...ok, slight over-statement, but Linc and I rewatched
The Incredibles last night. I've been refusing to watch it simply because thinking about a certain scene puts me close to tears and I really don't like to cry. But it's such a fun movie. So he put it on and I sat down to nurse the CuddleMonster.
First thing I thought of was just how much Elastigirl sacrificed to do the right thing by her family. And how fucking pissed off I got thinking about the
idiotic criticism levelled at her character. Level it at the movie as part of an industry where female characters are never the focus for anything other than 'female' movies (in the dominant industry anyway). I agree with some of the criticism - it is lazy to have a jive-talking black superhero. A sass-mouthed wife for said black super is lazy as well, but we hit the first little and telling error - she's taken his suit and hidden it knowing his proclivities to 'do good', he didn't misplace it 'comically'. Little errors that point to a far less than close watching that can undermine any real criticism of the movie. Anyway, on to Elastigirl/Helen.
”she steals a bad guy right out from under Mr Incredible’s nose, putting it out of joint in the process, and after a bit of the hostile argy-bargy that passes for “flirting” in Hollywood they get married the same day. (Yeah, well, it’s a cartoon.)”THAT WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME THEY MET. It's established banter - I certainly understood it given I indulge in the the same sort of thing with Linc. Yes it’s over the top ‘flirting’ banter and later, during the wedding, it’s derided by the character as such. It’s admittedly over-the-top and it’s a nod to this movie as a parody of superhero movies. She takes out this bad guy and then finds her chosen career taken away from her by beauracracy - as do all supers. Bob is given a job and she stays home with Violet - someone has to and given that now, 2009, I don't get to go work outside the home without making a choice between leaving my infant in the care of another while barely scraping by or staying at home with her, and barely scraping by - why is that going to be different for Helen's character?
”We are expected to believe that exile from superherodom is for him a wound that can never be healed; if that’s the case, why is the former Elastigirl coping so well? “This makes me wonder if it's the same damn movie or if it's just my viewpoint has changed. I don't see it as a happy sacrifice, but a needful one. She's NOT fulfilled at home, not coping, but doing the best she can for her family. Three kids, spaced wide, means at any point in the fifteen or so years since they got married she has had an infant to care for. She's chosen to care for the infants herself. It's a valid choice. Given the cultural mores of the Incredible universe, it's no surprise. The government beauracracy that took away her super status is the one handing out the jobs and, again, you think it’s easy to find a job with a kid? With three? How about not really needing to have a job, is it still worth it to go to work, put the kid/s in care just to make a point?
”Elastigirl doesn’t go bowling in the evenings; she doesn’t do anything. There is no point in the entire film where she is shown enjoying herself; she hasn’t got a single friend”Again, you would think someone reviewing a movie would have paid a little more attention. There’s hardly anyone at their wedding - is that going to change given the magnitude of the secret she has to hide and the moving they've done? Hell, I've been in this city for over 18 months and I don't have a bunch of friends. Neither does Linc. And we don’t even have to hide our basic nature from everyone around us for fear of having to move again. When you add in kids, it doesn't surprise me that Helen isn't a social butterfly. She's got a job and she's concentrating on it - much like she did as a super.
”The message at this point appears to be that the secret to happy family life is for men to get more fulfilling jobs...that the nuclear family is the best of all possible worlds, provided the dad is extremely rich...“Ah what? Fulfilling jobs makme EVERYONE happier. Elastigirl doesn’t have a fulfilling job, but she is doing everything she can to do the best job she can. Bob fucks up, Bob's a selfish git who also isn't coping with being out of a super-job and into meaningless (and soul-crushing) work. The advantage to baing at home caring for your children is that it is infinitely more meaningful than Bob’s job is shown to be. Helen keeps it together and she does what is needed to save the family. But why is it the writer can only see Bob's story in all this? Why isn't Helen's story resonant? Because it sure is for me - I'm struggling with shitty beauracracy that means I don't get to do what I love and what I do best. i'm making a sacrifice of that in order to provide continuous and loving care for my daughter. Both Bob and Helen struggle with a shitty universe that means they can't do what they do best AND do family in the best way they deem possible. So they sacrifice things - happiness, careers, whatever it takes to make a life for their children. And it turns out, happiness is the one you don't want to sacrifice - Bob isn't made 'whole' or happy by the money, although that does help, but by having meaningful work. The same goes for Helen, once they reclaim their super identities.
”The statement ‘moms have to stretch in 100 different ways each day’ is of course often correct; the problem is that Bird seems to view this an as exemplary situation rather than an injustice to be rectified by forcing men to shoulder a greater share of childcare and housework.”Oh for fuck’s sake - not everyone wants to stay at home and care for their children. I was just talking with my mother about this today - all she ever wanted was to have children. So she did. She stayed home our entire time at home. She loved it. I was talking about how grateful I am for my even-tempered daughter (currently crying...) and for my husband who understands that staying at home with her is hard for me so he still does housework and he tries to make sure he spends as much time with our daughter as possible. Which means once he’s home from work, he generally takes over most of the child-based duties except for feeding so I can do a lot of the stuff I don’t get to do during the day and while she’s feeding he usually does some housework/cooks dinner/gets to indulge in his hobbies. My mother said she rarely ever did that - she loved being sole carer for us kids (our father worked out of the home most of our lives). She understands my point of view, that I’m doing this because it’s the right thing and the best thing, not because I love it. And that my husband works out of the home (rather than staying at home with our child) because it’s the right thing and the best thing. Parenting is shared as equally as it can be with me staying at home and him working outside the home, and with me being solely responsible for her feeding.
Yes parenting should be cared equally - but why the fuck is working outside the home not being fucking counted? And why isn’t staying at home being seen as fulfilling yet not always satisfying? I love being at home with my daughter, but this isn’t what i want to do with my life. The opposite is true for my husband - he works, but wants to stay home. We want that. Can we do it? No, because shit sucks and we need to do what we need to do to make the best choice for our child. So he spends his day at a shitty job, dealing with petty bullshit to make the money that keeps a roof over our heads. I spend my day with a child attached to my chest, juggling her and the bare minimum of housework in order to make it to the end of the day when I can use both hands.
I hate being like this - I don’t think it’s okay that my sister-in-law
bribes her partner to do anything with their son. But I don’t think ignoring the impact of work on a person is acceptable either. If I hated my job I’d be a shitty parent as well - I’m lucky that my partner is able to leave his work at work. Until we’re paying people a fair wage to stay at home and care for children we have to walk the line of work and care for our children. But part of that is acknowledging it not only as a valid choice (not just forced on women) and, simultaneously, as something it isn’t fair to force women to do. Part of the struggle of staying home is dealing with fuckwits who think that choosing to stay home means you’re unambitious, stupid, unfeminist and in need to enlightenment. Knowing that the easiest thing to do is to quit work and stay home because the patriarchal capitalist society pays my husband half again more than I get paid in spite of my seven years at uni versus his failed out of first year uni. But also knowing that taking that route will not satisfy me and as much as I will do a good job, it won’t be the best job.
Sometime you compromise. It sucks, but it’s part of life. Not acknowledging it as a compromise leads to this idiocy where if you stay home and do it well it's because you LOVE IT FOREVER AND ALWAYS. As if identity isn't fluid. As if it isn't a rigged choice. Yeah it's a fictional universe so it could have been anything (a movie about Elasstigirl would have rocked) but the set up is Bob hates his work - having everyone happy and fulfilled at the start of a movie fucks up the whole damn thing.
”And the Evil Genius reveals that he has spent the last twenty years inventing super-weapons and selling them to 2nd- and 3rd-world countries...The idea that WMDs are perfectly safe, provided they are kept in the hands of just a few countries, could be read as a straightforward War on Terror allegory. “Syndrome has not yet sold his weaponry - he's planning to sell it to everyone though. Not just second and third world countries. I have no idea where the writer got that idea. And I'm not getting the 'struggling against beauracracy that directly disadvantages people' = political correctness. Ethical I'll buy, but politically correct? Same with the 'if everybody's special, nobody is' thing - that's not a bad idea and not a slam against policital correctness. It's a slam against the idea that if everybody just shut up and conformed it'd be nice and easy and there would be no hurt feelings. Dismay that a Bob would kill Syndrome's guards? His guards are willing to kill children (either the scene that makes me choke up where Helen is yelling "children and women aboard, abort missiles" and they don't or the scene where his guards attempt to kill Violet and Dash).
Oh Violet, how could I forget you. Such a difficult character - she seems much younger than she actually is. She's soft spoken to a fault. She's shy. She's so so so caught up in wanting to be normal. TOTALLY UNLIKE ANYONE'S EXPERIENCE OF HIGHSCHOOL THEN? Fuck no. i remember that awkwardness. I remember it well. Wanting desperately to fit in. Never ever managing it, but wanting it anyway. Her dismay their marriage may be in danger? Totally understandable coming from a teenager - they tend to be self-absorbed. When you're talking about a teenaged character who just wants to fit in, having non-divorced parents would be a really vital thing.
“
He’s not even content to restrict the most sexist lines to the male characters, either: it is Violet who says ominously (and quite seriously!) “Mom and Dad’s lives could be in danger… or, worse still, their marriage.” Pathetic.”Oh no! A teenaged character who is short sighted and self absorbed! HOW UNREALISTISTIC.
”The most outrageous crime of the whole lot, however, is the character of Violet. For a start, she is THE thinnest, spikiest, tortured-on-a-rack-in-childhood waif that has ever had the misfortune to grace a cinema screen. Her left ear is wider than her waist; her eyes are bigger than her feet. “”Violet is shown at an athletics meet, having cast off her black Goth jeans and donned a pink dress and a bow in her hair (pukarama!!!). The object of her affections approaches her with a puzzled expression: “You’re Violet, right? You look… different.” “You like different?” Violet asks anxiously. “Sure… different is good,” he smug stud replies, at precisely the moment Violet has started to look just like everyone else.”Oh for the love of all that’s holy - she’s crap because she’s not a happy outgoing character and is crap because she becomes one? When she asks 'different is okay?' is a scene I recoiled at the first time I watched it. But watching it, knowing her changes? What makes you think she's asking permission rather than testing? Either way, we're still talking about a fucking teenager who is having to hide her nature - not being a fucking feminist icon is well within character. Her coming into her own and absolutely owning with her powers? That's awesome and a whole lot more empowering than 'I don't care what anyone thinks' because it is in character for a teenager and for that particular teenager. And then showing just how different she feels, she’s actually outspoken? That was awesome.
Also? We're looking at superhero structure here - Helen's hips and thighs are as big as her head, but not her hair. Bob's head is the same size as his butt. Jack-Jack's head is bigger than everyone else's. Yes there are problems with the representation of the female form, particularly in animated imagery. Portraying the shy character
who turns invisible as damn near invisible anyway? Part and parcel for the genre.
”Mr Incredible, who believes his wife and children are dead, is hanging sobbing in a torture device. Mirage, who has seen the light, sneaks into the room, turns off the machine and tries to tell him that they are in fact alive. Before she can get the words out, however, he picks her up by the neck, chokes her and starts shouting at her. At this point his miraculously still-alive Elastigirl enters the room and, noticing her, he is so delighted he forgets all about Mirage and drops her in a retching, gasping heap on the floor. The noises she made at this point were so comical that I realised, to my horror, that this is supposed to be a joke. (Ha. Ha.)
This evidently wasn’t violent enough for Bird’s tastes, so Elastigirl, believing that Mirage is The Other Woman, becomes furious and punches her in the face with her super-long elastic arm. Incredible then grabs her by the wrist, drags her towards him (despite the fact she is shouting “let go of me!”) and… kisses her! (Euck!!!) Ignoring the unconscious Mirage completely,”Or, oddly enough for a SUPERHERO MOVIE there is going to be violence. And there is going to be a scene where the main hero loses everything he cares for and stoops to whatever low was perviously explicitly denied. In this case he’s shown before that he cannot and will not harm Mirage. So when he has lost everything, he does harm her. Would he have actually killed her? Unlikely - except the man has just been tortured and presumably heard his wife and children blown apart by missiles, so I'm a little less likely to make a call on that.
And seriously, "euck"? The man kisses his wife - he thinks she was dead, she thinks he's a cheating arsehole, so they're having a little trouble communicating. Again, it's part and parcel and in need of change, but at least Helen doesn't melt and become a malleable lovedoll as per the usual trope. No, she's still pissed off and for good reason but again, she's concentrating on doing what's right and what's needed. I've come to appreciate that a lot.
Maybe it's because I'm struggling with the temporary hold put on my career in order to care for my daughter. Maybe it's a sensitivity to people who seem to think staying at home with children is a fucking breeze. Maybe it's annoyance with people who demean the choice of women to stay home then deride those horrible children brought up without parents in the home. Maybe I'm just fucking cranky. But I'll tell you this - in the entire movie it is NOT the scene where Bob tells Helen he's not strong enough that made me cry. It's not the scene where Syndrome steals Jack Jack. It's the scene where Helen is doing everything she can to avoid the missiles Syndrome has sent. It also makes my husband cry. It makes his brother cry. It is the most powerful scene in the movie. And it's central to her character - she's doing everything she can to protect her family. She's
competent fucking awesome. She's not a pushover, she's not a weakling and she's not there to be rescued.
"Brad couldn’t get any of his ideas for new animated features greenlit by the studios... stalled out for purely bureaucratic reasons. ... I wasn’t getting the chance to do what I love. To do what I was good at.”
...
Dear god: so all there really is behind the bureaucracy-is-evil, women-are-pinching-our-jobs rhetoric is just one rather sad director with delusions of grandeur?"What? Bureaucracy is fucked up - it places rules aboves the spirit the rules intend. It leads to shit like me not getting maternity leave if my husband takes his parental leave to spend time with his newborn/looking after me. It means people tell you 'no food allowed' if you try breastfeeding. It means public indecency accusations for breastfeeding. And where the fuck is 'women pinching our jobs' in
The Incredibles? This isn't the stupidest leap of logic in the article, but close.
Anyway. Doing what you love and what you're good are are not delusions of grandeur. In fact, that's pretty much key in the movie - supers have gifts that can help. Everyone should have something fulfilling in their life - not necessarily work or family. Just something they're good at and/or love.
*sigh*
I'm not saying
The Incredibles is a feminist movie. It's part of an industry built on exploitation and part of a genre that relies on sexist (and often misogynist) tropes. But to deride Helen Parr/Elastigirl as a useless hero? Or Violet as weak? Not only incorrect, but damaging to women.
Also? If you want to criticise Pixar?
This is the way to do it.
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