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you pesky kids rule
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this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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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.
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.
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.
You know what does more for a trans person's mental health and suicide risk than any amount of talk therapy? Being themself.
Besides that, it's a movie. There isn't any time for a therapy scene in a 115 minute family movie about superheroes with everything else going on. The core theme of the movie is family, and family is what helps Dash and Violet. Helen accepts them for who they are instead of telling them to repress, and Bob gets on Helen's side and encourages restraint. That's actually kind of accurate - children's mental health issues are so often caused by a bad family environment. Bob and Helen weren't on the same page for most of the movie, and they were giving their kids conflicted messaging. When they reconcile and agree on how to parent the kids, the kids are able to reconcile too. Dash stops parroting Dad's supremacist views and Violet stops internalising Mum's conformist views. Good parenting is the very best thing for a child's development.
And when I say plus size, I don't mean fat. Plus size men's clothing stores are called "big and tall". Mr Incredible is big, and he's tall. His size is plus compared to the body type the world is built for. It's giving him back problems and poor activity levels because he doesn't fit.
Yeah, but that's not what you said Dash stands in for. Being yourself is not how you treat ADHD.
The solution to not having enough time to cover that is to not make Dash stand-in for that. Which they don't because that's not what the movie is about.
The movie is about a stiffling system making the kids of a white middle class nuclear family struggle by forcing them to conform to a rigid (government-set) standard when they would thrive by self-expression and learning from their parents' experience instead. Which neatly solves the problem of having to find a stand-in for mental health tratment by making the kids' issues in the fictional universe be caused by the conformity, not by their superpowers.
Because the movie isn't interested in the downsides of the powers. Dash getting bored because he's fast isn't presented as a struggle when he's not forced to stay on the level of the normies. It's not a day-to-day problem in the way The Thing being a monster made of rocks is a problem for him. It's not caused by his powers, it's caused by society trying to hold him back. Dash isn't trans and he doesn't have ADHD, he is a precocious kid being dragged back because the system is meant for people with less talent than he has.
That is what the movie is concerned with, and it overlaps with the ideology that it does. You are projecting what is at most a secondary concern (the feelings of otherness and isolation) onto the text because they are a more palatable interpretation.
Which, hey, is the point of this entire thread.