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.
Jack Jack is the most powerful character in the movie, and he can be handled by a teenager with a fire extinguisher. Is Kari more special than Syndrome?
“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.
Kari had Jack Jack handled better than Syndrome. Why? Because she’s a good babysitter. Babysitting is a more useful skill when looking after a baby than engineering. Syndrome is better at building gadgets, Kari is better at looking after a baby.
It’s not an absolute idea of specialness or universal competence. Not the Randian idea of Prime Movers. What we see in this movie is that EVERYONE has useful skills. Even an awkward teenage girl in braces. Syndrome doesn’t have the awkward teenage girl’s skills, and it gets him killed. Even for all his intellect, money, and power, he doesn’t have what she has. Everyone’s special.
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.
There’s a specific impetus in 99% of little boys that makes them want to run a lot.
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.