MudMan

We have distinctly different ideas on how this works. Both hypotheses are untestable, though (at least to us).

Or, you know, to put it differently, “agree to disagree”.

You’re thinking of neofascism as a compound form of neoliberalism there, which I think is a mistake.

The people migrating from US-style neolib views into protofascist veneration for a strongman aren’t stacking one thing on top of the other. They are breaking with a neoliberal scheme that didn’t do much for them and into a fascist mindset that presents itself as revolutionary.

Had the left done a better job of channeling that disaffection they could have broken leftwards. They didn’t, so they abandoned neoliberal views for neofascist ones.

I am very skeptical that the conversion path for those fascists is back to neoliberalism and then from there to a more leftist stance. The left isn’t competing for the people already radicalized right, they are competing for the people that keep shedding off the husk of the liberal establishment.

And they’re losing.

Yeah, but people don’t make movies about that.

They do, however, sometimes notice that and use it to build an elaborate metaphor about family’s place in society and the emasculative nature of suburban middle class life.

That happens to have some objectivist undertones sometimes.

But… you are not saying everyone is special.

You are saying some people are. Fundamentally.

I mean, not to be too real, but superpowers aren’t a thing, they stand in for other stuff in the movie. Talent, ambition, creativity, whatever. If you’re going to push me into the dregs of hermeneutics I’d point out that the two “good guy” non-powered characters, Edna and Kari, are both women defined by providing a service to the talented ones. There is a very specific difference between them and the supes.

They may be special, but they’re not… “special”. And there are definitely people who are fundamentally not “special” who definitely benefit from what the special people do. In the movie, that is.

That is a very specific framing. If it’s not Randian Prime Movers it’s certainly adjacent to it. It’s hard to watch that movie and come out of it not thinking there is a fundamental impetus in Bob and Dash especially that drives them to doing something specific and great and makes them miserable if suppressed. Either the powers are presented as a metaphor for that or as a manifestation of that.

Meh. I end up tempted to use BS a bunch and thinking about it twice because it may be confusing in unflattering ways.

“Handled” is a way to put it. The running gag throughout the movie is she gets progressively more overwhelmed in the background while trying to reach out to the parents until they eventually come home to the fallout (and Syndrome finds out why the hard way).

Jack-Jack is the ultimate eff you to Syndrome. He tries to kidnap him and it’s made VERY clear to the audience that normie Syndrome can’t even stack up to special people when they’re a baby. Jack-Jack rescues himself.

I’d argue that he disproves your whole thing about the kids being special because they learn to listen to their parent because it’s extremely obvious that Jack-Jack is strong from birth, not as a result of any lessons or upbringing.

But he’s a bit of a punchline, no need to force the entire thing through his lens for it to say what it’s saying.

The joke is on Syndrome, though. And it’s still about how he can’t fake his way to natural talent.

Syndrome doesn’t say he’ll sell his gadgets to rich people, though. You added that in.

In fact, if he sold his gadgets only to rich people his statement that “when everyone is special, noone is” wouldn’t make sense. I mean, you can guess that’s how it’d play out in real life, but the movie never does anything to suggest that’s the case.

It’s the same with the interpretation that it’s Syndrome who thinks superheroing is about strength. There’s no indication of that. In fact, he says the exact opposite in his first appearance. Admittedly the way he says it seems to imply there are other operating superheroes with no natural powers, but the movie never confirms whether this is true or explicitly shows any of them on screen.

And yes, he lost because of a “specialness deficiency”. He clumsily loses the gear he has to control the robot and when he has to try to stop it legitimately he gets immediately knocked out. He then tries to kidnap Jack-Jack, gets immediately stomped on by Jack-Jack, has a car thrown at him he can’t avoid and finally gets sucked into a jet engine because he’s wearing a cape.

None of that is inconsistent the read we’re giving you. I am torn on whether the movie thinks Syndrome is Bob’s fault for being too arrogant to properly explain things to him or not, but that’s because the movie sure seems unconcerned about addressing it.

Like the guy above said, Syndrome isn’t flawed because he is an evil dick, he is an evil dick to justify his flaws. Because if the movie made Syndrome reasonable-but-frustrated and not a psychotic asshole he would not play as the villain. His position is tragic, but not unreasonable. Which is fine, it’s a common choice, but it’s one made when you don’t have the time or disposition to engage with the villain’s argument and need to discard it so you can focus on what you really care about (in this case how little, suburban middle class life stiffles the aspirations and creativity of a certain type of person) (that type of person is, I suspect, mostly Brad Bird).

This wasn’t a rare narrative at the time. The Incredibles took a bit longer to get there, so it showed up post-9-11, but the late 90s are riddled with it. Fight Club, American Beauty, Office Space… it’s practically a subgenre by itself that decade.

Yeah, but that’s not what you said Dash stands in for. Being yourself is not how you treat ADHD.

The solution to not having enough time to cover that is to not make Dash stand-in for that. Which they don’t because that’s not what the movie is about.

The movie is about a stiffling system making the kids of a white middle class nuclear family struggle by forcing them to conform to a rigid (government-set) standard when they would thrive by self-expression and learning from their parents’ experience instead. Which neatly solves the problem of having to find a stand-in for mental health tratment by making the kids’ issues in the fictional universe be caused by the conformity, not by their superpowers.

Because the movie isn’t interested in the downsides of the powers. Dash getting bored because he’s fast isn’t presented as a struggle when he’s not forced to stay on the level of the normies. It’s not a day-to-day problem in the way The Thing being a monster made of rocks is a problem for him. It’s not caused by his powers, it’s caused by society trying to hold him back. Dash isn’t trans and he doesn’t have ADHD, he is a precocious kid being dragged back because the system is meant for people with less talent than he has.

That is what the movie is concerned with, and it overlaps with the ideology that it does. You are projecting what is at most a secondary concern (the feelings of otherness and isolation) onto the text because they are a more palatable interpretation.

Which, hey, is the point of this entire thread.

I was joking elsewhere that if the movie wasn’t on the political wavelength it is Bob would certainly be the villain. Because man, that kid was making hoverboots when he was in primary school. Most useful superpower in the whole movie and Bob discouraged him right into the private sector.

To bring it here, since you pointed me at it, I don’t see how Helen’s line changes anything.

The movie never contradicts Bob, Dash OR Syndrome. Right after Syndrome brings back Dash’s line there is no more debate. He just goes to enact his plan and the family goes to physically stop him, which ends with him getting exposed as a fraud and then killed. By his own incompetence, I might add. Because he’s not meant to be special.

Likewise, in Dash’s scene that’s the end of the conversation.

If the movie was meant to reinforce that, actually, everybody IS special, they forgot to put it in the text.

And hey, I think Bird has conservative views on this front (“there’s no school like the old school!”), but I don’t think he’s a bad writer. If he wanted Bob to learn his lesson he would have had him learn his lesson. He does explicitly learn he should not have lied to his family and that they work better as a unit (itself a heck of a conservative read on the thing), but not because “everybody is special”. He wins THAT particular argument pretty spectacularly, both with Helen, who is fully back on his camp by the end, and with the government, who are also back on board with special people being special all by themselves, which apparently yields benefits for society at large, I’m being told.

Oh, now you’re stretching. Bob isn’t “plus size” he’s 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 “normal” life holding him back from his natural greatness, not a rendition of the struggles of plus sized people.

I mean, Dash and ADHD works more, but it has the same problem as Vi’s anxiety in that he gets better by being himself and doing what he was meant to do and “being the best he can be”, which is what he complains his mom is not letting him do. If you want to read the kids’ powers as mental health issues actualized then I can’t be on board with how the denouement’s return to a modified normalcy presents their new situation. They didn’t work to get adjusted, they didn’t need help or therapy or support, just to be set free to self-actualize.

I don’t think that’s the idea, beyond the superficial (the kids’ mental health is played as growing pains or inherent characteristics of childhood, if anything), but if it was it’d be more problematic than the alternative.

I also take issue with the idea that white suburban middle class is “a cultural image we’re familiar with” and so suitable to serve as a projection of a minority alegory. I mean, no, white suburban middle class isn’t default human. If you set out to make an allegory about middle class you don’t come at it from that premise, that’d be… 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. X2’s “Have you tried NOT being a mutant” 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 it’s fine but it’s 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.

See, no, that doesn’t work, because Buddy being excited to do the superhero thing and not being patient enough to listen to the cautious adult in the room doesn’t survive Bob thinking Dash risking exposure by using his powers is not a bad thing. Which Helen finds is a major issue and Bob, to her frustration, either ignores or encourages.

Later Dash, who is coded as the rash, impulsive guy, will find himself in a situation where he DOES have to go into a life or death situation by himself and naturally thrives and finds out about things he didn’t even know he could do. If the payload Bird wants to deliver is that kids should listen to adults then why would Dash’s rebelliousness save the day while Syndrome’s ruins it? What did they do differently from each other for the movie to consider one a bad kid who grows into a villain and the other as a good kid who is being repressed by society? It sure seems to just be what their natural ability happens to be by birth.

Violet also thrives by herself, by the way. When the adults are off the picture she DOES learn how to use her powers, despite being too anxious to pull it off in the plane. Helen isn’t there when it happens, she and Dash are being actively shot at and she just reacts out of instinct. And by the end of the movie she hasn’t just done that, but become more self-assertive and gotten over her anxiety. Instead of having added PTSD to the mix, somehow.

You can taste how proud of itself the movie is for tapping into that Goonies thing where when the kids are in danger they are in danger, the movie isn’t pulling punches and their adventure has real stakes. Which is cool, but it really takes the fangs out of the argument that Syndrome shouldn’t have been superheroing because he was young or inexperienced. Either the movie presents Syndrome’s issue as being less naturally capable and jealous of the natural ability of others… or Bob is an absolute monster who flip flops between being so arrogant and incompetent he brews a major supervillain out of callousness while simultaneously putting his whole family at risk for his midlife crisis-fueled political views.

Oh, and for the record, Syndrome isn’t the only one to say “if everybody is special then nobody is”.

Dash does, too.

Dash: Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of. Our powers made us special.

Helen: Everyone’s special, Dash.

Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.

Sure, Syndrome uses that retort to describe his evil plan of first becoming a superhero himself, then giving everybody superpowers through technology. But that’s the plan the good guys have to stop. Because it’s a bad thing. The movie agrees with Syndrome. Dash doesn’t learn the lesson that everybody IS special after all, everybody else learns the lesson that Dash was right in the first place, so now they’re all back to superheroing and being praised by the masses for it.

For the record, I hated maybe the first five episodes of Lower Decks, while they were mostly just trying to do Rick and Morty in Trek. I do think they found their stride and now the concept of a stand-alone Trek comedy makes a lot more sense, especially from some of the same team.

Which I would much prefer over another season of SNW trying to make every episode the wacky, weird viral one instead of having a baseline of episodic sci-fi antology.

I get it, it’s harder to get that balance right with so few episodes, but SNW is WAY closer to jumping the shark than Lower Decks ever was. If you’re going to do a Trek comedy, do a separate show.

I swear, I’m always baffled by the whole “did we NEED” this piece of media.

I don’t even know what they mean. Was the world in 1982 going “Oh, thank God, I had been looking for an ET everywhere”.

You don’t know if you wanted to watch a thing until you watch it.

Well, they did five years of Lower Decks. I would watch more Lower Decks. I’d say there’s a need for that.

So do I need more Twny Newsome Star Trek workplace comedy? I need it in my cardiovascular system this very minute, yes.

I loved Obra Dinn and yet when you said that I drew a complete blank. What I remember of Obra Dinn is figuring out the metapuzzle. And maybe the Kraken.

I think the problem with “gaming moments” is you need a kind of universally communal experience of a game. The reason the Mexico ride in Red Dead became the prototype for THAT is it was maybe the last time we were all playing the same thing at the same time and reading the same things so we could all talk about the same bit at the same time.

Oh, yeah, there was a time when Valve teamed up with EA to make console ports back when Steam was a tenth of the userbase of the PS2 or a half of the 360, because business is business. You’ll note they’ve stopped doing that. I mean, it’s hard to tell because they don’t make many games anymore, but there were no console ports for DOTA, CS2, Deadlock or Artifact, and no Meta or Playstation VR ports for Alyx, either. They sure seem less bothered by exclusives than their fanbase these days.

And no, it’s not because they’re competitive or online games. Their last set of ports was CS: GO.

My question about Valve buying mods is why it’s fine for first party games to be exclusives but not third party games. Insomniac wasn’t owned by Sony for most of their existence, but most of their games were platform exclusives, first for Sony consoles, then, once, for Xbox. Was it better or worse for their output to be exclusive before or after the purchase?

And the same goes to Valve onboarding mod teams as fully owned teams, although just as an extension there. Team Fortress and DOTA do not originate at Valve, or as proprietary or exclusive games. Is that fine?

I mean, I think it’s fine. One could say it’s iffy to use free labor from modders as a recruitment tool, but mods are mods and mods are cool, so hiring mod teams is a smart way to hire game teams. But I also think that hiring a third party dev team to make a game for your platform is a perfectly fine way to fill your platform with content, so who knows where you guys are drawing the line for what you consider acceptable ways to fund a game’s development.

That’s not an invalid read. My problem with it is that the movie doesn’t show the supes as being inherently feared or hated. This isn’t 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 didn’t 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 isn’t rehashing any of those, they’re doing the Fantastic 4. Superheroes-as-family. Bit of a different tack.

And when they’re suppressed they aren’t 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 don’t 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 don’t think Bird has a Randian “you should be an asshole if you want to” 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. It’s why the slightly token black guy is there in the first place.

I should say I also think it’s undermined because the one instance of someone even appearing to have a recognizable trait of those things in the main family, which would be Vi’s 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.

Right, but the argument isn’t that the characters are objectivist, it’s that the movie is.

The thing with Syndrome is that the movie doesn’t make him wanting to be a superhero a problem because he’s bad at it or doing it for the wrong reasons, they do it because he’s 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 aren’t as good at getting it done as natural ability.

Had the movie shown him to have superpowers then the read wouldn’t hold, because it’d be his incompetence or his desire for fame and glory that makes him unsuitable, not his inherent characteristics.

But that’s not the case. The family’s 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. They’re good at it and it’s good for them. It helps them feel accomplished and get over their plain-normie anxieties because it’s what they’re meant to do.

You CAN make a non-objectivist take on The Incredibles and that’s called The Fantastic Four. It’s 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 aren’t 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 it’s not about the powers or inherent characteristics.

Obviously Bird doesn’t 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. Doesn’t mean it’s not saying what it’s saying, though.

Man, even the apologies are tinged in exceptionalism. I promise you guys aren’t the first (or even best) to persecute dissenters.

Look, I know I come across as just pushing back to be contrarian, but if anything it’s a hopeful message. I think the US left and a lot of the worldwide left have been negligent and self-centered in their political action. But I also think American leftists give their ability for action way too little credit.

There’s a bit of that exceptionalism. Like if you aren’t changing the fundamental fabric of the system at a national scale you are not “making a difference” or whatever, but what I’m saying, for good and bad, is that movement leftward is about institutional networks, unified strategies and long-term groundwork.

Maybe it’s too late now, I don’t know. But the goal should always be to get the right people to the right places. As a country in the Americas struggling with oligarchy and rising populist fascism in an unstable political landscape I say this now more genuinely than ever: you’re not that special.

There are playbooks out there. Problem about playbooks is you need a team to run the plays. It’s not going to be a switch flipping from degenerated neoliberalism into socialist utopia.