As someone who loved The Incredibles and has been known to spend way too much time analyzing pop culture (and comic books in particular), I gotta say this whole line of criticism is completely absurd :
But it’s hard not to be suspicious of the winners. Any winners, for that matter, and that includes The Incredibles. While The Incredibles’ battle against conformity and mediocrity screams anti-oppression to some, it’s obviously Randian to others.
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The message of The Incredibles—reported everywhere!—was that the chosen few should have the right to exercise their powers over a wide, bland majority of fans and mediocrity-worshippers, and save the world from a bitter, deadly evil.
It’s very much in the eye of the beholder, but at the moment, to the butt-kicked, discouraged liberal team, the Pixar-built shiny, muscle-bound cartoon characters seem to come very much from the other team.
"And what is The Incredibles?" said Richard Goldstein, author of The Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right. "It’s really a movie about people sort of bursting out of this model of decency and concern for others, and all of those values that now get labeled politically correct, and bursting forth with their true strength and power, like an animated Hobbes. I guess the bet is that the rest of the world, looking at this spectacle, will actually just say, ‘Holy cow—we’d better do what they say!’ And this Hobbesian idea will be proven correct."
"It’s kind of ironic that superheroes now have these fascist, right-wing connotations," said Ted Rall, the editorial cartoonist for United Press Syndicate and author of Wake Up, You’re Liberal! How We Can Take America Back From the Right. "The right has stolen the flag and our superheroes, too."
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The Incredibles’ storyline, not unlike most current superhero storylines, will warm the hearts of the Republican elite, and also the scared, ordinary moviegoing folks emboldened by America’s long-time military prowess. Mr. Incredible could be Dick Cheney himself, or Donald Rumsfeld, big-bellied and in mothballs during the Clinton years, watching the world go to hell while nobody needed them, tortured and beat up by the little people and the bureaucrats all around them.
I honestly don't see how these weak-ass complaints about
The Incredibles wouldn't apply to the entire superhero archetype itself. The cynical view that superheroes are simply powerful individuals who use their power to try to make the world fit their vision may seem like a right-wing value now, but five years ago (when this movie was written) it was seen as a liberal value. Should I bother trying to dredge up one of Bush's "nation-building" quotes?
If you really want to over-think The Incredibles, the movie is a satirical look at the superhero genre sprinkled with little lessons about being true to yourself, the importance of family, etc. Pretty non-controversial stuff if you ask me. Apparently though, somebody still reeling from last week's election results and unfamiliar with how long it takes to make animated movies decided that The Incredibles is a right-wing fantasy about neoconservative supremacy.
Despite the giant chip on the shoulder of the writers, which pretty much ruins the article, there is a great examination of my favorite superhero courtesy of the always-great Chip Kidd :
What is a liberal superhero? The last time anyone looked, superheroes were serving the weak and the helpless, not themselves.
According to Chip Kidd, the co-author of The Golden Age of DC Comics: 365 Days, Superman—created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1938, during the Great Depression—was a liberal hero in his original incarnation, shy about his abilities and eager to do social good during the New Deal, when the general ethic sought a strong man willing to protect the weak, not so much to show off his powers as to serve the general welfare.
"The charming thing about the basic superhero myth, as it was conceived during the Depression, was if you’re an omni-powerful being or something like it, your responsibility is to serve the world, not to rule it," said Mr. Kidd. "The United States, as Bush runs it—he probably thinks he’s doing that, but he’s not. He is trying to rule it, in a way. And that’s where it differs from what I would call a superhero ideal."
Mr. Kidd may be partisan, but he’s not wrong in the sense that it’s almost impossible to image Superman as a Republican in the 1930’s or 1940’s. Superman was definitely a Roosevelt man. Batman may have been more up for grabs; it’s possible Commissioner Gordon was in close contact with gangbusting D.A. Tom Dewey.
Even then, though, I think it's a mistake to let partisan politics get too wrapped up into superheroes. Just as it's wrong for some on the right to lay exclusive claim the the flag, neither side should claim that Superman is the epitome of their political beliefs. Superman may embody ideals that are almost entirely absent from our current President, but that doesn't mean that he somehow stands against traditional (as opposed to modern) conservatism any more than he's a liberal everyman. Superman, in my view, stands as a patriotic ideal in much the same way that Uncle Sam does.
