’t that villainous) and I’ll find Syndrome wasn’t really that evil in intent. But there is some truth to “When everybody’s special, nobody is.” It’s like those stupid soccer games where “we don’t keep score, the point is fun”. There’s value in losing, and in turn moving on to discover where somebody DOES excel. But straight up trying to make everybody equal always winds up neutering the gifted in practice.
Taking umbrage at the notion the movie is making progressives the villain makes me think you’re looking too deeply into a kid’s movie. True, maybe they should have specified somehow that “everyone is special in their own way because we’re all unique” and shown a non-powered (normal) person be the the only one smart enough to defuse a bomb. Or have a musician figure out a lock or something. Maybe that would have been a better message?
It’s very possibly true that I’m reading too much into Syndrome’s philosophy.
This reminds me: I need to get cracking on #2 and #1!
Quite late, but you and I took different morals away from the movie. The lesson in The Incredibles isn’t that some people are better than others; it’s that “when everyone is special, no one will be” is inherently fallacious. Syndrome’s fatal assumption – echoed by Dash near the beginning – is that specialness is homogeneous. The lesson of the film is that it’s heterogeneous. There isn’t a single scale, or a privileged frame of reference. Bob is strong and tough, but relatively slow and inflexible; if you want to catch up with someone or reach the top shelf, you call someone else. And so on. Ultimately, the film wants us to celebrate individual specialness – not to compete on a universal Specialness Scale. Everyone is special, without nobody being special for it.
(That’s why Syndrome is the villain, incidentally; not only does he believe that “when everyone is special, no one will be”, but his method of implementing specialness – by distributing his devices, giving everyone exactly the same abilities – would create a homogeneous specialness. In the world he wants to create, “when everyone is special, no one will be” is true, and that’s antithetical to the core value of the film.)