I would lie if I said I wasnāt baiting a little bit, but man, see? Cuts both ways.
Die Hard is extremely obvious. I mean, the whole movie is about this guy finding that his wife suddenly has a job, makes more money than he does and may be attractive to smarter, richer people, but then fate conspires to make his blue collar streetsmarts and prepper attitudes having him save the day for the foppish yuppies. The entire movie ends when they throw the eurotrash rich thief out of a building by literally unshackling Holly from the bonus gift her company job gave her, then wrapping her up in a comfort blanket and taking her home. The movie also finds time to clearly establish that all public servants are idiots except for street level cops.
Back to the Future is subtler, but also pretty straightforward. Kid thinks life with middle class parents in the 80s sucks, goes back to the 50s, which turn out to be as ideal as expected but also somehow cooler in a very 80s kind of way, teaches his dad self-assertion and comes back to the future to find heās now upper class and has a 4x4. Itās a lot less hardcore, but the reagonomics are running underneath the whole thing. Iād take that itās accidental, because the same team went much more leftward in Roger Rabbit, so I think itās just that a lot of the cultural white noise of the mid-80s is baked into the assumptions. And the nostalgia is a massive driving force of conservatism anyway. BTTF is idolizing this āfifteightiesā imagery the same way Grease was to suggest there is a perfect past to return to. Kind of in the way Stranger Things and a bunch of other stuff does to the 80s.
Thatās maybe the most fun part of breaking down BTTF. The iconic slivers of the film set in the 80s are supposed to show it being run down, realistic and disappointingly drab by comparison.
Also, Lybian terrorists stealing plutonium but being so incompetent they get tricked by Doc and defeated by Marty. Thatās a very time-specific one, like Rambo praising the Taliban.
I donāt know, man, Die Hard is pretty far out there.
The Rambo and Rocky sequels are what they are as well. They are almost naive about it in a way that supports ironic appreciation, though.
Dirty Harry tracks, but thatās back in the early 70s. I never went deep enough into the sequels to see if it got really bad down the line.
Iāve heard some stuff about Field of Dreams, but I donāt think Iāve watched that in one sitting.
I donāt know itās often the action stuff. Your Commandos and Death Wishes and so on. Does stuff like Red Dawn and Invasion USA even count as ācryptoā? Those are pretty overt.
If you let me break the time frame I will say that I think The Incredibles flies over peopleās heads as being aggressively conservative. Forrest Gump used to, but I think people got wise to it over time. Another Zemeckis joint, too. Maybe itās Roger Rabbit that was the accident.
Even the incredibles thinks the insurance industry is predatory. It flew over my head completely in being right wing, but Iām autistic and often miss really, really obvious subtext (though I can generally predict entire plots from the first few minutes, so itās a weird combination). I could tell that zootopia was a heavy handed allegory, but I couldnāt quite put my finger on it referencing racism, for example.
In fairness, Zootopia isā¦ kinda muddy on that front.
The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist āif everybody is special the nobody isā and how the supes are better because they were born better but the wannabe sidekick has no business trying to be one of the special people by inventing stuff. And how the government and society are regulating these people who are intrinsically better into normalcy when they should be allowed to freely express themselves.
But not the guy who isnāt born into it. Thatās evil.
I mean, Iām pushing it, but itās not really a secret. And man, does it set people off. Not just on the Internet. There are full on thinkpieces that have been printed on paper about how heās subtly different from a true Objectivist and so his ideas that some people are exceptional and superior are fine.
The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist āif everybody is special the nobody isā
The villain says that. When Thanos said half the population should be randomly killed, did you think that was the message of that movie? The Incredibles is about Bob navigating his relationship with his own biases. Syndrome is Bobās dark foil; a villain made of all the worst parts of Bob. Bob can only defeat Syndrome after learning to fight for something more than himself. He can only defeat Syndrome with help from other people who he loves. He has to stop believing that superheroism is about being better than everyone else.
the wannabe sidekick has no business trying to be one of the special people by inventing stuff
Because heās not trying to help people! Superheroism is meaningless without empathy. Thatās the thesis of the movie
the government and society are regulating these people who are intrinsically better into normalcy when they should be allowed to freely express themselves.
The government banning people who are different from freely expressing themself is badā¦ Wonder whether thatās a left or right opinion.
The villain saying āI want to make everyone Super, so that itās not just natural Supers that get to have powersā is absolutely an objectivist-adjacent plot. The fact that Syndrome also wants to murder (genocide?) Supers with his droids and āspend his life getting all his kicks from being the only (artificial) Super until he gets bored and then shares the tech with the publicā is a classic example of attaching blatant evil to the ideology you want to villainize.
Itās not the movie saying āif everyoneās super, no one isā, itās the movie saying āthe dude who wants everyone to be super instead of only the genetic lottery winners is evil bad murder villain, look, we wrote him doing so much evil bad murder!ā
Like, letās say you want to have themes of anti-environmentalism in your movie. Whatās your villain? Eco-terrorist that bombs coal power plants to stop them from polluting the earth. Itās the oldest framing technique in the book, especially for all-ages media: just have the character that expresses the ideology you want to defeat also be a mean bad murder villain. Bonus points if you can somehow make the murder bad villain evil plan relate to the ideology in some superficial way.
Syndrome doesnāt want to give everyone powers so he can help people. He wants to give everyone powers to spite his enemy and make money. Heās Elon Musk. The idea of helping people is just a marketing line and an ego trip. Heās not actually making anyoneās lives better. Heās doing the opposite; selling advanced weapons to world governments under the table. Arms dealing isnāt equality! You think things will be more equal when rich people can buy flight and super strength? Syndrome does. Because heās a capitalist villain who doesnāt understand any of the leftist rhetoric heās co-opting.
You fell for a billionaireās self-aggrandising lies.
Right, but the argument isnāt that the characters are objectivist, itās that the movie is.
The thing with Syndrome is that the movie doesnāt make him wanting to be a superhero a problem because heās bad at it or doing it for the wrong reasons, they do it because heās not superpowered. He seems genuinely keen on helping when he first shows up, in fact. He is just bad at it because his artifical replacements arenāt as good at getting it done as natural ability.
Had the movie shown him to have superpowers then the read wouldnāt hold, because itād be his incompetence or his desire for fame and glory that makes him unsuitable, not his inherent characteristics.
But thatās not the case. The familyās kids are shown as being perfectly fine getting into superheroics. Unlike Syndrome, despite having no gear and never having practiced it much they are naturally talented at it. Theyāre good at it and itās good for them. It helps them feel accomplished and get over their plain-normie anxieties because itās what theyāre meant to do.
You CAN make a non-objectivist take on The Incredibles and thatās called The Fantastic Four. Itās the version where the powers are the result of an accident, not a birthright, the non-powered bad guy is a monarch, who HAS a birthright but also a dictatorial position. Where the powers arenāt always a self-realizing blessing and can be a curse and the leader can feel guilty for having forced them onto his family instead and vow to work to make them optional. And where the people with powers may be infatuated with each other, but also sometimes with a disabled artist because itās not about the powers or inherent characteristics.
Obviously Bird doesnāt think his objectivism or exceptionalism or whatever you want to call it is an immoral or unethical stance. Obviously he thinks the full expression of your talent and the fame and fortune that should come with it are a result of you using your natural talent to help others and lift society up, normies included. Doesnāt mean itās not saying what itās saying, though.
The thing with Syndrome is that the movie doesnāt make him wanting to be a superhero a problem because heās bad at it or doing it for the wrong reasons, they do it because heās not superpowered. He seems genuinely keen on helping when he first shows up, in fact. He is just bad at it because his artifical replacements arenāt as good at getting it done as natural ability.
No. Buddy blows up a bridge and lets Bomb Voyage get away because he wore a cape and wouldnāt listen. Bob tried to tell him there was a bomb on the cape, and he flew off and told Bob to go away. You cannot have children volunteering to go into life or death situations who wonāt listen to their responsible adults. We see the same thing later on when Helen tells Violet to put a force field around the plane, and Violet doesnāt listen. She says Helen told her not to. But then she starts listening, and while she doesnāt get it right away, Helen sits the kids down to have a talk and they get the hang of things.
Buddy and Violet both make fatal mistakes they would have died for, if an adult hadnāt helped them. Then, Helen becomes patient with Violet and Violet listens. Bob puts Buddy in a cop car and Buddy doesnāt listen. No kid is instantly great at superheroism. In order to live long enough to get good at it, they need a good role model who theyāll listen to.
Brad Bird has said many times the most important thing in The Incredibles is the family. Dash and Violet succeed because of their relationships with their family. Buddy and Bob donāt have a good relationship. Thatās the story, coming straight from the authorial intent.
Itās not even a case of Buddyās invented powers malfunctioning in the movie. He makes a simple mistake of bad judgement. His powers didnāt have anything to do with not listening to an adult.
The Incredibles flies over peopleās heads as being aggressively conservative.
Superheroes are a metaphor for minorities. Thereās the immigrant experience in constantly moving house, the queer experience in hiding who you are, the neurodivergent experience in being told not to stick out in school.
The villain is a capitalist billionaire who wants to appropriate a minorityās culture without understanding what it means. If youāre an indigenous minority youāve been through that.
Thereās a scene where the mum has a talk with her kids about treating authority figures theyāve been trained not to fear as threats to their lives. That talk is familiar to any black family in the USA.
Thereās a struggle between parents and their children about how to navigate assimilating into the majority culture while retaining their own identity. Many immigrants go through what Dash and Violet did.
Thatās not an invalid read. My problem with it is that the movie doesnāt show the supes as being inherently feared or hated. This isnāt the X-Men, which does work on that front.
Here the supes are suppressed by the government, not a societal issue. They are presented as being accepted in the past, in a world without intervention. Thriving, in fact. They are celebrities and have a whole James Bond-style support system. They didnāt come from a different place with a different culture like Superman or Wonder Woman. Superheroes-as-minorities is a very frequent trope, but The Incredibles isnāt rehashing any of those, theyāre doing the Fantastic 4. Superheroes-as-family. Bit of a different tack.
And when theyāre suppressed they arenāt suppresed into a marginal role in society. They are suppressed into suburban white middle class. Which, incidentally, is presented as less flashy than the life of the one explicitly black character, but that is probably a well-meaning accident.
I do think the concept of cultural appropriation is and has alway been iffy, but beyond that, while I think you can argue that read I donāt think it fits the movie particularly well.
And yes, in the moral space the movie is drawing it is explicitly including those characteristics as part of the exceptionality you are supposed to self-realize. As I told you on the other thread, I donāt think Bird has a Randian āyou should be an asshole if you want toā approach to this. He sees it as moral and ethical and valuable for society when people can self express their exceptional, natural abilities, and I do believe there is an explicit attempt to include those things in the mix. Itās why the slightly token black guy is there in the first place.
I should say I also think itās undermined because the one instance of someone even appearing to have a recognizable trait of those things in the main family, which would be Viās crippling social anxiety, is shown as getting better when she fully expresses her powers and self-realizes, which if a bit of an icky approach.
Bob is marginalised in a way invisible to the people around him, but itās there. As a plus size person, he doesnāt fit in his cubicle or his car. When he stops paying attention, the world around him crumbles. World of cardboard. Being huge and super strong isnāt easy for him.
But whatās even harder is having Bobās justice sensitivity. Justice sensitivity is a symptom of autism in which neurodivergent people are more sensitive to social problems. Bob gets fired because his sense of right and wrong is too strong to fit into the world around him.
Dash also struggles with the same problems as neurodivergent people. Dashās allegory is ADHD. Heās not allowed to participate in the parts of school life that interest him; that heās good at. Heās constantly holding himself back. I was a gifted kid too, and my giftedness has caused consequences for other students when I dominated a classroom discussion. When I was moved to a gifted school and surrounded by peers, life got better for me. I see myself in Dash.
Violetās marginalisation is more of an immigrant/racialised/misogyny problem. Sheās accepted the mainstream narrative that her powers make her a freak. That sheās different and thatās bad. That normality is an ideal to aspire to. She becomes confident in herself after sheās allowed to engage with her own native culture and see that itās not bad. She gets a talk from Mum and forges a new relationship with her minority identity. The fighting is secondary. The story isnāt about it.
There are queer or disabled people in white middle class nuclear families, and they have problems. I think Brad chose to make the story relatable to everyone by using a cultural image weāre very familiar with. But then he showed problems that happen when someone, even someone in that social role, is different from what society expects.
Oh, now youāre stretching. Bob isnāt āplus sizeā heās meant to look like a bodybuilder who let himself go (and gets back into shape once the societal restraints on his self-actualization are removed). The scenes where his environment is shown to be too small for his stature are a visual representation of ānormalā life holding him back from his natural greatness, not a rendition of the struggles of plus sized people.
I mean, Dash and ADHD works better, but it has the same problem as Viās anxiety in that he gets better by being himself and doing what he was meant to do and ābeing the best he can beā, which is what he complains his mom is not letting him do. If you want to read the kidsā powers as mental health issues actualized then I canāt be on board with how the denouementās return to a modified normalcy presents their new situation. They didnāt work to get adjusted, they didnāt need help or therapy or support, just to be set free to self-actualize.
I donāt think thatās the idea, beyond the superficial (the kidsā mental health is played as growing pains or inherent characteristics of childhood, if anything), but if it was itād be more problematic than the alternative.
I also take issue with the idea that white suburban middle class is āa cultural image weāre familiar withā and so suitable to serve as a projection of a minority allegory. I mean, no, white suburban middle class isnāt default human. If you set out to make an allegory about middle class you donāt come at it from that premise, thatād beā¦ bad. Again, I think the objectivist read is actually less problematic there.
On that it again helps to look at similar media that DOES use superpowers as a minority allegory. Yeah, the X-Men work as a metaphor for that, and you do see it transposed to white middle class. X2ās āHave you tried NOT being a mutantā scene comes to mind. But they are also presented on the run from authorities, living in the sewers, looking visibly different to non-mutants and being shunned on sight and in all sorts of other situations analogous to real world discrimination. The Incredibles does very much not. Suburban middle class life is stiffling in that very 90s way where itās fine but itās not the self-realization that special people like the Parrs were meant for, so it makes the men in particular feel restless and frustrated.
The Incredibles is a bit of an anti-Fight Club, now that I think of it. Which is weird to think about, but it fits. Both get interpreted backwards often, too.
You know what does more for a trans personās mental health and suicide risk than any amount of talk therapy? Being themself.
Besides that, itās a movie. There isnāt any time for a therapy scene in a 115 minute family movie about superheroes with everything else going on. The core theme of the movie is family, and family is what helps Dash and Violet. Helen accepts them for who they are instead of telling them to repress, and Bob gets on Helenās side and encourages restraint. Thatās actually kind of accurate - childrenās mental health issues are so often caused by a bad family environment. Bob and Helen werenāt on the same page for most of the movie, and they were giving their kids conflicted messaging. When they reconcile and agree on how to parent the kids, the kids are able to reconcile too. Dash stops parroting Dadās supremacist views and Violet stops internalising Mumās conformist views. Good parenting is the very best thing for a childās development.
And when I say plus size, I donāt mean fat. Plus size menās clothing stores are called ābig and tallā. Mr Incredible is big, and heās tall. His size is plus compared to the body type the world is built for. Itās giving him back problems and poor activity levels because he doesnāt fit.
Here the supes are suppressed by the government, not a societal issue. They are presented as being accepted in the past, in a world without intervention
Not true. The government shut down the superhero program because of public pressure. The catalyst was the suicide jumper that Bob saved. But around that time there were a lot of incidents of property damage and lawsuits that made it too expensive for the government to have superheroes, because of what the people were doing.
But I guess we can add Bad Boys 2 to the list. I mean, all of Michael Bayās oeuvre, but holy crap, Bad Boys 2. That MUST have been some form of weird Florida-lobby/CIA psyop, there is no other explanation.
Interested in hearing about the right wing bent of Bttf and die hard
I would lie if I said I wasnāt baiting a little bit, but man, see? Cuts both ways.
Die Hard is extremely obvious. I mean, the whole movie is about this guy finding that his wife suddenly has a job, makes more money than he does and may be attractive to smarter, richer people, but then fate conspires to make his blue collar streetsmarts and prepper attitudes having him save the day for the foppish yuppies. The entire movie ends when they throw the eurotrash rich thief out of a building by literally unshackling Holly from the bonus gift her company job gave her, then wrapping her up in a comfort blanket and taking her home. The movie also finds time to clearly establish that all public servants are idiots except for street level cops.
Back to the Future is subtler, but also pretty straightforward. Kid thinks life with middle class parents in the 80s sucks, goes back to the 50s, which turn out to be as ideal as expected but also somehow cooler in a very 80s kind of way, teaches his dad self-assertion and comes back to the future to find heās now upper class and has a 4x4. Itās a lot less hardcore, but the reagonomics are running underneath the whole thing. Iād take that itās accidental, because the same team went much more leftward in Roger Rabbit, so I think itās just that a lot of the cultural white noise of the mid-80s is baked into the assumptions. And the nostalgia is a massive driving force of conservatism anyway. BTTF is idolizing this āfifteightiesā imagery the same way Grease was to suggest there is a perfect past to return to. Kind of in the way Stranger Things and a bunch of other stuff does to the 80s.
Thatās maybe the most fun part of breaking down BTTF. The iconic slivers of the film set in the 80s are supposed to show it being run down, realistic and disappointingly drab by comparison.
Also, Lybian terrorists stealing plutonium but being so incompetent they get tricked by Doc and defeated by Marty. Thatās a very time-specific one, like Rambo praising the Taliban.
Dare I ask you to go further?
Whatās an extreme example of a crypto-rightwing-coded-80s-flick?
I donāt know, man, Die Hard is pretty far out there.
The Rambo and Rocky sequels are what they are as well. They are almost naive about it in a way that supports ironic appreciation, though.
Dirty Harry tracks, but thatās back in the early 70s. I never went deep enough into the sequels to see if it got really bad down the line.
Iāve heard some stuff about Field of Dreams, but I donāt think Iāve watched that in one sitting.
I donāt know itās often the action stuff. Your Commandos and Death Wishes and so on. Does stuff like Red Dawn and Invasion USA even count as ācryptoā? Those are pretty overt.
If you let me break the time frame I will say that I think The Incredibles flies over peopleās heads as being aggressively conservative. Forrest Gump used to, but I think people got wise to it over time. Another Zemeckis joint, too. Maybe itās Roger Rabbit that was the accident.
Even the incredibles thinks the insurance industry is predatory. It flew over my head completely in being right wing, but Iām autistic and often miss really, really obvious subtext (though I can generally predict entire plots from the first few minutes, so itās a weird combination). I could tell that zootopia was a heavy handed allegory, but I couldnāt quite put my finger on it referencing racism, for example.
In fairness, Zootopia isā¦ kinda muddy on that front.
The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist āif everybody is special the nobody isā and how the supes are better because they were born better but the wannabe sidekick has no business trying to be one of the special people by inventing stuff. And how the government and society are regulating these people who are intrinsically better into normalcy when they should be allowed to freely express themselves.
But not the guy who isnāt born into it. Thatās evil.
I mean, Iām pushing it, but itās not really a secret. And man, does it set people off. Not just on the Internet. There are full on thinkpieces that have been printed on paper about how heās subtly different from a true Objectivist and so his ideas that some people are exceptional and superior are fine.
The villain says that. When Thanos said half the population should be randomly killed, did you think that was the message of that movie? The Incredibles is about Bob navigating his relationship with his own biases. Syndrome is Bobās dark foil; a villain made of all the worst parts of Bob. Bob can only defeat Syndrome after learning to fight for something more than himself. He can only defeat Syndrome with help from other people who he loves. He has to stop believing that superheroism is about being better than everyone else.
Because heās not trying to help people! Superheroism is meaningless without empathy. Thatās the thesis of the movie
The government banning people who are different from freely expressing themself is badā¦ Wonder whether thatās a left or right opinion.
The villain saying āI want to make everyone Super, so that itās not just natural Supers that get to have powersā is absolutely an objectivist-adjacent plot. The fact that Syndrome also wants to murder (genocide?) Supers with his droids and āspend his life getting all his kicks from being the only (artificial) Super until he gets bored and then shares the tech with the publicā is a classic example of attaching blatant evil to the ideology you want to villainize.
Itās not the movie saying āif everyoneās super, no one isā, itās the movie saying āthe dude who wants everyone to be super instead of only the genetic lottery winners is evil bad murder villain, look, we wrote him doing so much evil bad murder!ā
Like, letās say you want to have themes of anti-environmentalism in your movie. Whatās your villain? Eco-terrorist that bombs coal power plants to stop them from polluting the earth. Itās the oldest framing technique in the book, especially for all-ages media: just have the character that expresses the ideology you want to defeat also be a mean bad murder villain. Bonus points if you can somehow make the murder bad villain evil plan relate to the ideology in some superficial way.
Syndrome doesnāt want to give everyone powers so he can help people. He wants to give everyone powers to spite his enemy and make money. Heās Elon Musk. The idea of helping people is just a marketing line and an ego trip. Heās not actually making anyoneās lives better. Heās doing the opposite; selling advanced weapons to world governments under the table. Arms dealing isnāt equality! You think things will be more equal when rich people can buy flight and super strength? Syndrome does. Because heās a capitalist villain who doesnāt understand any of the leftist rhetoric heās co-opting.
You fell for a billionaireās self-aggrandising lies.
Right, but the argument isnāt that the characters are objectivist, itās that the movie is.
The thing with Syndrome is that the movie doesnāt make him wanting to be a superhero a problem because heās bad at it or doing it for the wrong reasons, they do it because heās not superpowered. He seems genuinely keen on helping when he first shows up, in fact. He is just bad at it because his artifical replacements arenāt as good at getting it done as natural ability.
Had the movie shown him to have superpowers then the read wouldnāt hold, because itād be his incompetence or his desire for fame and glory that makes him unsuitable, not his inherent characteristics.
But thatās not the case. The familyās kids are shown as being perfectly fine getting into superheroics. Unlike Syndrome, despite having no gear and never having practiced it much they are naturally talented at it. Theyāre good at it and itās good for them. It helps them feel accomplished and get over their plain-normie anxieties because itās what theyāre meant to do.
You CAN make a non-objectivist take on The Incredibles and thatās called The Fantastic Four. Itās the version where the powers are the result of an accident, not a birthright, the non-powered bad guy is a monarch, who HAS a birthright but also a dictatorial position. Where the powers arenāt always a self-realizing blessing and can be a curse and the leader can feel guilty for having forced them onto his family instead and vow to work to make them optional. And where the people with powers may be infatuated with each other, but also sometimes with a disabled artist because itās not about the powers or inherent characteristics.
Obviously Bird doesnāt think his objectivism or exceptionalism or whatever you want to call it is an immoral or unethical stance. Obviously he thinks the full expression of your talent and the fame and fortune that should come with it are a result of you using your natural talent to help others and lift society up, normies included. Doesnāt mean itās not saying what itās saying, though.
No. Buddy blows up a bridge and lets Bomb Voyage get away because he wore a cape and wouldnāt listen. Bob tried to tell him there was a bomb on the cape, and he flew off and told Bob to go away. You cannot have children volunteering to go into life or death situations who wonāt listen to their responsible adults. We see the same thing later on when Helen tells Violet to put a force field around the plane, and Violet doesnāt listen. She says Helen told her not to. But then she starts listening, and while she doesnāt get it right away, Helen sits the kids down to have a talk and they get the hang of things.
Buddy and Violet both make fatal mistakes they would have died for, if an adult hadnāt helped them. Then, Helen becomes patient with Violet and Violet listens. Bob puts Buddy in a cop car and Buddy doesnāt listen. No kid is instantly great at superheroism. In order to live long enough to get good at it, they need a good role model who theyāll listen to.
Brad Bird has said many times the most important thing in The Incredibles is the family. Dash and Violet succeed because of their relationships with their family. Buddy and Bob donāt have a good relationship. Thatās the story, coming straight from the authorial intent.
Itās not even a case of Buddyās invented powers malfunctioning in the movie. He makes a simple mistake of bad judgement. His powers didnāt have anything to do with not listening to an adult.
Superheroes are a metaphor for minorities. Thereās the immigrant experience in constantly moving house, the queer experience in hiding who you are, the neurodivergent experience in being told not to stick out in school.
The villain is a capitalist billionaire who wants to appropriate a minorityās culture without understanding what it means. If youāre an indigenous minority youāve been through that.
Thereās a scene where the mum has a talk with her kids about treating authority figures theyāve been trained not to fear as threats to their lives. That talk is familiar to any black family in the USA.
Thereās a struggle between parents and their children about how to navigate assimilating into the majority culture while retaining their own identity. Many immigrants go through what Dash and Violet did.
Thatās not an invalid read. My problem with it is that the movie doesnāt show the supes as being inherently feared or hated. This isnāt the X-Men, which does work on that front.
Here the supes are suppressed by the government, not a societal issue. They are presented as being accepted in the past, in a world without intervention. Thriving, in fact. They are celebrities and have a whole James Bond-style support system. They didnāt come from a different place with a different culture like Superman or Wonder Woman. Superheroes-as-minorities is a very frequent trope, but The Incredibles isnāt rehashing any of those, theyāre doing the Fantastic 4. Superheroes-as-family. Bit of a different tack.
And when theyāre suppressed they arenāt suppresed into a marginal role in society. They are suppressed into suburban white middle class. Which, incidentally, is presented as less flashy than the life of the one explicitly black character, but that is probably a well-meaning accident.
I do think the concept of cultural appropriation is and has alway been iffy, but beyond that, while I think you can argue that read I donāt think it fits the movie particularly well.
And yes, in the moral space the movie is drawing it is explicitly including those characteristics as part of the exceptionality you are supposed to self-realize. As I told you on the other thread, I donāt think Bird has a Randian āyou should be an asshole if you want toā approach to this. He sees it as moral and ethical and valuable for society when people can self express their exceptional, natural abilities, and I do believe there is an explicit attempt to include those things in the mix. Itās why the slightly token black guy is there in the first place.
I should say I also think itās undermined because the one instance of someone even appearing to have a recognizable trait of those things in the main family, which would be Viās crippling social anxiety, is shown as getting better when she fully expresses her powers and self-realizes, which if a bit of an icky approach.
Bob is marginalised in a way invisible to the people around him, but itās there. As a plus size person, he doesnāt fit in his cubicle or his car. When he stops paying attention, the world around him crumbles. World of cardboard. Being huge and super strong isnāt easy for him.
But whatās even harder is having Bobās justice sensitivity. Justice sensitivity is a symptom of autism in which neurodivergent people are more sensitive to social problems. Bob gets fired because his sense of right and wrong is too strong to fit into the world around him.
Dash also struggles with the same problems as neurodivergent people. Dashās allegory is ADHD. Heās not allowed to participate in the parts of school life that interest him; that heās good at. Heās constantly holding himself back. I was a gifted kid too, and my giftedness has caused consequences for other students when I dominated a classroom discussion. When I was moved to a gifted school and surrounded by peers, life got better for me. I see myself in Dash.
Violetās marginalisation is more of an immigrant/racialised/misogyny problem. Sheās accepted the mainstream narrative that her powers make her a freak. That sheās different and thatās bad. That normality is an ideal to aspire to. She becomes confident in herself after sheās allowed to engage with her own native culture and see that itās not bad. She gets a talk from Mum and forges a new relationship with her minority identity. The fighting is secondary. The story isnāt about it.
There are queer or disabled people in white middle class nuclear families, and they have problems. I think Brad chose to make the story relatable to everyone by using a cultural image weāre very familiar with. But then he showed problems that happen when someone, even someone in that social role, is different from what society expects.
Oh, now youāre stretching. Bob isnāt āplus sizeā heās meant to look like a bodybuilder who let himself go (and gets back into shape once the societal restraints on his self-actualization are removed). The scenes where his environment is shown to be too small for his stature are a visual representation of ānormalā life holding him back from his natural greatness, not a rendition of the struggles of plus sized people.
I mean, Dash and ADHD works better, but it has the same problem as Viās anxiety in that he gets better by being himself and doing what he was meant to do and ābeing the best he can beā, which is what he complains his mom is not letting him do. If you want to read the kidsā powers as mental health issues actualized then I canāt be on board with how the denouementās return to a modified normalcy presents their new situation. They didnāt work to get adjusted, they didnāt need help or therapy or support, just to be set free to self-actualize.
I donāt think thatās the idea, beyond the superficial (the kidsā mental health is played as growing pains or inherent characteristics of childhood, if anything), but if it was itād be more problematic than the alternative.
I also take issue with the idea that white suburban middle class is āa cultural image weāre familiar withā and so suitable to serve as a projection of a minority allegory. I mean, no, white suburban middle class isnāt default human. If you set out to make an allegory about middle class you donāt come at it from that premise, thatād beā¦ bad. Again, I think the objectivist read is actually less problematic there.
On that it again helps to look at similar media that DOES use superpowers as a minority allegory. Yeah, the X-Men work as a metaphor for that, and you do see it transposed to white middle class. X2ās āHave you tried NOT being a mutantā scene comes to mind. But they are also presented on the run from authorities, living in the sewers, looking visibly different to non-mutants and being shunned on sight and in all sorts of other situations analogous to real world discrimination. The Incredibles does very much not. Suburban middle class life is stiffling in that very 90s way where itās fine but itās not the self-realization that special people like the Parrs were meant for, so it makes the men in particular feel restless and frustrated.
The Incredibles is a bit of an anti-Fight Club, now that I think of it. Which is weird to think about, but it fits. Both get interpreted backwards often, too.
You know what does more for a trans personās mental health and suicide risk than any amount of talk therapy? Being themself.
Besides that, itās a movie. There isnāt any time for a therapy scene in a 115 minute family movie about superheroes with everything else going on. The core theme of the movie is family, and family is what helps Dash and Violet. Helen accepts them for who they are instead of telling them to repress, and Bob gets on Helenās side and encourages restraint. Thatās actually kind of accurate - childrenās mental health issues are so often caused by a bad family environment. Bob and Helen werenāt on the same page for most of the movie, and they were giving their kids conflicted messaging. When they reconcile and agree on how to parent the kids, the kids are able to reconcile too. Dash stops parroting Dadās supremacist views and Violet stops internalising Mumās conformist views. Good parenting is the very best thing for a childās development.
And when I say plus size, I donāt mean fat. Plus size menās clothing stores are called ābig and tallā. Mr Incredible is big, and heās tall. His size is plus compared to the body type the world is built for. Itās giving him back problems and poor activity levels because he doesnāt fit.
Not true. The government shut down the superhero program because of public pressure. The catalyst was the suicide jumper that Bob saved. But around that time there were a lot of incidents of property damage and lawsuits that made it too expensive for the government to have superheroes, because of what the people were doing.
Donāt forget any movie that includes a fleet of Chevrolet Suburbans being driven as a government vehicle!
Oh, man, way too new for the conversation.
But I guess we can add Bad Boys 2 to the list. I mean, all of Michael Bayās oeuvre, but holy crap, Bad Boys 2. That MUST have been some form of weird Florida-lobby/CIA psyop, there is no other explanation.
Ahh Deathwish I havenāt thought about that in years but yeah it does have white flight, brown gangs, and one NYC architect-cum-vigilante savior.