OK. I'm kind of slightly to the left of most people in the USA. As in, I think that garbagemen should probably be paid more than CEOs, because there are almost certainly more people who want to run a business than who want to clean up garbage, and if we all had a free choice probably most of us would not choose taking out the garbage, and the only justification for differential compensation that I can see is in order to give incentives to do undesirable but socially necessary work.

But let's not talk about that. I avoided The Incredibles because reviews suggested that it was one more cleverly disguised piece of right-wing capitalist propaganda. Now Vincent says it isn't! Help me out: will this movie offend my inflexible ideological preconceptions, or will the Commissars of Correctness in Thought sanction my viewing of it?

Sean wrote: But let's not talk about that. I avoided The Incredibles because reviews suggested that it was one more cleverly disguised piece of right-wing capitalist propaganda.

If you're going in there looking for something to be pissed about, I'm sure you will find it. That's what having politics is about; finding stuff to be pissed about.

It helps, when watching movies, to suppress one's radical political leanings and just enjoy the story!

Hiya,

Sean, whoever wrote that was a dingbat.

Best,
Ron

Sean, I think you're going to need to connect the dots on what you expected of the movie, and why a bit more before I can tell you whether the Incredibles meets or defies your expectations. I don't know which reviews you read, or what you took away from them.

Sean wrote: OK. I'm kind of slightly to the left of most people in the USA. As in, I think that garbagemen should probably be paid more than CEOs, because there are almost certainly more people who want to run a business than who want to clean up garbage, and if we all had a free choice probably most of us would not choose taking out the garbage, and the only justification for differential compensation that I can see is in order to give incentives to do undesirable but socially necessary work.

But let's not talk about that. I avoided The Incredibles because reviews suggested that it was one more cleverly disguised piece of right-wing capitalist propaganda. Now Vincent says it isn't! Help me out: will this movie offend my inflexible ideological preconceptions, or will the Commissars of Correctness in Thought sanction my viewing of it?

I didn't notice anything like that. And I would.

The trick to understanding The Incredibles is to understand that it's not about some families, it's about your family. Everyone in the audience, they're looking up at the screen seeing their own family there.

Here's a second-hand quote I gacked from somewhere:

David Sterritt in The Christian Science Monitor wrote: "The movie salutes Superman," Dr. Brottman adds. "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."

Da lump has it right. Go see it! It's a great movie, especially if you have kids to take it to.

The Incredibles is mindless fun. It has great visuals with great action and humor but as for givining you something to think about, it has the message of a 30-second commerical.

quozl wrote: The Incredibles is mindless fun. It has great visuals with great action and humor but as for givining you something to think about, it has the message of a 30-second commerical.

Oh and Lord I hope you read that Jonathan as kind of light and bantery and open, the way I'd say it in person, not as it looks.

-Vincent

The Incredibles is a superhero movie. Superheroes are, by definition, Nietzchean (or however you spell his name). If you consider that right-wing, then yes, the movie has that.

Do you read any superhero comic, ever? The Incredibles is *much less* propoganda than that.

Also, it is the awesome.

yrs--
--Ben

Nietzsche's actual political philosophy, boiled down to a catch phrase or two, is that aesthetics trumps everything else where principles of social organization are concerned. The 'overman' is not Superman or Hitler, but what humanity might make of itself now that God is dead and we have to choose our values for ourselves, without any sort of divine warrant.

That's not a recognizable form of leftism, but it's not really a right-wing view either. Though it can easily lead to fascist forms of social organization, in the name of whatever higher aesthetic principles one is aiming for.

Nietzsche's critique of the Nazis, had he lived to see them, would have been similar to his critique of the anti-semites of his own day: they were boring. Not evil, just boring and crude.

I don't share Nietsche's views as I understand them.

No doubt, since I am on the left, I must be dour and humorless, and must therefore have been entirely serious about avoiding all forms of entertainment that conflict with my politics.

All this comes off as snarky - don't mean to snark at you, Ben. Thanks for the information on the film, everyone. Here's a question: why would a reviewer even think the film was right-wing propaganda, since I was misled? Is it just the superheroes thing as a bare fact? Or are there other weird background bits, like the government driving superheroes out of business through regulation or something?

Oh yeah, litigation does force the superheroes underground. Also the supervillain says that after he's had his fun he's going to give to everyone the technology he has for being super, so no one will be super anymore.

-Vincent

Sean,

There are people who will, quite honestly, believe anything they come across is laden with political messages and propaganda. Your reviewer was very likely one of those.

Great movie, capable of being mindless fun or tongue-in-cheek commentary, as you like it.

I'm with Vincent.

My family actually resembles the Incredibles somewhat if you take away the superpowers which are, of course, simply a layer of metaphor. My by Alex even looks and sounds like Dash. It was so much a movie of trying to be a family despite corporate America that I can only assume that something remarkably transformative has happened to me in being a father that I find this so blazingly obvious and others don't see it.

Is it deeply philosophical? Yer telling me somebody went to a Disney animated film looking for deeply philosophical?

Mike

lumpley wrote: Do you have kids?

-Vincent

I saw The Incredibles with my girlfriend and we pick movies apart for shit like that. We adored it.

I do not see that agenda going on in that film at all.

Wolfen wrote: Sean,

There are people who will, quite honestly, believe anything they come across is laden with political messages and propaganda. Your reviewer was very likely one of those.

Jonathan wrote: One [kid], and she'll be 4 in July. Am I missing something?

I got that and it's a cool moment but I'm not sure how that makes it deeper than a 30-second commercial. Don't get me wrong. It was a cool movie that was very fun. There just wasn't anything to think about.

lumpley wrote: I wouldn't have also before my kids went to public school.

lumpley wrote: So yeah, in the flick there's the exceptional and the mediocre, and the exceptional triumph over the mediocre. That's fine; it's not saying that that's how the world is. It's saying that your family - thus everyone's family - can triumph over mediocrity.

Disney? Right wing? NOOOO!

(Well, perhaps in some alternate reality)

According to the Liberty Film Festival, The Incredibles was one of the top 5 conservative films of 2004:

http://www.libertyfilmfestival.com/ (scroll down for list).

When The Incredibles came out, Andrew Sullivan raved about it for promoting conservative values: using your talents rather than conforming to be like everyone else, a clear moral imperative, and of course the traditional nuclear family.

Frankly, I'm not sure when those values became "conservative" values, but I suppose it comes from the same place where Martin Luther King Jr. was a "conservative" person because he fought for the civil rights of black people. Which is to say, not at all, but it has been re-invented as such by Karl Rove and the lazy left has done nothing to counter it.

So if you want the argument, there you go. I didn't find The Incredibles to be conservative in the least (the main character does fight against a soul-crushing and unethical corporation), but people can find patterns in peanut butter if they look hard enough, and repeat their message enough times.

Jason, you remind me of something I had pointed out to me recently, by my aunt.

Our Founding Fathers weren't conservative. However, their beliefs, what they fought for, are now lauded as "conservative". Martin Luther was hardly a conservative, but now the things he fought to change would be considered conservative these days.

My guess is, if the gay/bi/lesbian movement ever wins this thing about marriage, in a generation or two, it will be considered conservative.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that liberal and conservative are iffy stances; they change with the times. Whatever set of values is currently widely accepted as good, normal and "American" are conservative values.

Oh and Matt:

Matt Wilson wrote: I guess it depends on how you define "political", but something doesn't have to be propaganda to have a political message, and it doesn't even have to be something the author intended. In fact, it's pretty hard for a movie of any substance not to have a political message. We just don't notice it as much when it's status quo.

Disney's Robin Hood? Steal from the rich and give to the poor? Commie.

Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame? French, and ergo, commie.

Disney's Aladdin? Where you just release the "genie" (read: a-bomb) and you get "whatever you want" (read: Stalin) as the poor supplant the rich and/or political class? Commie.

Disney's Finding Nemo? More like FINDING STALIN. Commie.

-dev has read too many political blogs

OK, I don't see the movie as right-wing or anything, but taking it plainly, it is unabashedly a retro throwback to many motifs of early comics. It does this consciously but not mockingly. We have the strong-jawed man who is hero, breadwinner, and protector; woman who becomes housewife and mother; boy with great physical powers; girl who can disappear and defend.

Elastigirl spouts feminist talk in the beginning interview, but goes on to become a dedicated housewife and mother, who argues against heroics. What actual accomplishments she makes are primarily in saving her children. (For example, while she manages to sneak into the villain's base, she doesn't actually rescue Mr. Incredible.) She helps and fights when needed, of course, but doesn't break out of her role as supporter and mother.

True, Mr. Incredible is convinced to be open enough to let his wife help him in the final battle. It's not a complete atavism, but it's not terribly liberal either. We see similar themes if we look at the kids. Dash's subplot is his athletics; Violet's subplot is her shyness of boys. When left to themselves, Violet worries about her parents' marriage, while Dash goes off to explore.

Outside of the gender roles, there is a peculiar sort of essentialism in the plot, shown in the attitude around powers. The motifs of this is that a crushing system -- driven by lawsuits -- is keeping down the greatness of the protagonists. For example, this is visually displayed by showing Mr. Incredible at his job where he is literally too big for the cubicle he is put in, and jabbered at by an extremely small boss.

The villain is shown as distinct from the real heroes in that he doesn't have "true" powers. Real heroes in this world apparently all have innate powers (which are shown to be genetic by the kids). The terrible end he threatens is that he will make his gadgets available to the world and thus empower everyone -- making no one "special". The thrust of the film, then, is perhaps more properly libertarian than conservative.

Wolfen wrote: Jason, you remind me of something I had pointed out to me recently, by my aunt.

Our Founding Fathers weren't conservative. However, their beliefs, what they fought for, are now lauded as "conservative". Martin Luther was hardly a conservative, but now the things he fought to change would be considered conservative these days.

My guess is, if the gay/bi/lesbian movement ever wins this thing about marriage, in a generation or two, it will be considered conservative.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that liberal and conservative are iffy stances; they change with the times. Whatever set of values is currently widely accepted as good, normal and "American" are conservative values.

If anyone wants to hear more right wing, crypto-Objectivist rhetoric, there was an interview with Brad Bird, writer/director of The Incredibles, on NPR's Fresh Air today.

Sean wrote: OK. I'm kind of slightly to the left of most people in the USA. As in, I think that garbagemen should probably be paid more than CEOs...snip rhetoric

Shreyas: That might have been true a while back, but for more than a decade, the garbage man's income has been (inflation adjusted) almost flat, while the CEO's has been growing by leaps and bounds.

http://www.faireconomy.org/research/Economic_Apartheid_Data.html#p42

In fact, a CEO's salary, as a multiple of an average factory worker's went from 30x in 1980 to 130x (or more) in 1991.

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/4Inequality.htm

That means that in his FIRST YEAR as a CEO, in 1991 he earned more money than the factory worker did in his ENTIRE CAREER. He earned more money in his first year as CEO than the factory worker would have had if he had banked 10% of his salary at 5% interest.

And yes, the data on these pages is out of date... since then, things have gotten even MORE disparate than these statistics show.

You're not looking at this ecologically enough. I'm thinking in spans of the decline and fall of empires, here.

Yeah, and I'm looking at them in terms of a human lifespan.

Garbagemen make, in the United States, $6,000 more per annum then teachers, on average. It's not a badly compensated line of work and it's by no means dishonorable: society needs its garbage taken out.

I believe that, as a baseline, all human beings should receive exactly the same amount of monetary compensation for their work per unit time. Deviations from that need to be justified.

One form of justification for such deviations is of course providing an incentive. I don't mind some incentive pay, but the amount we have - especially when coupled with fringe benefits like social status and more interesting work - seem way out of line with the value that the work provides society.

Another reason for differential pay could be that a line of work is socially necessary but not particularly desirable. The higher pay for such work would be meant to get people to choose it.

I'm aware that there are huge problems involved with trying to design an economy for fairness (though not with 'planned economies' per se - all economies are planned economies, and with good reason - unfettered economic exchange ('pure capitalism' as some incorrectly call it) is like a game of poker. Once someone wins all the money, you can do something else, but you can't play poker any more). I am not, furthermore, trained in economics.

What I am saying is that I believe that there's a prima facie right for every human being to receive (a) roughly equal economic reward for genuine contributions to society and (b) food, clothing, and shelter, no matter what.

This position is generally associated with 'leftism', though there's no reason you couldn't have a 'rightist' basis for it as well. My basis is that most retrograde of ideals, the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. I'm aware that I don't have a full argument from first principles; the 'garbagemen' thing was meant as an illustrative example of the kind of reasoning I endorse, not a substantive thesis about how any particular actual society ought to be run.

Shreyas Sampat wrote: Anyway, it seems staggeringly plebian to me to say that a profession that involves large risks, substantial resource investment, and significant education should be paid less than a menial task that any able-bodied person can do.

Jason Mical wrote:
I see this as something a little more problematic with the left and the right these days. Traditionally, the left has been more concerned with civil rights (the 1960s, and gay rights now), and in the past religion has been a central part of that - Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X both being religious leaders. Lately, the left has begun to eschew religion despite the tradition of religiousity supporting many of the left's causes - Liberation Theology in Latin and South America, the American Civil Rights Movement, and so forth. The right, in its effort to reinvent itself, has gladly taken up this more religious aspect of Civil Rights and has begun subverting it. Can you imagine a message that Martin Luther King was a conservative, and the Klansman that burned down churches were the liberals? I can, and it's a scary piece of revisionist history.

Which is all to say that the values espoused in The Incredibles are neither left nor right, but the right is attempting to label them as exclusively conservative values - making it seem that the left lacks them.

Shreyas Sampat wrote:
Anyway, it seems staggeringly plebian to me to say that a profession that involves large risks, substantial resource investment, and significant education should be paid less than a menial task that any able-bodied person can do. The cost in time alone (I spent twelve years paying for college while you built your garbage nest egg!) reduces the over-time income of the CEO dramatically.

Anonymous wrote:
This position is generally associated with 'leftism', though there's no reason you couldn't have a 'rightist' basis for it as well.

Right, contracycle. ('Guest' is me.)

The issue is the fuzziness in 'left' and 'right' though. If you take 'right' = 'laissez-faire capitalist', then what you say is true enough. If you take 'right' = 'conservative' = 'defender of the status quo who bases his morality/politics on tradition instead of reason', then you could in fact have a 'right-wing social justice movement.' In the Christian tradition it would be something like Liberation Theology, with all that scripture about clothing the naked and feeding the hungry and such. Since Jesus doesn't talk about capitalism (heck, there's even that incident with the Citibank ATM in the temple), this could even be put together with a very different regulation of the flow of money than we see today.

I would still consider such a movement in a certain sense 'conservative', though, if it rooted itself in the passages of an old book, words passed down from our savage past, rather than our best judgment about what is conducive to human happiness and flourishing at the present time.

People who call themselves conservatives nowadays are anything but.

Likewise with liberals.

Sean wrote:
The issue is the fuzziness in 'left' and 'right' though. If you take 'right' = 'laissez-faire capitalist', then what you say is true enough. If you take 'right' = 'conservative' = 'defender of the status quo who bases his morality/politics on tradition instead of reason', then you could in fact have a 'right-wing social justice movement.'

I would still consider such a movement in a certain sense 'conservative', though, if it rooted itself in the passages of an old book, words passed down from our savage past, rather than our best judgment about what is conducive to human happiness and flourishing at the present time.

Just a note- Disney and Pixar are quite different. Disney has the distribution rights and handles the marketing wing of Pixar productions, but in terms of writing and developing Pixar is its own creature. Tis akin to Disney and Studio Ghibli - their work stands on its own, but Disney has the american distribution rights.
That said, a Disney agenda and a Pixar agenda aren't one and the same. Even Pixar "agendas" can vary from show to show, as most are creator driven as opposed to company driven.

I listened to the NPR bit, and it makes me really want to see the movie! But also... give that I'm all political, I can see how some people got worked up about the individualist themes that the excerpts mentioned, since I could *see* them being spouted by a Randroid. That's its own category, there.

Aside from questions of the social justice of how to reward CEOs / working class workers / etc., I still don't think most liberals/leftists are actually opposed to an individual freedom to be truly excellent, and a lot of that is motivated by a society harming an individual. While rightists often see the market as a big free space that is therefore good, many leftists see it as a monolithic authoritarian entity that this therefore bad; implicit in both of these is support for the individual trying to rock out and live well.

So, neither side of the politics should have a "monopoly" on the idea that people should try to be all they can.

To lighten things a bit, did you know that Sarah Vowell did the voice of Violet in the movie? Did you know that Sarah Vowell makes my heartstrings pluck like a well-tuned ukulele? Did you know that that made me feel odd during the movie, as the voice that makes me all swoony belonged to, like, a 13-year-old girl?

Also, did you know that the audiotape of her book The Partly Cloudy Patriot is like the best album ever? It's filled with They Might Be Giants music, and Norman Lear's on it. Really.

Man, Sarah Vowell. I can't figure out what it is about her, but man, oh man.

What's the book about? I'll check it out...

Dev wrote: What's the book about? I'll check it out...

Have you seen the Sarah Vowell ... erm... thing on the Incredibles DVD?

Clinton R. Nixon wrote: To lighten things a bit, did you know that Sarah Vowell did the voice of Violet in the movie? Did you know that Sarah Vowell makes my heartstrings pluck like a well-tuned ukulele? Did you know that that made me feel odd during the movie, as the voice that makes me all swoony belonged to, like, a 13-year-old girl?

Also, did you know that the audiotape of her book The Partly Cloudy Patriot is like the best album ever? It's filled with They Might Be Giants music, and Norman Lear's on it. Really.

Man, Sarah Vowell. I can't figure out what it is about her, but man, oh man.

Video essay? Is that what it is? It seemed a bit too stream-of-consciousness to call an essay.

Vaxalon wrote: Video essay? Is that what it is? It seemed a bit too stream-of-consciousness to call an essay.

joshua neff wrote:
Oh, man, do I agree with everything you said. Except for the part about her book, since I've only read bits & pieces of it, out of order. Sarah Vowell is going to be at one of the Borders in Madison next Wednesday night, and I'm sorely tempted to make the drive there, even though I've never read any of her books from cover-to-cover and I have loads of schoolwork to do. But she's so cute and cool...

Dev wrote:
Aside from questions of the social justice of how to reward CEOs / working class workers / etc., I still don't think most liberals/leftists are actually opposed to an individual freedom to be truly excellent, and a lot of that is motivated by a society harming an individual.

Ah, Sarah Vowell. If any of you like David Sedaris or listen to This American Life on NPR (which I highly recommend), you'll love her work, and probably vice versa.

Thanks for the information on her books!