Summer is over, children are back to school and Miss asks what we all did on our summer holidays. Well, this isn't one of those essays, but I am tempted to wax lyrical about one of my summer's treats - watching again, and again, 'The Incredibles'. If not exactly incredible, it was - like good childcare needs to be - good enough.
Since children watch everything until they know it off by heart, there's nothing worse than a boring, implausible, glamorously vacuous kids' movie, to be endured ad infinitum, in the same manner as a Ladybird book or Barbie and Ken.
'The Incredibles' is not so much 'family entertainment' as trans-generational entertainment. It is a children's adventure that engages adults' pleasure in its historical cinematic and comic-book references.
The story of the Parr family initially presents itself as a flat, dull mirror of the fictional American family - brawny bloke, bird-like mom, 2.4 stereoptypical kids. But then the movie becomes animated, and bright and a little brave, as the family is thrown into a reprise of the era of super-heroism.
In this case, super-heroism generates its own jealous, deprived, angry, ugly disease, a character called Syndrome, who enlists the Inredibles'comeback in order to search-and-destroy them.
The film's weaknesses are also its strengths. They lie in its historic compromise with the genre: the happy family is, in fact, contra genre.
There's parental conflict but it isn't catastrophic. The narrative is interesting, until the inevitable, inflammatory end.
Dad is Waspish, genial, strong, but a bit dim, his buddy is black and smart, mom is the brains, son Dash is fast, daughter Violet is a genius at making herself an invisible field of force - a lovely play on a girl's self-hating quest for invisibility. Edna is a designer who furnishes the heroic fashions, like a character out of 'Easter Parade'.
It works with and against gender stereotypes. One of my little relatives, a boy-boy, says he'd like to be Violet. (I confess, I want to be Edna.) And the film invokes and simultaneously subverts fantasies about power.
Super-heroism is offered as a contradiction - that longed-for-thing in a society that has become monochrome, diminished by bureaucracy, coroporate cheating, and banality. 'The Incredibles' offers a satisfying contemporary caution that super-heroics are both a marvel and a mess. They come out of crisis and they cause havoc.
