Explanation: A lot of Internet People say that The Incredibles is objectivist (Ayn Rand’s ideology) because the heroes fight against a revolutionary who wants to make everyone equal by giving people superpowers.
What they miss is that this “revolutionary” is a billionaire who made his fortune selling weapons to world governments under the table, and his only motivation for saying he’d sell his weapons is to make money and spite his enemy. There’s no reason to think he would follow through, and selling powers doesn’t mean everyone gets them. It means everyone with money gets them. Syndrome is proposing a world where rich people have super powers. That’s just the plot of Vampire: The Masquerade.
Syndrome is co-opting leftist rhetoric to make himself look like a hero, while not actually understanding it, because he’s not a leftist. He’s a capitalist billionaire. And the Internet People who think this movie is bad because it praises hypercapitalist ideology… fell for the capitalist’s rhetoric.
The argument I saw is that the film is Randian because a central plot point is government regulation making things worse by forcing exceptional individuals into hiding. Forcing “super” people to be normal. Syndrome’s threat is a foil to this, the same outcome reached through the opposite approach.
His line, “When everyone’s super, no one will be,” even mirrors a scene earlier in the film, where Helen says, “Everyone is special, Dash,” and her son replies sourly, “…which is another way of saying no-one is.”
It comes up twice and nothing in the dialog, events, or general framing suggest the filmmakers want us to see this as anything but a neutral, factual observation. I think you’ve thought through the actual consequences of Syndrome’s threat more that the filmmakers did. Kinda a shame, would have made for a better sequel than the one we got.
Yes, this. The fact that billionaires become crazed money monsters that accept unthinkable collateral damage in order to feel special is very relevant to the current time period, but it didn’t resonate in the same way when it came out.
The real “incredible” bit is that syndrome made his own gadgets. You know that the real syndrome would have sub basements upon sub basements stuffed with brilliant engineers from developing countries to produce his stuff.
Maybe he did.
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.
You’re missing the line right before Helen says “everyone’s special, Dash” - “But Dad always told us our powers are nothing to be ashamed of; our powers make us special!”
That exchange is part of an ongoing argument between Bob and Helen about how to raise their children. Bob wants to teach the children a sense of superiority, Helen wants them to fit in. Bob’s desire to see himself as better than others is something he slowly overcomes over the course of the movie. He can’t defeat Syndrome until he gets over that mindset, stops trying to do everything alone, and accepts help from the people he loves. Helen directly says in the cake/rubble scene that Bob is projecting his ego onto Dash.
In that scene, Dash is showing us that Bob’s misunderstanding of heroism is tearing his family apart and affecting his children. He’s already hurt one child with his idea that heroism is about superiority, and now he’s hurting another. We see Syndrome say the same thing as Dash so that we understand Bob needs to overcome this thinking to prevent Dash from growing up like Syndrome.
It’s really good writing.
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.
Syndrome is special. He built himself rocket boots as a ten year old. I’m a grown adult and I can’t do that! He doesn’t get his ass beat by the Omnidroid due to a specialness deficiency. He gets his ass beat because he invented an AI specifically designed to learn how to fight supers, and then had it fight him. He did a bad thing and the bad thing hurt him. He got leopard face’d. “I didn’t think leopards would eat MY face, says supervillain who trained leopards to eat faces.” There’s nobody in the movie who can solo the Omnidroid. Not Bob, not Frozone, not Syndrome. The Incredibles beat it with teamwork, love, and trust. Syndrome tells his teammate that love makes you weak and he can’t be trusted.
The counter to Syndrome’s argument is that power didn’t make him a superhero. Syndrome says “Oh, I’m real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your oh-so-special powers.” Syndrome thinks being a “real hero” is about being strong. Selling his technology to rich people isn’t going to turn everyone into a hero. Syndrome, and all other billionaires, are unheroic because of their awful personalities. Powers aren’t what makes the difference.
You know who doesn’t have powers and is awesome? Edna. Edna Mode is most certifiably, 100% special. And it’s all in her personality.
Edna describes her work with supers as “designing for Gods”. Again, this feeds into the underlying subtext through the film that some people are innately better than others, and should not be constrained in the same way normal people are.
She then goes on to describe how many of her “gods” were killed by their capes. The same thing that happened to Syndrome.