Down With... Superheroes


I don't like geniuses. They're dangerous. A man abler than his brothers insults them by implication. He must not aspire to any virtue which cannot be shared.

-Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead

***

Dash: You always say 'Do your best', but you don't really mean it. Why can't I do the best that I can do?
Helen: Right now, honey, the world just wants us to fit in, and to fit in, we gotta be like everyone else.
Dash: But 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.

-Dashiel and Helen Parr in The Incredibles

***

The 1950s was a period when the Comic Book industry found itself under attack. A psychiatrist named Frederic Wertham had published a highly influential book entitled Seduction of the Innocent in which he claimed (in great detail) that comic books were directly responsible for the perceived rise in juvenile delinquency in American society. (Juvenile delinquency hadn't actually risen all that dramatically; it was just getting talked about a lot more.)


Wertham's book was taken very seriously by concerned parents and by the Government. A Congressional enquiry was formed to look at the poisonous influence of comic books on modern youth, and many of the comic books of the era were either banned outright or severely restricted. (This did absolutely nothing to reduce juvenile delinquency, by the way, but it did reduce the comic book industry very successfully.)

This week's film is not about all of that, at least not exactly.


The Incredibles takes place in a version of the 1950s in which super-heroes have been banned, and are forced to hide their powers from society.

Bob Parr (formerly "Mr. Incredible") is finding it very difficult to adjust to his new life as an average, unremarkable working man. That's hardly surprising, since he is quite plainly far superior to everyone else. Why should he be forced to fade in to the background, just because society demands that he suppress his incredible talents and conform to a world that glorifies the "ordinary"?


If you think this sounds a little... Ayn Rand... you are absolutely not alone. Quite a few critics and commentators have noted the parallels between The Incredibles and The Fountainhead (myself included, it must be said). 


In both stories, men (and women) of great ability are despised and rejected by a society that resents them for their obvious greatness. In both stories, a villain is determined to rid the world of greatness so that no one will ever have to feel inferior, and in both stories the heroes resent being forced to conform to the rules and standards of a society that is obviously designed for people who are much less important than they are.


In case the parallels are not obvious enough, The Incredibles even features a character who has been (partly) modelled after Ayn Rand herself.

None of this is to say that The Incredibles is a polemical film. This is not the film I made you sit through last week (don't panic!).

On the contrary, The Incredibles is great fun and exceedingly well written. It is (rightly) regarded as one of the best films to come out of Pixar Studios, but it also dances around an ideology that has found expression in some very different contexts.


We will be screening The Incredibles at 7.30 on Thursday, the 16th of March at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

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