this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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In fairness, Zootopia is... kinda muddy on that front.
The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist "if everybody is special the nobody is" 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 isn't born into it. That's evil.
I mean, I'm pushing it, but it's 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 he's 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 Bob's 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 he's not trying to help people! Superheroism is meaningless without empathy. That's the thesis of the movie
The government banning people who are different from freely expressing themself is bad... Wonder whether that's a left or right opinion.
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.
No. Buddy blows up a bridge and lets Bomb Voyage get away because he wore a cape and wouldn't 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 won't 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 doesn't listen. She says Helen told her not to. But then she starts listening, and while she doesn't 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 hadn't helped them. Then, Helen becomes patient with Violet and Violet listens. Bob puts Buddy in a cop car and Buddy doesn't 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 they'll 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 don't have a good relationship. That's the story, coming straight from the authorial intent.
It's not even a case of Buddy's invented powers malfunctioning in the movie. He makes a simple mistake of bad judgement. His powers didn't have anything to do with not listening to an adult.
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 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-fueld 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.
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.
I addressed the Dash everyone super idea in another comment - https://lemmy.zip/comment/18650684
I'm running low on time and think we're getting away from the core issues, so I'll reply with a meme.
The villain saying "I want to make everyone Super, so that it's not just natural Supers that get to have powers" is absolutely an objectivist-adjacent plot. The fact that Syndrome also wants to murder (genocide?) Supers with his droids and "spend his life getting all his kicks from being the only (artificial) Super until he gets bored and then shares the tech with the public" is a classic example of attaching blatant evil to the ideology you want to villainize.
It's not the movie saying "if everyone's super, no one is", it's the movie saying "the 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!"
Like, let's say you want to have themes of anti-environmentalism in your movie. What's your villain? Eco-terrorist that bombs coal power plants to stop them from polluting the earth. It's 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 doesn't want to give everyone powers so he can help people. He wants to give everyone powers to spite his enemy and make money. He's Elon Musk. The idea of helping people is just a marketing line and an ego trip. He's not actually making anyone's lives better. He's doing the opposite; selling advanced weapons to world governments under the table. Arms dealing isn't equality! You think things will be more equal when rich people can buy flight and super strength? Syndrome does. Because he's a capitalist villain who doesn't understand any of the leftist rhetoric he's co-opting.
You fell for a billionaire's self-aggrandising lies.