Scene I'd Like to See: Re The Incredibles

[wingedbeast]

Setting: An office. Syndrome sits across the desk from Wot.

Syndrome: We'll have to use supers to test and refine this robotic orb in order to make it a monster. Then, I'll send the monster-orb to attack a city. I'll save the city from the monster-orb. I'll be a hero. It'll just cost a few billion dollars and the lives of some supers. And, everybody will want to buy my technology.

Wot: Okay, I get how certain parts of this work. I even get how certain parts of this plan might even be good for society. But, I have a question about this orb-monster business.

Syndrome: Oh, if you want out, don't worry. In fact, I'll make sure you don't have to worry about anything ev-

Wot: Euphemism for killing me. I get it. No, I'm actually asking what I think is a reasonable question.

Syndrome: ... Okay. What's your question?

Wot: About this last part of the plan where you make the orb-monster. Why?

Syndrome: What part don't you get?

Wot: The part where it serves any purpose at all.

Syndrome: What do you mean? Making the sphere-monster is-

Wot: A completely unnecessary complication and waste of resources. Without that, you can easily do a few PR moves to show off your inventions and make a massive return on your investment. Heck, just for that, you'd be a world-wide hero.

Wot: Firemen and police and the National Guard and militaries and anybody involved in any kind of rescue scenarios will line up to shake your hand for the lives you'll have saved just by inventing all this stuff. Even with anti-trust laws to break up a company, give you some competition, you'll still own the patents, so all that money is still coming your own way.

Wot: Seems like the only thing making this monster and releasing this monster, not to mention killing people to do so, would do is give people a legitimate reason to try to kill or imprison you. Amazingly high risk, absolutely no reward.

Syndrome slumps his shoulders.: Can I tell you something personal?

Wot slips over to close the office door.

Wot sits down and leans in: Yeah.

Syndrome: I've got some unresolved superhero-related issues.

Wot nods to motion that he's listening.

Syndrome: I tried to be a sidekick. I was young, I know, ten years old. In my defense, that wasn't all that unusual. Heck, there was that one solo superhero that started at nine years old. So, I tried to be a sidekick for Mr. Incredible.

Wot: He was always solo, never took a sidekick once.

Syndrome: Have you ever had your hero tell you you're not good enough?

Wot: ... No.

Syndrome: Well, even something like that doesn't soften the blow. But, eventually I gained some perspective. I got over it when I got a little older and realized I'd just been ten years old. Maybe not rare, but still not a good idea.

Syndrome: Then, I started working on my sociology degree. I'd gotten a few science and engineering degrees under my belt. I'd already started my business. I'd gotten some good advice that stretching out of my comfort zone would be a good idea. So, I focused my studies on the social impacts of superheroes.

Syndrome: Have you ever heard about The Person?

Wot shakes his head.

Syndrome: Not many have. The Person had no powers, just a suit that obscured everything. All you could tell was that The Person wasn't actually taller than the suit. Not even man or woman. But, you could tell that The Person didn't have powers.

Syndrome: One team did a piece on The Person, but they never got in touch with The Person. So, they asked other superheroes, the ones who had powers, about him. Mr. Incredible said that any praise The Person got was, these are his words now, "celebrating mediocrity".

Wot sits back, stunned.

Syndrome: I looked into the interviews of other superheroes, all with powers. They shared that opinion. If someone didn't have any powers, their place was in a support position, so the truly exceptional could best do their jobs.

Wot: Wow. That's... like...

Syndrome: Elitist?

Wot: I suppose that's the nice way to say it.

Syndrome: Yeah.

Wot: I think I get it. I think I even get why getting your revenge might even be a good thing. But, Buddy?

Syndrome narrows his eyes.

Wot: Hasn't revenge already just... happened on its own?

Syndrome: What?

Wot: Think about it. First, there was The Wave, all those lawsuits happening at the same time. People try to pass them off as all spurious, but spurious lawsuits get thrown out of court all the time. Heck, this was a time when the police saw it as their duty to just clean up after the superheroes. DAs, judges, just about the whole criminal justice system thought they could do no wrong.

Wot: You'd have to be deliberately self-deluded to believe that all those lawsuits represented no real harm done. There was a serious pattern of behavior among supers, including doing physical violence to suspects after they've already clearly stopped resisting. In one incident, the claimed cause for striking a suspect was that the suspect weighed in on an argument between two supers, so he got punched right in the head until he stopped moving.

Wot: He suffered brain damage because that kind of thing doesn't just harmlessly knock you out. It puts you in a coma.

Wot: Anyway, they all made the same argument, that the harm they did, the damage to property like trees that were city property and the like, that it was all worth it because they saved the world. Without them, we were supposed to be all destroyed or taken over by now.

Wot: You know what happened next?

Syndrome: The massive retraining program for all police, military, and emergency responders?

Wot: That was part of it. But, what happened was two decades... two decades so far.

Wot: It's not that there haven't been threats. It's that we've handled those threats with, mostly, normal people. Where people with powers were involved, they took support roles and were proud to be one of many heroes, rather than getting special glories.

Wot: Reality has pushed this lesson and it's pushed it hard. If you can't be special when everybody's special, then you're not special. You're just an ass.

Syndrome leans back.: That's... that's actually worth thinking about. But, it doesn't satisfy me.

Syndrome: Despite all the memory erasures-

Wot: How does that violation of multiple constitutional rights still go on?

Syndrome shrugs: Despite that, supers are remarkably easy to find, at least the ones who used to be superheroes before The Wave.

Syndrome: I find a lot of them through letters to the editor. These guys haven't learned that lesson. They write about how the only reason we have anybody doing anything good these days is that we used to have Superheroes giving people inspiration. Eventually, without superheroes, they argue that we're going to lose all motivation to do good as a society.

Syndrome: I tried to argue the first couple times. I showed them how young people are still doing good, even though they've only ever known superheroes as boring documentaries about the criminal justice system before The Wave.

Syndrome: They just repeat the same thing. They attribute it to adults having lived during the Superheroes. When this generation passes, they keep on warning how nobody will be inspired to be selfless ever again.

Wot: Buddy, if someone's paycheck or their place in society or their self-identity depends on them not learning a lesson, you can bet they'll find a way not to learn that two plus two equals four.

Wot: They say that living well is the best revenge. I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe like that Poe story, A Cask of Amontillado, it doesn't work unless they know it. Maybe it can anyway. But, Buddy, take my advice about this Mr. Incredible. Just outgrow him.

Comments

[gehayi]

It's not that there haven't been threats. It's that we've handled those threats with, mostly, normal people. Where people with powers were involved, they took support roles and were proud to be one of many heroes, rather than getting special glories.

The weird thing is that you're not just talking about The Incredibles universe. This is the Silver Age of comics.

Now, I remember the Silver Age. It was, admittedly, goofy. That's because it was geared toward kids and not toward teens or adults. And the writers also assumed that in a world where superheroes and magic and aliens all co-existed, some of the things that would happen would be silly. So fine. That's not a problem.

But.

Superheroes of the Silver Age respected ordinary people. I can recall Green Lantern abandoning a fight to save people that the fight endangered--and fixing their homes afterwards. The Flash rebuilt a damaged skyscraper nanoseconds after it had been hit by a supervillain's weapons--reinforcing it to make it stronger and leaving the decor undamaged. This was mid-fight. Supes did this as well. Wonder Woman once encircled a city with her lasso to create a protective force field so that one of her enemies couldn't harm it. I can also recall multiple superheroes apologizing to people who had been hurt or traumatized--and giving them help, openly or, if the person was too proud to accept help, secretly. Superheroing was all about responsibility. If you weren't ready to protect people, if your battle was more important than people's lives...then by Silver Age standards, YOU WERE NOT A HERO. You were a supervillain waiting to happen.

Moreover, ordinary people got a lot of favorable superhero attention. Superman held in-universe interviews that praised teachers and firefighters and people struggling to survive in desperate situations as the REAL heroes. Batman was a philanthropist who lived in a modern, up-to-date city that was as far from the rundown Gotham of nowadays as you can get; he funded scholarships, theater, ballet, researchers into disabling and terminal diseases. Again, this was addressed in in-universe interviews. Bruce Wayne said that hope and creativity were vital. That people needed to be able to fix things themselves--and that, given the opportunity, they did an amazing job.

I can also recall superheroes trusting ordinary people to do their jobs. Superman, Supergirl, the Marvel Family, members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, etc., would ask permission of ordinary people working in a disaster: "What can I do to help?" or "Do you need my help?" In fact, a few times the ordinary people had more information about the cause of the disaster than the superhero--and the superhero's initial plan would have made things infinitely worse if they hadn't asked. Respecting other people's expertise was vital.

I saw the Avengers movie. And it was good...until the climactic fight. I looked at the devastation the nominal heroes were wreaking, and I flinched. This was not what comics taught me about responsible behavior--that hurting people just because you had the power to do so (or because you were doing something that you considered more important) was wrong. Other people's lives always meant more than a battle. If someone wanted to fight a devastating battle on Earth, then you found some way of redirecting the battle to an empty dimension where there was no one you could hurt. You could out-punch them, yes, but it was better to outsmart your enemy, to trick them, to take away their weapons and their power. And, if possible, to teach them that they were wrong and that there was a better way.

I'm not sure what happened. The industry aiming comic books at an older and more cynical crowd, and trying to be darker and edgier as a result? The perception of anyone dressing up as a superhero as mentally ill--which, in American sensibility, too often is equated with violence? 9/11 and the fury that came in its aftermath? I don't know. And I'm not saying that there aren't good comics nowadays. There are.

But that particular aspect of the Silver Age--the idea that ordinary people of all races, all nations, and all classes of society matter, and that a superhero not only knows this but embraces it? I kind of wish we'd kept that.

[wingedbeast]

That makes the general message of The Incredibles even stranger. Because, it's clear that this is intended as a Silver Age world.

Mr. Incredible, before getting sued, works with the police with some familiarity, if formally. The nature of the villains in that one day at the beginning and the way the heroes talk is all very Silver Age. It's got that feel to it, it's Mr. Incredible, for the most part, talking like he knows he's a role-model.

But, you're right. Silver Age Superman would never suggest that the average person on the street is any less special than himself. He wouldn't refer to their accomplishments, even that of moving from the third grade to the fourth grade (or whichever grade Dash was in), as mediocrity. Superman didn't feel the need to be the only special one.

I do have my objections to Superman, the part where he just has inherent super-morality. And, I could deal with him struggling just a bit... or at least verifying that it isn't just something he was born with. (No, snapping Zod's neck isn't a good way to do it, either.)

But, to make it so that the moral is "always obey the ubermench"... yeah.

[dragoness_e]

Superman was never portrayed as "just born with" his morality, AFAIK. He always attributed his morality to his adoptive parents, Ma & Pa Kent, who raised him and taught him everything, including their values.

[wingedbeast]

I think that's been a big part of the core... but it's also a part of the core that gets forgotten a lot of the time.

See Man of Steel and Batman-v-Superman for an example.

Otherwise, there seems to be an assumption that something is good because Superman does it. That's, again, something more recent.

Still, remembering the influence of good parentage on Clark Kent is worth it. It does put me a mind of trying again at the scenes I'd like to see regarding a different Superman movie.

[dragoness_e]

I only watched the first season or so of "Smallville", but at least in those seasons, the show revealed a lot of the relationship between Clark and the Kents, and it was a good one. They were good people who taught Clark to be like themselves.

I think the comics have over the years explored what Superman might have been like if he'd been raised by different parents. Even Warren Ellis did, in "Planetary". Most of the alternatives resulted in a real nightmare.