Super Hero = Super Power: The Incredibles Returns Us to Certainty

by Abou Farman

The author is, at times, a writer. His writing has been published in newspapers, magazines and academic journals in Canada, the United States, and Egypt.

So the world’s greatest and only surviving Super Power feels an overwhelming responsibility to rid the world of evil. To its surprise, much of the world is not greatly in favor of the Super Power muscle-flexing, missile-launching, and force-field-throwing its way around the world in its bid to defeat the great nemesis, evil. Clearly, the world does not understand; the superpower is misunderstood. The world is cowered and compromised. Courage and righteousness have been sucked out of its marrow by moral and economic blackmail. The rest of the world wants to handle things through law and discussion and deal-making. But the times do not abide debate, delay or doubt. Remember, the world doubted and discussed once before and the Superpower had to step in to save it from evil, that short, moustachioed, boyish character with an armband and an odd salute. Then the world was grateful. It would be so again. Despite the general consensus, the Super Power must act. Alone if need be.

This is more or less the narrative we heard after 9/11. It is also more or less the narrative we get in Disney’s new Pixar movie, The Incredibles, written and directed by Brad Bird. It’s a bit disconcerting that one of the most creative and entertaining movies of the year ends up being one of the most reactionary. The Incredibles is a craftfully-rendered, sensitively-characterized animation; it’s just that it echoes with lines straight from Donald Rumsfeld and other members of President Bush’s secret society (if only all of that had just been a two hour cartoon).

The movie’s main conceit is brilliant and contemporary: all the super heroes have been sued into submission, driven into hiding and retirement, forced to become housewives and insurance salesmen, growing fat and dysfunctional, by day caught up in petty fixes with bosses, boyfriends and school teachers, by night bickering with each other at the dinner table, like the rest of us. Thus our particular super heroes: Bob Parr (aka Mr Incredible), his wife Helen Parr (aka Elastigirl) and their children, Dash, Violet and the baby Jack Jack. The group and their special powers are a tribute to the Fantastic Four, but with metaphoric resonance for today: Elastigirl is the multi-tasking housewife over-extending in every direction; Violet’s invisibility stands in for the smart, shy teenage girl who constantly wishes she’d just disappear; and Dash’s unstoppable legs bring us the hyperenergized boy limited by schoolhouse rules. Confined by what they perceive as the tyranny of normalcy – to say everyone is special, observes Dash, is “another way of saying no one is” – the whole family’s itching for super hero action. They know they are more equal and they want to show it.

They get their chance fifteen years later when a jilted fan, a boyish super-nerd once rejected by Mr Incredible, decides to show the world who really deserves the unfair tag, Super Hero. Syndrome, as he names himself, combines James Bond villains with comic book villains. His hairstyle is Joker, his hi-tech hideout is a Dr No-ish volcanic island, his sidekick a sultry spy with a foreign accent (though the accent is more L.A. than foreign). And so it is clear as soon as she appears on screen, all leggy and blond, that she, in a classic Bond moment of female weakness, will save our super heroes from certain doom.

A few predictables mar the creative consistency. Dash being chased around the island by flying saucers, for example, is too long and typical an action scene. Most disappointing of all is the final collective battle against the robot, in which nothing particularly funny, suspenseful or super happens. Why Brad Bird, why so normal at the climax?

Unlike the recent spate of special-effects super hero movies, the characters and their powers here are developed in ingenious ways – Elastigirl shaping herself into a boat with Dash kicking out like a motor – which demonstrate the superiority of straight animation over realistic CGI when it comes to, well, flexibility. As with other Pixar productions, most of the characters (with the possible exception of Frozone, the lone black character) are drawn with zing, using unusual facial expressions and perfect movement – the sultry sidekick slinks around but is not over-sexualised; Bob Parr’s enormity in the insurance office cubicle is hilarious; Violet’s slumped posture and the way she wraps her arms around her bunched up knees couldn’t be more teen-age girly. The funniest character, however, is Edna Mode, the Super Hero costume designer, a fashion maven of undefined ethnicity with a sleek mansion, a need to address everyone as ‘Dahling’ and a penchant for phrases such as ‘Don’t beg me, you know I won’t do it’ followed by an expectant smile waiting to be begged to do it when no one had thought of begging her for anything at all. Brad Bird must have come across a few such characters out there in Hollywood because he does the voice-overs himself and delivers the lines with hysterical perfection.

The jokes are not bought, there aren’t any one liners squeezed in for a laugh, which is the sense one gets from so many other animations including the great Shrek. Talented and smart, Brad Bird – could his name be more DC Comics? – writes the script the old-fashioned way, based on experience, story and character development, rather than formulas, inside jokes and stand-up comedy routines. And the driving force of the story is Bob Parr’s frustration with his designated status as ‘normal’. That is where the problem starts.

On one level, the story is another artist’s cry against mediocrity and conformity. At the same time, it comes off as an insidious argument for power. If you have the power, the movie seems to say, it’s a waste not to use it (ennui as a theory of global politics?) and the only ones who ought to use power are those who have real special ones. These special ones stand apart, exempted from law and order in order to maintain law and order – which is exactly the core philosophy of the neocons and the Bush presidency. The Incredibles may be about Super Hero specialness, but it also sounds a lot like an argument for Super Power exceptionalism.

It makes no bones about its righteousness, no pretense of weighing the pros and cons of power and its use. The case made against Syndrome’s band of evil men is eerily similar to what is said of Al-Qaeda: “Remember those bad guys on TV?” asks mother Parr. “These ones aren’t like that. They won’t show restraint just because you’re kids.” (I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but in the scene where Mr. Incredible breaks into Syndrome’s computer room and sees his plans projected on the screen, there is a brief moment in which a rocket’s trajectory is ominously flanked by two towers. Also, when the robot-carrying rocket is launched, we get a rocket’s eye view of the flight towards a city that looks distinctly Manhattan-like.) Then there are those lines like “Doubt is a luxury we can not afford” and “You have more power than you know” which might as well have been lifted from White House speeches.

After the equivocations, doubt and self-hate introduced into the genre by the second generation of super heroes – Marvel’s the Incredible Hulk, Spiderman, X-Men – we are back, following a long and painful trek through Hollywood remakes, to the moral certainty that marked the 50s, and marks the post-9/11 world of Bush’s half of America, which happens to include Disney and, it seems, Pixar and Brad Bird (who incidentally is no political innocent; see his first animated film, The Iron Giant). The original Fantastic Four were mutants and non-conformists. The Thing was disturbed by his monstrous form; Mr. Fantastic didn’t just have physical powers, he was a genius; and he and The Invisible Woman were only boy friend and girl friend, not joined in holy matrimony (at least not until later). The Incredibles, by contrast, form the perfect white middle class nuclear family, held together by super power glue. At the very end, Dash falls on to a limo seat and exclaims: “I love our family!”

The family’s special powers come from elsewhere, from some unknown otherworldly source, and like divine right or genetic superiority, are passed down the family line, if in somewhat unpredictable ways. It’s the aristocratic-slash-eugenic version of entitlement. The only person who attempts to attain super power heights through physical effort and mental ingenuity – Syndrome - ends up as the villain, the ultimate evil. It doesn’t matter that the poor super nerd does not even crave world domination – he just wants some recognition. Contrary to its apparent message, that normalcy is bad, the deeper message turns out to be something quite different, namely, that you ought to be satisfied with your own assigned place, your mediocrity. Unless you happen to have inherited some real special powers, don’t try and be super. We mortals are just meant to be like the neighborhood kid on the tricycle, eyes wide, mouth open, bubble gum popped all over the face, awed by the spectacle of power.

The Incredibles

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