It's all in the lens you look through

I enjoyed the recent movie The Incredibles, in the same way that I enjoy a James Bond film -- slick styling, a little tongue-in-cheekiness, some Good Guys Win action (where you overlook the terribly chauvenist definition of a hero). Maybe, in a Family Movie vein, I also saw it as a testimony in favor of trueness to The Self, in the sense of not overlooking your natural talents to fit a different image -- even the bad guy could have been something greater if he had been willing to be a Brillian Scientist instead of a Superhero.

However, an interesting alternative take is presented by Sally at Prednisone Nation, who argues that this is primarily a film with a Randian agenda of defending inequality:

Some people, according to The Incredibles, are just born better than the rest of us. This superiority is innate and inherited: superheroes make up a kind of master race. The movie doesn't just suggest that it's destructive to stifle talented people; it also derides the notion that everyone has talents that should be celebrated, and it raises and dismisses the idea that ordinary people could make their way into the elect. You don't choose to be a superhero; you can't earn it through ingenuity or hard work. You're either born super or you're not.
. . .
This movie says that powerful, hereditary elites are good for society not because they're more talented but because they're more moral. It's a nineteenth or even eighteenth-century version of how society should be ordered: it's a celebration of natural aristocracy and the concept of knowing your place.

Fascinating, as is her snide comment about the aptitude of such a philosophy in a time/place where the situationally elite (but intellectually encumbered) are running the world...

(via Alas a Blog)