We Love Pixar: What I Learned From 'The Incredibles'

Is the incredible out of the reach of social planners?

The Founders believed that happiness is the object of government, by which they meant virtue, or the proper workings of the human soul. It was an ancient understanding, founded on a modern notion of equality of opportunity.

But the left has deracinated the language of opportunity from its roots, along the way to justifying their practice of conforming and normalizing. They tell us that a more equal society is a better society, even if its inhabitants were to prefer something else, but they never answer the real question: If everyone is equal, then everyone isn’t average and mediocre?

The Incredibles suggests that something else is possible, that excellence can breakthrough. Robert Frost put it best, “The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.”

In The Incredibles, fear of a lawsuit prompts the superheroes to put away their uniforms for the tedium of office work, a drudgery which suits neither their talents, nor their ambition. Bob Parr, the erstwhile Mr. Incredible feels, well, not so incredible. His gut expands and he can’t fit into his suit; he’s trapped, instead, in a life that doesn’t suit him. He makes due because there are bills to pay and a family to feed. He remains confined to a car and a cubical comically too small to hold him – a comment, perhaps, on our struggling entrepreneurs, retarded as they are, by government more intent to keep the status quo than to celebrate the best?

Parr’s only real fun, far from the prying eyes of Helen, his wife, is fighting crime, but even she suspects something is up – an affair maybe? – but instead, she finds rubble on his jacket. Off to an island to fight a villain, Mr. Incredible is tricked and captured by the wannabe super-villain Syndrome. Syndrome hopes to be a super hero by unleashing a robot that only he can stop. Like Rahm Emmanuel, he never wants a good crisis to go to waste, especially one of his own making. Just when the public can’t take anymore, in comes Syndrome to rescue them all from the killer robot he designed!

And so, it turns to Helen a.k.a. Elastigirl to save her husband. She may no longer be a girl, but she, like every mother, can contort herself into any shape the situation demands and be literally in all places at once: she does the chores, breaks up fights between her children, and rescues her husband from his misdeeds. Later, to save her children from drowning or falling, she turns into a boat and a parachute – fitting metaphors for what modern motherhood has become in the days of PTO meetings and self-esteem.

Her children, of course, have stowed away onboard and join her in the expedition to rescue their pops. The tone of the film shifts markedly, as we see the Parr family as they were meant to be: kicking ass and fighting for one another.

Their worst enemies, though, aren’t the Syndromes of the world, but the syndrome that places normality above excellence, a mind-crushing conformity that permeates our public schools and our office parks.

Dash, the boy wonder, can run faster than a speeding bullet, but he can’t play sports, because “the world just wants us to fit in, and to fit in, we gotta be like everyone else.” He pleads with his mother, “I’ll only be the best by a tiny bit,” telling her:

Dash: You always say ‘Do your best’, but you don’t really mean it. Why can’t I do the best that I can do?

Helen: Right now, honey, the world just wants us to fit in, and to fit in, we gotta be like everyone else.

Dash: But Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of, our powers made us special.

Helen: Everyone’s special, Dash.

Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.

“If everyone is special, no one is.”

Ask yourself, have you ever heard a better indictment of what’s wrong with our failed, everyone-gets-a-trophy culture of public education?