The Incredibles

I watched The Incredibles expecting a children’s film and found myself thinking about office work.

Bob Parr has an absurd version of a familiar problem: he is good at something he is no longer allowed to do. The safe alternative is a stable job in a gray office where his actual abilities are inconvenient.

You do not need superpowers to recognize the frustration.

Competence and usefulness are not the same thing. A person may be excellent at a skill the environment does not value, or be placed in a system designed to prevent the very initiative that once made the person valuable.

Bob responds with nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a talented editor.

He remembers purpose, excitement and recognition. He forgets damage, danger and the inconvenience of having a family waiting at home.

I once worked briefly on a project where an older colleague spoke constantly about “the old days” of a previous system. In his stories everything had been faster, smarter and freer. One afternoon another colleague who had worked there at the same time listened for a while and said, “You complained every day.”

The room laughed.

Bob Parr would not have.

The film becomes more interesting when returning to the past stops being possible. Bob is no longer only Mr. Incredible. He is a husband and father. Identity has accumulated responsibilities.

Heroism now has dependencies.

The family powers are almost jokes about personality. Helen stretches herself across impossible demands. Violet disappears and builds shields. Dash is pure movement. Jack-Jack appears simple until everyone discovers there is much more happening than expected.

A family is an unusual team because nobody recruited members based on complementary skills.

You receive whoever arrives.

Then you learn coordination.

This makes the final cooperation more satisfying than Bob’s solo work. At the beginning he wants to recover an older self. By the end, the solution is not recovery but integration.

The past cannot simply be restored because the person who misses it has changed.

Syndrome adds a more uncomfortable question about ability. He resents exclusion and eventually tries to make exceptional ability meaningless.

“When everyone’s super, no one will be.”

The line is funny because it confuses equality with sameness.

Fairness does not require pretending people have identical abilities. The harder problem is preventing real differences in ability from becoming excuses for entitlement.

The film does not solve that problem.

It has robots to destroy.

Still, it is there beneath the capes.

When the movie ended, I realized why the adults in the room had laughed at different moments from the children.

The children had watched superheroes.

The adults had watched a marriage negotiating work, disappointment, children, secrecy, nostalgia and the belief that life used to be easier.

The powers make the Parr family extraordinary.

The complaints make them familiar.