"The Incredibles" Revisited

An Analysis

Pixar’s The Incredibles was released in 2004 - that’s about as long ago as I have any reliable memories. Five year old Michael was a busy chap, but he managed to find a gap in his schedule of lego-kingdom-building and Spyro the Dragon sessions to go of an evening to a chain cinema, family in tow, and watch an exciting new film, with bright colours and hijinx enough to hold his attention for a couple of hours. I even recall the Incredibles themed Happy-Meal, and the unfortunate plastic toys from it, which I managed to destroy before we even finished the drive home.

The Incredibles has been interpreted in numerous ways since its release. One prominent take, ill-favoured by Incredibles writer/director, Brad Bird (and by myself), is that the film was an expression of Randian Objectivism. (imagine having the brass neck to call your philosophy “objectivism”... “Introducing: I’m-right-ism, the groundbreaking new school of thought from Yours Truly!”) I won’t dwell long on this very shit opinion, suffice it to say that anything vaguely applicable to your Shrugging Fountains and Atlasheads from the film could be far more productively investigated from a Nietzschean angle. That, however, is something else I won’t do. I'll mostly be drawing on Evolian Traditionalism and Ancient Greek Mythology, I’ll even slip a bit of critique of technology in there for good measure.

Whatever the Incredibles is, it is most certainly not an endorsement or even favourable comment upon modernity, or the world of today. I will argue here, in fact, that the film is downright aristocratic in its tendencies; a love letter to heroism lost. A polemic against the mediocrity of modern existence.

Heroism

The world of the Incredibles is one populated in part by “Supers”, heroes who fight crime and help the general public against criminals, your usual superheroey deal. The film’s opening act, however, sees them banished from public life, as lawsuits from injured civilians cost the government too greatly, and the superhero program is discontinued. The Supers then flee into hiding and try to pass themselves off as ordinary people. This is the vehicle for Bird’s blending of the superhero format with an accompanying family story, as we follow the domestic life of Mr. Incredible, his wife Helen “Elastigirl”, and their three equally übermenschy children. The premise of relegating the divinely gifted to suburban drudgery is the first point which I will take as being of note. This is a world which has lost its heroes, and by what means? The inexorable onslaught of lawyers. Here, Olympus is undone by litigation - one wonders what a difference this plot point would make to the entire superhero genre. Perhaps Batman would’ve gone quite differently - if only the Joker had hired a decent solicitor.

Mr. Incredible is a blond haired, blue eyed man of herculean stature, crammed into a grey office chair, his masculine vitality is chained and wasting away. He’s exactly what Hollywood consistently casts as the high-school bully “jock” trope. The blond beast from an 80s movie, but this film is set in a post Revenge of the Nerds world, where Chad has been laid low, and where he is the goodie. The image of Mr. Incredible at his desk has even become a meme, used to convey the emptiness and crushing boredom of modern life, where actual living is exchanged for “a job that slowly kills you”, and a million and one surrogate activities, which merely distract us from the life that we’re missing. Besides commenting on modern life, the film impresses upon us the injustice of the servitude of the strong to the weak. Mr Incredible’s boss, Mr. Huph is a small, ruthlessly tidy and bespectacled runt, and (literal) pencil-pusher, sharing a voice actor with the craven T-Rex from Toy Story. Comically tiny, as Pixar villains often are, He represents the bureaucratic, Vogonic and officious tendency in man, and its ascendancy in the modern, corporate world. This scrawny nerd is seen to wield total power over Bob (Mr. Incredible), and to enjoy this greatly. The film communicates symbolically, but also through Mr Huph’s moral inferiority to Mr. Incredible, that this state of affairs is profoundly unjust.

The notion of the injustice of the rule of the lowly has great precedent in mythology. Like Mr. Incredible, the legendary Heracles was a servant under an inferior man, King Eurystheus, for whom he performs the twelve labours. This theme can also be found in the myths of Bellerophon and many others. In Bellerophon, it is explicitly stated that “It is not righteous for the mighty to be under the power of the weak”. 19th Century Historian George William Cox (whose works I encountered quite by accident during an opportune perusal of a charming rural bookshop), interprets this archetype, seen also in Apollo’s subjection under Admetos, and Achilles under Agamemnon, as a reflection of “the toil of the mighty sun for weak and mortal man”. Cox’s interpretations are characteristic of a Victorian naturalist account of religion, most often reading mythic events as idealisations of solar phenomena, as in the preceding quotation. In fact, “solar heroes” are a well established motif throughout the Indo European, and even other, religious canons. Examples range from Heracles and Theseus to Siegfried/Sigurðr and Indra. These heroes are seen to embody what Julius Evola would call the “solar” or “Uranian” principle, that of order, Being and “Dharma”. Mr. Incredible also upholds this motif.

While comparative mythology and religion will be topics that I cover a lot on this blog, the specificities of Cox’s naturalistic lens are not what I wish to draw attention to, but rather his identification of this solar symbolic thread. There is injustice in Mr. Incredible’s beauty and strength being servile to his boss, who prevents him from being heroic, revelling in the power he holds over him. Equally; the might and power of the sun, embodied within our hero, is made to serve the utterly mortal, utterly mundane and utterly materialistic ends of one obsessed by money, entertaining no moral or ideal notions. Once again, “the toil of the mighty sun for weak and mortal man”, is reified. Truly, the boss character is a puny man (if ever there were a good moment to bring in Nietzsche and the Last Man, now would be it), in thought, deed and stature.

Huph likens his company, “Insuricare”, to “an enormous clock”, which “only works if all the little cogs mesh together”. Our Olympian Adonis, shunned by the modern public, must withhold his divine strength, and contort himself into the shape of a cog, that can properly regurgitate the correct sequence of procedural actions to assist the running of an insurance corporation. Not only must he constrain his strength, but also his morality and will to help those in need. “We’re supposed to help our people, starting with our stockholders, Bob. Who’s helping them out, huh?” Huph represents the mercantile “caste”, if you will, who are ascendant against the dethroned heroes, whose fall was to begin with due to the reign of money itself. The heroic, solar principle of aspiration upwards, and of high ideals, is discarded, and instead an obsession with money and a preeminence of the feeble takes hold.

Beyond even a reinstantiation of the solar myth, here we stare in the face the truly nightmarish prospect of the integration of the virile spirit within man into a drab, procedural mill of paper and concrete. The tearing down of the heroes by attacks from below reflects also Evola’s understanding of the decline of the ages. The Chthonic underclasses assert themselves gradually over the conquering heroes who rule over them, and the telluric, earthly principle pulls the sky down to its own depths, so as to equalise the universe. The insistence that “everyone is special”, the desire to make common that which is exclusive, all of these are characteristic of an Iron Age, a decline downwards. And - almost poetically, the snoozefest of a sequel this film had a couple of years back saw just such a decline, just the same forces of levelling and mediocritising as the first film attacked, were pumped wholesale into the DNA of the sequel. I won’t dwell on what I don’t consider to be canon, but I’ll say this - the Incredibles was itself chained and restrained in the sequel, unable to tell its true heroic story, pulped and shat out as another film targeted at, and meant to ennoble the painfully average. It’s like Bob never left that desk at all.

While I’m sure my readership differs in their opinions on La mort d’auteur, and while it would suit my far-reaching interpretations to declare emphatically that the film “stands on itself”, without consideration as to authorial intent, I feel certain that, however nascent, there lurks a repugnance at the state of the modern world in the heart of one Bradley Bird. Or at least, there did in 2004.

Syndrome and the Sun Chariot

One aspect of the film which left a sour taste in the mouth of a 16 year old Michael, during my days as an “Old Whig” devotee of Daniel Hannan (blending a kind of blue-remembered-hills Anglo nostalgia with basic-bitch politics which, in retrospect, resembled those of Harry Enfield’s Tory Boy), was the way in which the industrious self-made-man, who invents his own super-gadgets, and earns his way into hero-dom, is cast as the film’s villain (Needless to say, a Randian film would differ on this … also imagine unironically being a libertarian in 2021). If all my other arguments are to be discarded as egregious twaddle, this one point undeniably stands out as anti-modern. Where is the meritocracy? Where is the narrative that the Supers are merely oppressors, relying on centuries of unearned privilege and the exploitation of the masses? The film roundly rejects these notions, or any such postmodern inferiority-complex guff. It has the bollocks to claim that saying “everyone is special”, is “another way of saying no-one is”. Quite contrary to the liberal humanist consensus view of the last however many years. This same levelling desire, to replicate and systematise the truffle-like unicity of the gifted few, is the primary motivation of the film’s antagonist.

A not so flattering depiction of Conservative Youth...

Back to the theory for a second; Syndrome, Mr. Incredible’s fanboy spurned and turned villain, represents the “adharmic” state in which power is held by a weak man, who can imitate true heroism, but produces only a thin reflection. Similar, yet distinct in emphasis to what we covered before with Bellerophon/Heracles etc, this mirrors more closely the myth of Phaethon. In the myth, Phaethon attempts to ride the chariot of Helios the sun-god, his immortal father, piloting the chariot across the sky and dragging the sun along, kicking and screaming, for the ride. The father-son relationship here resembles once more the interactions between Mr. Incredible and the young “Buddy”, later to become Syndrome. Cox remarks: “In his brightness Phaethon resembles Helios, but he is not the same being; he lacks either his wisdom or his strength.” As a result, when ascending the mantle of godhood, Phaethon fails to control the horses of the sun-chariot, and so the Earth is variably frozen and scorched, due to the chariot going too high and low in the sky, the details of this varying greatly across different accounts of the myth. Cox renders this tale as a mythologisation of the phrase “One who cannot guide the fiery horses sits in the chariot of the sun.” “So ran the phrase which… rose naturally to the lips of men when all herbage was scorched and withered in times of drought.”

Disorder, chaos and suffering are understood to be the result of the lowly assuming the role of the high, and being unable to maintain cosmic order. This is mirrored in Syndrome’s attempt to “become” a hero - to pilot the sun-chariot, as it were. He causes immense destruction for his weakness, and inability to destroy the robot that he created. The myth ends with Zeus striking Phaethon with a thunderbolt, to at last save the world from destruction. Here we see the reassertion of the Olympian order over the adharmic state, whereby the weak and unfit to rule assume the mantle of godly power - and so it is, in the Incredibles, that the heroes defeat the robot which Syndrome has lost control of - just as Phaethon loses control of the chariot. In a quick turnaround, after going into hiding and blending in with the population, the Supers, those aristocrats of the soul, reassert the natural order, but only after immense destruction at the hands of Syndrome - the false hero who wreaks destruction, because he is incapable of “riding the chariot of the sun”. I could even compare the jumbled electronic foot covered in ice which they fire at the robot to kill it to a Jovian thunderbolt, just to hammer home the synchronicity that bit further, but I think you get the message.

As Evola states in Rivolta:

“The regal idea occurs in an already weakened form when it no longer becomes incarnated in beings who are naturally above human limitations, but rather in beings who must develop this quality within themselves.”

The truly “regal”, “heroic” ideal, is in-born. This is also a controversial side to the film. A family of superheroes inherits their powers from their blood, “yikes, let’s unpack that real quick… sweetie who hurt you? Something something ToXiCitY…” Regardless, I don’t think I need to comment extensively on this aspect of it. It’s a deeply unpopular idea, smacks of essentialism and a million other no-nos in contemporary thought. All I’ll say is, it is yet another instance whereby the film instantiates an aristocratic and hierarchical principle.

Sturz des Phaethon, "The Fall of Phaethon", Johann Michael Franz 

Technology and Simulation

On top of all this, Syndrome represents the automation of heroism. He has no in-born superpowers, but rather produces a sad, staged facsimile of heroism through technology. It is literally an automated simulation of not just heroism, but the entire “process of heroism”, entirely counterfeit. Syndrome must manufacture the villain as well as the hero, the entire “mythic event”, if you like, is entirely artificial. Perhaps we can comment that the world is so drab and dull that even perilous situations have to be invented to inject some of the vital and spontaneous energy that belongs to a youthful Earth, before the last men make the world quite so small. Chad Haag’s Hermeneutical Death has invaluable insights into this kind of meta-simulatory intrusion of technology into the world, and I’d recommend this work to you all heartily. There are echoes also of a Kaczynskian critique here, and the loss of spontaneity under the influence of autonomous technique has Jacques Ellul written all over it.

We’ve covered how the film depicts with disdain the condition of modern life, in concurrence with both Kaczysnki and the title of Blur's second album, but perhaps more poignantly than a mere agreement on things being “a bit shite” these days, we can also trace alignments in the film with Kaczysnki’s notion of truly wild nature. Unlike a tame national park, where the mere appearance of nature can be perused at leisure, Kaczynski’s conception of wild nature is that of unbridled and uncontrolled nature - wild because it is uncontrollable, not simply permitted laissez-faire to go about its naturey habits. The chaotic and virile nature of the heroes is aped in an entirely controlled procedure, the eventual runaway of the technology notwithstanding. Where the heroes are wild nature, unpredictable, chaotic (costing the government money and making a right mess), and unbound, Syndrome represents the technologically enframed, neutered vision of heroism, the park, or the zoo of the Super.

For Syndrome, heroism is merely about spectacle. As a “fanboy”, he “geeks out” over Mr. Incredible, and is in many ways a kind of speccy bug-man who can only attain status through technology. Not unfair comparisons could be made between him and Silicon Valley billionaire dweebs who’ve essentially been handed the world for clacking their fingers on keyboards all their lives. His obsession with spectacle is evident in his fanboying over Mr Incredible’s escapades on his private island, praising his performance and then saying that he “ruined the ride” by sending out a homing signal. To Syndrome, heroism is just a TV show, something to “geek out” about. He understands heroism as mere simulation, mere entertainment. Mr. Incredible’s apparent cry for help was just “bad writing” to him. He almost comes across in this scene like one of the eight quintillion professional opinion-regurgitators still churning out the same eight hour video about why the obviously shit Disney Star Wars films were shit.

The true greatness of heroes is recognised in the film to be elusive and irreplicable- it cannot be synthesised. On top of this imitation of authentic heroism, Syndrome’s technology is seen to surpass him, and he loses control over it. Once again, a clear tie can be made to Kaczynski. It is a constant in Kaczynski’s works that the technological system will outgrow the use of its creators, and then humanity will simply be phased out as an inconvenient and inefficient bug in the system. We are a meaty barrier on the way to the ideal state, where the universe has been contorted into one bloody great logic-gate. When Syndrome’s simulation escapes him, it is then up to those truly gifted few, those inherently “super” to save the day against the robot, as we explored in the prior section. The film has hope, in other words, that the Supers will return. The solar heroes will again bless the world with nobility.

Concluding Remarks

The Incredibles is, in many ways, a nostalgic film. While it characterises Mr. Incredible’s own nostalgia for his “glory days” as childish and even pernicious at times, its 60s Americana aesthetic, and suburban golden-age setting can’t help but position it as a film of distinctly 20th Century concern, despite being published in a different millennium altogether. King Romance is, as ever, “Hedged in a backward-gazing world”. I’m sure one could wax at length on the hauntological significance of this, but this essay is long enough as is. The preoccupation with this past is, however, very striking indeed, and again one has to wonder as to the level of conscious awareness among the film’s creators as to the messages it seems undeniably to convey. Everything I’ve read into this film is present quite visibly in it - and you can call me Susan if it isn’t so. The Incredibles was, and remains, a standout classic in animation, bravely grappling with some of the key questions presented to us in post-post-modernity. If nothing else, it expresses a profound unease at notions which elsewhere in the contemporary world are taken entirely as gospel. I’ve grown up with this film as a prominent piece of culture from my very youngest engagements with media of any sort, and I feel it left a greater impression on me than perhaps any other film of its type. It’s also fun to watch, which helps.

P.S.

Believe it or not, the idea for this piece of writing has been doing the rounds in my noggin for a number of years now, and I’ve only just bloody managed to get it all written down. I plan for this place to be a repository for any notable ideas that swing my way. Stay tuned.

P.P.S

I copypasted this document over from Google Docs, and it seems that Blogger doesn't allow the use of footnotes for references, which is gay. Blame the man.