Well, you’d be surprised. Going through uni I definitely got to see a lot of left-of-centre young adults get through semiotics and discouse analysis courses and have an absolute fit at the realization that a bunch of the cool stuff they liked as kids had a clear right-wing bent.
I mean, they all had a lot of time to get attached to Back to the Future and Die Hard before they were forced to think about it too hard. Learning! Twice!
I would lie if I said I wasn’t baiting a little bit, but man, see? Cuts both ways.
Die Hard is extremely obvious. I mean, the whole movie is about this guy finding that his wife suddenly has a job, makes more money than he does and may be attractive to smarter, richer people, but then fate conspires to make his blue collar streetsmarts and prepper attitudes having him save the day for the foppish yuppies. The entire movie ends when they throw the eurotrash rich thief out of a building by literally unshackling Holly from the bonus gift her company job gave her, then wrapping her up in a comfort blanket and taking her home. The movie also finds time to clearly establish that all public servants are idiots except for street level cops.
Back to the Future is subtler, but also pretty straightforward. Kid thinks life with middle class parents in the 80s sucks, goes back to the 50s, which turn out to be as ideal as expected but also somehow cooler in a very 80s kind of way, teaches his dad self-assertion and comes back to the future to find he’s now upper class and has a 4x4. It’s a lot less hardcore, but the reagonomics are running underneath the whole thing. I’d take that it’s accidental, because the same team went much more leftward in Roger Rabbit, so I think it’s just that a lot of the cultural white noise of the mid-80s is baked into the assumptions. And the nostalgia is a massive driving force of conservatism anyway. BTTF is idolizing this “fifteighties” imagery the same way Grease was to suggest there is a perfect past to return to. Kind of in the way Stranger Things and a bunch of other stuff does to the 80s.
That’s maybe the most fun part of breaking down BTTF. The iconic slivers of the film set in the 80s are supposed to show it being run down, realistic and disappointingly drab by comparison.
Also, Lybian terrorists stealing plutonium but being so incompetent they get tricked by Doc and defeated by Marty. That’s a very time-specific one, like Rambo praising the Taliban.
I don’t know, man, Die Hard is pretty far out there.
The Rambo and Rocky sequels are what they are as well. They are almost naive about it in a way that supports ironic appreciation, though.
Dirty Harry tracks, but that’s back in the early 70s. I never went deep enough into the sequels to see if it got really bad down the line.
I’ve heard some stuff about Field of Dreams, but I don’t think I’ve watched that in one sitting.
I don’t know it’s often the action stuff. Your Commandos and Death Wishes and so on. Does stuff like Red Dawn and Invasion USA even count as “crypto”? Those are pretty overt.
If you let me break the time frame I will say that I think The Incredibles flies over people’s heads as being aggressively conservative. Forrest Gump used to, but I think people got wise to it over time. Another Zemeckis joint, too. Maybe it’s Roger Rabbit that was the accident.
The Incredibles flies over people’s heads as being aggressively conservative.
Superheroes are a metaphor for minorities. There’s the immigrant experience in constantly moving house, the queer experience in hiding who you are, the neurodivergent experience in being told not to stick out in school.
The villain is a capitalist billionaire who wants to appropriate a minority’s culture without understanding what it means. If you’re an indigenous minority you’ve been through that.
There’s a scene where the mum has a talk with her kids about treating authority figures they’ve been trained not to fear as threats to their lives. That talk is familiar to any black family in the USA.
There’s a struggle between parents and their children about how to navigate assimilating into the majority culture while retaining their own identity. Many immigrants go through what Dash and Violet did.
That’s not an invalid read. My problem with it is that the movie doesn’t show the supes as being inherently feared or hated. This isn’t the X-Men, which does work on that front.
Here the supes are suppressed by the government, not a societal issue. They are presented as being accepted in the past, in a world without intervention. Thriving, in fact. They are celebrities and have a whole James Bond-style support system. They didn’t come from a different place with a different culture like Superman or Wonder Woman. Superheroes-as-minorities is a very frequent trope, but The Incredibles isn’t rehashing any of those, they’re doing the Fantastic 4. Superheroes-as-family. Bit of a different tack.
And when they’re suppressed they aren’t suppresed into a marginal role in society. They are suppressed into suburban white middle class. Which, incidentally, is presented as less flashy than the life of the one explicitly black character, but that is probably a well-meaning accident.
I do think the concept of cultural appropriation is and has alway been iffy, but beyond that, while I think you can argue that read I don’t think it fits the movie particularly well.
And yes, in the moral space the movie is drawing it is explicitly including those characteristics as part of the exceptionality you are supposed to self-realize. As I told you on the other thread, I don’t think Bird has a Randian “you should be an asshole if you want to” approach to this. He sees it as moral and ethical and valuable for society when people can self express their exceptional, natural abilities, and I do believe there is an explicit attempt to include those things in the mix. It’s why the slightly token black guy is there in the first place.
I should say I also think it’s undermined because the one instance of someone even appearing to have a recognizable trait of those things in the main family, which would be Vi’s crippling social anxiety, is shown as getting better when she fully expresses her powers and self-realizes, which if a bit of an icky approach.
Bob is marginalised in a way invisible to the people around him, but it’s there. As a plus size person, he doesn’t fit in his cubicle or his car. When he stops paying attention, the world around him crumbles. World of cardboard. Being huge and super strong isn’t easy for him.
But what’s even harder is having Bob’s justice sensitivity. Justice sensitivity is a symptom of autism in which neurodivergent people are more sensitive to social problems. Bob gets fired because his sense of right and wrong is too strong to fit into the world around him.
Dash also struggles with the same problems as neurodivergent people. Dash’s allegory is ADHD. He’s not allowed to participate in the parts of school life that interest him; that he’s good at. He’s constantly holding himself back. I was a gifted kid too, and my giftedness has caused consequences for other students when I dominated a classroom discussion. When I was moved to a gifted school and surrounded by peers, life got better for me. I see myself in Dash.
Violet’s marginalisation is more of an immigrant/racialised/misogyny problem. She’s accepted the mainstream narrative that her powers make her a freak. That she’s different and that’s bad. That normality is an ideal to aspire to. She becomes confident in herself after she’s allowed to engage with her own native culture and see that it’s not bad. She gets a talk from Mum and forges a new relationship with her minority identity. The fighting is secondary. The story isn’t about it.
There are queer or disabled people in white middle class nuclear families, and they have problems. I think Brad chose to make the story relatable to everyone by using a cultural image we’re very familiar with. But then he showed problems that happen when someone, even someone in that social role, is different from what society expects.
Oh, now you’re stretching. Bob isn’t “plus size” he’s meant to look like a bodybuilder who let himself go (and gets back into shape once the societal restraints on his self-actualization are removed). The scenes where his environment is shown to be too small for his stature are a visual representation of “normal” life holding him back from his natural greatness, not a rendition of the struggles of plus sized people.
I mean, Dash and ADHD works more, but it has the same problem as Vi’s anxiety in that he gets better by being himself and doing what he was meant to do and “being the best he can be”, which is what he complains his mom is not letting him do. If you want to read the kids’ powers as mental health issues actualized then I can’t be on board with how the denouement’s return to a modified normalcy presents their new situation. They didn’t work to get adjusted, they didn’t need help or therapy or support, just to be set free to self-actualize.
I don’t think that’s the idea, beyond the superficial (the kids’ mental health is played as growing pains or inherent characteristics of childhood, if anything), but if it was it’d be more problematic than the alternative.
I also take issue with the idea that white suburban middle class is “a cultural image we’re familiar with” and so suitable to serve as a projection of a minority alegory. I mean, no, white suburban middle class isn’t default human. If you set out to make an allegory about middle class you don’t come at it from that premise, that’d be… bad. Again, I think the objectivist read is actually less problematic there.
On that it again helps to look at similar media that DOES use superpowers as a minority allegory. Yeah, the X-Men work as a metaphor for that, and you do see it transposed to white middle class. X2’s “Have you tried NOT being a mutant” scene comes to mind. But they are also presented on the run from authorities, living in the sewers, looking visibly different to non-mutants and being shunned on sight and in all sorts of other situations analogous to real world discrimination. The Incredibles does very much not. Suburban middle class life is stiffling in that very 90s way where it’s fine but it’s not the self-realization that special people like the Parrs were meant for, so it makes the men in particular feel restless and frustrated.
The Incredibles is a bit of an anti-Fight Club, now that I think of it. Which is weird to think about, but it fits. Both get interpreted backwards often, too.
Here the supes are suppressed by the government, not a societal issue. They are presented as being accepted in the past, in a world without intervention
Not true. The government shut down the superhero program because of public pressure. The catalyst was the suicide jumper that Bob saved. But around that time there were a lot of incidents of property damage and lawsuits that made it too expensive for the government to have superheroes, because of what the people were doing.
But I guess we can add Bad Boys 2 to the list. I mean, all of Michael Bay’s oeuvre, but holy crap, Bad Boys 2. That MUST have been some form of weird Florida-lobby/CIA psyop, there is no other explanation.
Even the incredibles thinks the insurance industry is predatory. It flew over my head completely in being right wing, but I’m autistic and often miss really, really obvious subtext (though I can generally predict entire plots from the first few minutes, so it’s a weird combination). I could tell that zootopia was a heavy handed allegory, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it referencing racism, for example.
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 Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist “if everybody is special the nobody is”
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.
the wannabe sidekick has no business trying to be one of the special people by inventing stuff
Because he’s not trying to help people! Superheroism is meaningless without empathy. That’s the thesis of the movie
the government and society are regulating these people who are intrinsically better into normalcy when they should be allowed to freely express themselves.
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.
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.
I’ll say that it’s still a great movie. I love it. That’s something modern culture warriors just won’t acknowledge. You can engage with a piece of art or entertainment pushing politics you despise. It’s fine.
Well, you’d be surprised. Going through uni I definitely got to see a lot of left-of-centre young adults get through semiotics and discouse analysis courses and have an absolute fit at the realization that a bunch of the cool stuff they liked as kids had a clear right-wing bent.
I mean, they all had a lot of time to get attached to Back to the Future and Die Hard before they were forced to think about it too hard. Learning! Twice!
Interested in hearing about the right wing bent of Bttf and die hard
I would lie if I said I wasn’t baiting a little bit, but man, see? Cuts both ways.
Die Hard is extremely obvious. I mean, the whole movie is about this guy finding that his wife suddenly has a job, makes more money than he does and may be attractive to smarter, richer people, but then fate conspires to make his blue collar streetsmarts and prepper attitudes having him save the day for the foppish yuppies. The entire movie ends when they throw the eurotrash rich thief out of a building by literally unshackling Holly from the bonus gift her company job gave her, then wrapping her up in a comfort blanket and taking her home. The movie also finds time to clearly establish that all public servants are idiots except for street level cops.
Back to the Future is subtler, but also pretty straightforward. Kid thinks life with middle class parents in the 80s sucks, goes back to the 50s, which turn out to be as ideal as expected but also somehow cooler in a very 80s kind of way, teaches his dad self-assertion and comes back to the future to find he’s now upper class and has a 4x4. It’s a lot less hardcore, but the reagonomics are running underneath the whole thing. I’d take that it’s accidental, because the same team went much more leftward in Roger Rabbit, so I think it’s just that a lot of the cultural white noise of the mid-80s is baked into the assumptions. And the nostalgia is a massive driving force of conservatism anyway. BTTF is idolizing this “fifteighties” imagery the same way Grease was to suggest there is a perfect past to return to. Kind of in the way Stranger Things and a bunch of other stuff does to the 80s.
That’s maybe the most fun part of breaking down BTTF. The iconic slivers of the film set in the 80s are supposed to show it being run down, realistic and disappointingly drab by comparison.
Also, Lybian terrorists stealing plutonium but being so incompetent they get tricked by Doc and defeated by Marty. That’s a very time-specific one, like Rambo praising the Taliban.
Dare I ask you to go further?
What’s an extreme example of a crypto-rightwing-coded-80s-flick?
I don’t know, man, Die Hard is pretty far out there.
The Rambo and Rocky sequels are what they are as well. They are almost naive about it in a way that supports ironic appreciation, though.
Dirty Harry tracks, but that’s back in the early 70s. I never went deep enough into the sequels to see if it got really bad down the line.
I’ve heard some stuff about Field of Dreams, but I don’t think I’ve watched that in one sitting.
I don’t know it’s often the action stuff. Your Commandos and Death Wishes and so on. Does stuff like Red Dawn and Invasion USA even count as “crypto”? Those are pretty overt.
If you let me break the time frame I will say that I think The Incredibles flies over people’s heads as being aggressively conservative. Forrest Gump used to, but I think people got wise to it over time. Another Zemeckis joint, too. Maybe it’s Roger Rabbit that was the accident.
Superheroes are a metaphor for minorities. There’s the immigrant experience in constantly moving house, the queer experience in hiding who you are, the neurodivergent experience in being told not to stick out in school.
The villain is a capitalist billionaire who wants to appropriate a minority’s culture without understanding what it means. If you’re an indigenous minority you’ve been through that.
There’s a scene where the mum has a talk with her kids about treating authority figures they’ve been trained not to fear as threats to their lives. That talk is familiar to any black family in the USA.
There’s a struggle between parents and their children about how to navigate assimilating into the majority culture while retaining their own identity. Many immigrants go through what Dash and Violet did.
That’s not an invalid read. My problem with it is that the movie doesn’t show the supes as being inherently feared or hated. This isn’t the X-Men, which does work on that front.
Here the supes are suppressed by the government, not a societal issue. They are presented as being accepted in the past, in a world without intervention. Thriving, in fact. They are celebrities and have a whole James Bond-style support system. They didn’t come from a different place with a different culture like Superman or Wonder Woman. Superheroes-as-minorities is a very frequent trope, but The Incredibles isn’t rehashing any of those, they’re doing the Fantastic 4. Superheroes-as-family. Bit of a different tack.
And when they’re suppressed they aren’t suppresed into a marginal role in society. They are suppressed into suburban white middle class. Which, incidentally, is presented as less flashy than the life of the one explicitly black character, but that is probably a well-meaning accident.
I do think the concept of cultural appropriation is and has alway been iffy, but beyond that, while I think you can argue that read I don’t think it fits the movie particularly well.
And yes, in the moral space the movie is drawing it is explicitly including those characteristics as part of the exceptionality you are supposed to self-realize. As I told you on the other thread, I don’t think Bird has a Randian “you should be an asshole if you want to” approach to this. He sees it as moral and ethical and valuable for society when people can self express their exceptional, natural abilities, and I do believe there is an explicit attempt to include those things in the mix. It’s why the slightly token black guy is there in the first place.
I should say I also think it’s undermined because the one instance of someone even appearing to have a recognizable trait of those things in the main family, which would be Vi’s crippling social anxiety, is shown as getting better when she fully expresses her powers and self-realizes, which if a bit of an icky approach.
Bob is marginalised in a way invisible to the people around him, but it’s there. As a plus size person, he doesn’t fit in his cubicle or his car. When he stops paying attention, the world around him crumbles. World of cardboard. Being huge and super strong isn’t easy for him.
But what’s even harder is having Bob’s justice sensitivity. Justice sensitivity is a symptom of autism in which neurodivergent people are more sensitive to social problems. Bob gets fired because his sense of right and wrong is too strong to fit into the world around him.
Dash also struggles with the same problems as neurodivergent people. Dash’s allegory is ADHD. He’s not allowed to participate in the parts of school life that interest him; that he’s good at. He’s constantly holding himself back. I was a gifted kid too, and my giftedness has caused consequences for other students when I dominated a classroom discussion. When I was moved to a gifted school and surrounded by peers, life got better for me. I see myself in Dash.
Violet’s marginalisation is more of an immigrant/racialised/misogyny problem. She’s accepted the mainstream narrative that her powers make her a freak. That she’s different and that’s bad. That normality is an ideal to aspire to. She becomes confident in herself after she’s allowed to engage with her own native culture and see that it’s not bad. She gets a talk from Mum and forges a new relationship with her minority identity. The fighting is secondary. The story isn’t about it.
There are queer or disabled people in white middle class nuclear families, and they have problems. I think Brad chose to make the story relatable to everyone by using a cultural image we’re very familiar with. But then he showed problems that happen when someone, even someone in that social role, is different from what society expects.
Oh, now you’re stretching. Bob isn’t “plus size” he’s meant to look like a bodybuilder who let himself go (and gets back into shape once the societal restraints on his self-actualization are removed). The scenes where his environment is shown to be too small for his stature are a visual representation of “normal” life holding him back from his natural greatness, not a rendition of the struggles of plus sized people.
I mean, Dash and ADHD works more, but it has the same problem as Vi’s anxiety in that he gets better by being himself and doing what he was meant to do and “being the best he can be”, which is what he complains his mom is not letting him do. If you want to read the kids’ powers as mental health issues actualized then I can’t be on board with how the denouement’s return to a modified normalcy presents their new situation. They didn’t work to get adjusted, they didn’t need help or therapy or support, just to be set free to self-actualize.
I don’t think that’s the idea, beyond the superficial (the kids’ mental health is played as growing pains or inherent characteristics of childhood, if anything), but if it was it’d be more problematic than the alternative.
I also take issue with the idea that white suburban middle class is “a cultural image we’re familiar with” and so suitable to serve as a projection of a minority alegory. I mean, no, white suburban middle class isn’t default human. If you set out to make an allegory about middle class you don’t come at it from that premise, that’d be… bad. Again, I think the objectivist read is actually less problematic there.
On that it again helps to look at similar media that DOES use superpowers as a minority allegory. Yeah, the X-Men work as a metaphor for that, and you do see it transposed to white middle class. X2’s “Have you tried NOT being a mutant” scene comes to mind. But they are also presented on the run from authorities, living in the sewers, looking visibly different to non-mutants and being shunned on sight and in all sorts of other situations analogous to real world discrimination. The Incredibles does very much not. Suburban middle class life is stiffling in that very 90s way where it’s fine but it’s not the self-realization that special people like the Parrs were meant for, so it makes the men in particular feel restless and frustrated.
The Incredibles is a bit of an anti-Fight Club, now that I think of it. Which is weird to think about, but it fits. Both get interpreted backwards often, too.
Not true. The government shut down the superhero program because of public pressure. The catalyst was the suicide jumper that Bob saved. But around that time there were a lot of incidents of property damage and lawsuits that made it too expensive for the government to have superheroes, because of what the people were doing.
Don’t forget any movie that includes a fleet of Chevrolet Suburbans being driven as a government vehicle!
Oh, man, way too new for the conversation.
But I guess we can add Bad Boys 2 to the list. I mean, all of Michael Bay’s oeuvre, but holy crap, Bad Boys 2. That MUST have been some form of weird Florida-lobby/CIA psyop, there is no other explanation.
Even the incredibles thinks the insurance industry is predatory. It flew over my head completely in being right wing, but I’m autistic and often miss really, really obvious subtext (though I can generally predict entire plots from the first few minutes, so it’s a weird combination). I could tell that zootopia was a heavy handed allegory, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it referencing racism, for example.
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.
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.
Ahh Deathwish I haven’t thought about that in years but yeah it does have white flight, brown gangs, and one NYC architect-cum-vigilante savior.
I still can’t tell if the original response thought I was actually calling Scooby Doo woke 😭
What’s so right wing about those? Honestly, it’s been a while but I don’t really remember any clear examples.
Somebody else just asked, so see above.
BTTF I can get, but Die Hard flying under people’s radar is always surprising.
Thanks! Today I learned I don’t really remember any details about die hard…
Hah! It happens. That’s when the shock comes.
I’ll say that it’s still a great movie. I love it. That’s something modern culture warriors just won’t acknowledge. You can engage with a piece of art or entertainment pushing politics you despise. It’s fine.