Why is Mr Incredible balmed for their lack of teaching and love? Huh huh huh?

Because his suit was chafing?

sorry, but the typo made me laugh and laugh at the image it invoked

Also, backing up Jars, it is not unlike a kid in a plastic fireman's hat trying to tag along on a run with an actual firefighter.

On another movie, LATimes ran an article re: V for Vendetta and Allan Moore was quoted from a BBC interview as saying he couldn't have suffered worse treatment from Hollywood if he had "sodomized and murdered a busload of children after giving them heroin."

Except that the Incredible kids are shown as having the capabilities (mentally, physically, and morally) of adult superheroes at an even younger age. They come by it naturally. It's "in their blood." (squiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick)

I don't think this is honestly something I can argue rationally, because it hits me so hard at a gut level.

It's "in their blood."

IT'S THE MIDOCLORIANS AGAIN!!!

the Incredible kids are shown as having the capabilities (mentally, physically, and morally) of adult superheroes

I disagree that they're shown to be adult -- they certainly aren't deemed able by the story to act as independent agents outside of an emergency. Their powers mean they're not an immediate liability (plus there's that whole plucky thing, but that's because they're the heroes, as I read it, not because they're plucky).

Even if chibiSyndrome had had powers, babysitting him wouldn't have been Mr. Incredible's job, AND he wouldn't at the time have done it for kids of his own either.

Jess, I understand if you can't answer this cause it's a pingy subject for you, but do you have the same issue with the kids in X-Men and the adults around them? Do the same issues ping you?

I don't see the connection. And I think I have to step away from this.

Ok.

OK, I'm trying to write a coherent essay about the politics and philosophies in The Incredibles that pinged me, but what with life and baby and stuff it's taking time. I will link it here when done.

Quick responses though: hayden, I absolutely agree that art should be enjoyed despite disagreeing with the author. In this case, I am just agog at how freaking great The Incredibles was from an art-direction standpoint. And I admire them for making a superhero movie that has a philosophical underpinning worth discussing. I'm not saying I thought it was a junk movie at all, just that it will be hard to rewatch.

And I will have to look up the exact quote, but I thought it was made quite clear that Syndrome was excluded from the Super Club because he wasn't born with powers. Quick quote from The Objectivist Center's review (a Randian source):

The one unambiguous flaw in the movie's conception of heroism lies in its portrayal of the villain. Syndrome has invented technological marvels, like boots that enable him to fly, a fortress run by computers, and a ray gun that traps its target in an anti-gravitational force field. Though he puts these tools to evil uses, they are obviously the product of exceptional mental ability that makes the superheroes' athletic gifts seem crude by comparison. By invoking the stock figure of the evil genius, the filmmakers have signed on to the conventional view that intelligence is at best amoral. Had they simply omitted any character of heroic mental powers, they would have conveyed a merely limited conception of heroism; by introducing such a character and making him the villain, they have offered a distorted conception. In an extraordinary moment near the end, Syndrome says his goal in inventing the technology was to destroy the superheroes by enabling everyone to do what they do. "Everybody will be super, which means no one will be." In that one line, writer Brad Bird managed to equate murder and invention as acts of envy-driven hatred, and to elevate native physical abilities over the exercise of man's distinctive ability to think, create, and magnify his powers through technology. The latter is an especially bizarre statement for the wizards at Pixar to make.

And another related quote, from the CSM (I think):

"I can't help thinking of [philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche and his idea that some people are better and more deserving than others," says Mikita Brottman, professor of language and literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. "The movie salutes Superman. Not the 'superman' in comic books but the one [despots] believe in. Its idea seems to be that even in a democracy some people are 'more equal' than others, and the rest of us shouldn't be so presumptuous as to get in their way."

These writers reflect my read on it.

My main essay is going to focus more on the philosophy and the politics, but I want to say one quick word about gender roles: the male supers all had dynamic attacking powers, while the female supers had assistive or defensive powers. And the little boy using his powers to kill people wasn't even a thing - he was rewarded for killing. Sic semper normalis.

One final quickie on the dash (heh) of Scientology: minor, to be sure, but Scientology says that (quoting from Wikipedia here), a person is an immortal spiritual being (termed a thetan) who possesses a mind and a body, accompanied by a lesser "genetic entity," which pings me as the born-in superpowers. And

Scientology claims to offer [a] methodology to help a person achieve ... improvement, so that he or she may achieve ... greater effectiveness in the physical world. .... The ultimate goal of Scientology is to "rehabilitate" the thetan, restoring its superhuman abilities to control "matter, energy, space and time".

You could, if you were so inclined, read the story arc of the Incredibles regaining their position as superheroes as a Scientological parable.

Scientology holds that the human mind consists of two parts: (continued...)