#and “abandoned his family because he felt like it” is an oversimplification but it also technically isn’t wrong lol

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

this tweet has haunted me for months bc “descends into violence the second he experiences a breakup” is literally just an incorrect description of the sequence of events. there was half an episode between ed getting dumped and ed “descending into violence.” we literally see his response to being dumped, and it was not violence. being dumped definitely impacted his decision to “descend into violence” but. the literal plot progression. The Chronological Order In Which Things Happen. the cause that comes first and the effect that comes after.

there is a specific scene where ed chooses to go full Kraken and it’s not when he’s being left at the docks.

[sokkastyles]

One Iroh's line about Katara and Zuko relationship in the "Legacy of the Fire Nation" that always bothered me is that she blamed him for her mother's death, because... It's not true? Yes, she was angry in TSR at the Fire Nation and projected her anger on Zuko (so at least Zuko thought) but never blamed him? In my opinion, these are different things, but maybe I misinterpreted the series and their relationship

In order to answer this question, I want to look at what Iroh says, and the relevant paragraph.

Sometimes I thought Katara’s feisty fire burned brighter than yours, Zuko. And hers was never so hot as when she blamed you for the death of her mother. But it was your heart, again, in its desire for forgiveness that prompted you to reach out and help seal the wound in Katara’s by seeking out the ones who committed the crime.

I think you’re right, in that she was angry at him and projected her anger and hurt about her mother’s death onto him, and that isn’t the same thing as blaming him for her mother’s death. And I think that’s an important distinction to make because saying Katara blamed him for her mother’s death sort of...gets Zuko off the hook by painting Katara’s anger as irrational, which it wasn’t. She blamed him for things that he actually did do. He did turn against her at Ba Sing Se and his actions did lead to the city being conquered and Aang’s death. Although I would argue that he was only indirectly responsible for those things, and there were a lot of mitigating factors, including the fact that he didn’t really have much of a choice about joining Azula (the other choice was being dragged back to the Fire Nation as a prisoner) and Azula had a lifetime of psychological abuse and conditioning on her side. Plus the fact that he didn’t actually promise Katara that he would be on her side and wasn’t really prepared to make that promise just because she offered to heal him, and it’s sort of unfair to put that on him as a condition for her kindness towards him. However, that doesn’t make his actions any less of a betrayal to Katara, and she’s right to confront him with it, which she does, when he asks her what he can do to fix things.

You really want to know? Hmm, maybe you could reconquer Ba Sing Se in the name of the Earth King. Or, I know! You could bring my mother back!

She does conflate what happened in Ba Sing Se with the death of her mother, and she also holds him responsible for what happened in Ba Sing Se to an extreme, and offers him an ultimatum that he cannot possibly fulfill. Basically, she’s telling him that there’s nothing he can do. But even though she does later forgive him, she’s not necessarily wrong to hold him accountable. And she’s not necessarily wrong to associate him with her mother’s death, either.

I’ve seen a lot of discourse about this topic, and on one level, of course Katara knows that Zuko is not responsible for her mother’s death, and it would be wrong to blame him for it. He was just a child when it happened, and himself a victim of abuse and having his mother taken away. But he also for a long time was at best a passive participant in, and at worse an active perpetrator of, the same system that killed Katara’s mother. Just like Katara’s mother’s killer, Zuko also came to the South Pole in a Fire Nation ship with a Fire Nation army looking for a bender.

I think I’ve said this before, but Katara’s anger at Zuko is closely connected to her trauma over her mother’s death for multiple reasons, actually. The first, more obvious one is because he is Fire Nation and he hurt her. The second one, though, I think is more overlooked, but it’s an important reason, and it’s the feeling of betrayal. Katara didn’t feel like that towards Yon Rha because she never saw him as anything but a monster. But she did briefly extend her trust to Zuko, which makes her anger towards him different from her anger at Yon Rha. This aspect of her anger towards Zuko is connected to her trauma over her mother’s death, but instead of projecting Yon Rha onto Zuko, what she’s actually projecting onto Zuko is her mother’s abandonment of the family. Not that she blames her mother for dying, but Katara does have abandonment issues because of both her mother dying and her father leaving. Her mother was someone she relied on whose absence left a void she had to fill, both within herself and within her family. When she thought she could trust Zuko in Ba Sing Se and he betrayed her, I think she was left with a similar feeling of being left behind, putting her heart out there only to be hurt, and having to pick up the pieces. Katara didn’t just think she could trust Zuko, she thought she could help him, save him in a way. Him choosing to go back to the Fire Nation is kind of like the death of the person she so briefly trusted. It also meant that she is once again responsible for losing someone she cared about. Her mother died to protect her, and Zuko betrayed her after she did not succeed in healing him. These are irrational associations, because neither her mother’s death nor healing Zuko was her responsibility, but that doesn’t make them any more psychologically true or make the pain any less.

I also think that another aspect of her feelings of betrayal towards Zuko is that he had just confessed to her that he had also lost his mother. He knew what it felt like to feel that pain of losing a mother, told her he understood her pain, and he still betrayed her. When Katara confronts Yon Rha, she says that she always wondered who could do such a thing as kill a mother protecting her child. She was devastated by Zuko’s betrayal because she thought he was the kind of person she could trust, and after his betrayal, I think he became in her mind a similar monster, someone who she could not trust, who might be capable of unfathomable evil. In “The Western Air Temple” after the first time Zuko tries to join the gaang she tells them that when they were in Ba Sing Se he was “pretending” to be “an actual human being.” So I think that’s another reason she associated him with Yon Rha in her mind. I know in one of the supplementary books Katara talks about wanting someone to rely on in relation to Jet, and this is very much related to the fact that she had to become a mother figure in her mother’s absence and always having to be the responsible one, and wishing she had someone who could carry that responsibility for her. I also think this is all very interesting considering the parallels between Zuko and Jet, particularly in relation to Katara.

So, yes, I think it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say that Katara blamed Zuko for the death of her mother.

What I actually think is more interesting is what Iroh says about Zuko’s heart prompting him to reach out to her. It reminds me of what Iroh says in the series about Zuko having a “pure heart”, the kind needed to restore the honor of the Fire Nation.

It also reminds me of this, also from Legacy of the Fire Nation:

I’m assuming this is what Iroh is referring to when he says “your heart, again, in its desire for forgiveness.” He’s connecting Zuko’s relationship with Katara with Zuko’s journey as a whole. There’s also the connection between “your heart burned brightest” / “Katara’s fire burned brighter”. But I love that Iroh associates Zuko’s journey with his heart. First, Ozai being described as “without love” = without a heart. Then the Agni Kai with Zhao that “showed me your heart.” And the way that Iroh talks about Zuko’s true self being peeled back to reveal that pure heart, which the Fire Nation did not deserve, but Katara did.

[bombshellsandbluebells]

i for one loved murphy and raven flanking clarke. a lot of murphy’s storyline revolved around emori as of late - and that got good closure. i think it was a sweet moment to show the “mains” off, one more time. they are family. would have been nice to add miller and octavia in there as well - all the original delinquents (and raven). as a murphy fan who is neutral to memori, i loved that he got to stand on his own two feet for once. he deserved it.

Obviously I’m a Murphy fan who’s VERY into Memori and I love the romantic Memori moments and the storylines that revolve around them coming back for each other and choosing each other, but I ALSO actually really wanted Murphy to get a storyline outside of his relationship.

As much as I love Memori, I think both Murphy and Emori are such strong, interesting characters in their own right and I love any time they get to have storylines focusing on them. I think because their relationship is so important to them it’s always going to factor in in some way and play a part, but I DO actually like to see them function in the story as more than just a romance plot.

Look I love hearing for the 40th time how much John Murphy loves Emori and always saw something amazing in her and always put her first, but I also REALLY wanted something more for his last storyline in this show.

There’s been pockets of disappointing writing over the years, but overall, Murphy has had such a great arc over the course of this series. He’s gone from a character that wasn’t that important to one of the main characters of the show to one of the main members of the main group always saving the day. He’s gone from looking out for only himself (out of what he felt was a necessity after a long history of abandonment) to looking out for the people he directly cared about to even looking out for others outside of his own little chosen family. He’s started going out of his way more and more to help the people kicked down by society because he sees himself in them. He’s stood up for the people who society beats down and abandons because he used to be that person but he’s grown to have more and more influence and power and he chose to use it to help others.

He’s had an overall fascinating journey on this show - not necessarily from villain to hero, as I think that’s too much of an oversimplification, but from the outcast to someone with a community who understands what it’s like to be the outcast or the scapegoat and stands up for them and I WANTED to focus more on that in his last storyline.

I honestly don’t jam with any of this test/alien/transcendence nonsense, but within the context of the story written I honestly wanted him to take the test. I wanted him to stand in for humanity, to be an example of someone who can grow and be better (when shown love.) I wanted him to argue for the people that Cadogan would have made the decision for, because that has ALWAYS been who Murphy is - someone who stands against the idea of an all powerful leader who gets to make decisions for the people under them.

Murphy has always been of the people in a way that Clarke never has, and I think there would have been something really powerful in that. Clarke is more like Jaha and Cage and Dante and Cadogan and Blodreina and Russell. But Murphy has been at the bottom of society and knows what it’s like and he has always argued for the few over than many and for those that society doesn’t want to save.

(I wanted more for Emori than to be a damsel in distress in her last moments too, but more on that in another post.)

I love Memori. I love their story. I love the moments between them. But I also really didn’t want the end story for Murphy (or Emori) to just be a romance plot. I wanted a more compelling, satisfying end to Murphy’s story that actually says something about where his character has ended up and about his story overall. But we honestly didn’t even really get that with ANY character. Once again, plot and action was given more importance and screentime than meaningful character beats, even in the LAST episode of the entire show. And that’s really disappointing. So I’m with you on that.

That said, I still don’t fully like the final shots. I like that Murphy gets to get celebrated as a “main” one last time, but I just really, really dislike the way the narrative keeps insisting everyone is Clarke’s best friend and she’s at the center of everything even when it falls flat every time. I like him getting his spotlight moment, but I just hate that once again it’s about what a good friend he is to Clark because that just doesn’t ring true to me. But they stuck to their guns and insisted Clarke was the most important even to the end so /shrugs./ It is what it is.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Hey 😊 What are your thoughts on not!Lucille being included in 12x15? I feel like I'm the only one (unpopular opinion coming) but I hated the way they did it? The fact that Dean ENJOYED using the bat (or at least seemed to), and was looking at it/handling it with REVERENCE creeped me out? It just drew parallels with Negan that I didn't want drawn? I mean I get that it's JDM, but Dean should never be paralleled with Negan 😭😭, it betrays who he is as a character just to get a cool reference in😭

Heya! Funnily enough I ended up in the same place, kind of. At least, being totally horrified by it, after I had a very good laugh on first impressions. I don’t think they shouldn’t have done it though because it was a great joke on first impression and then the fridge horror of it all actually works really well for me thematically with exactly what was going on in that scene ANYWAY so it was actually an incredibly clever and layered joke that I think happened to just fit in with something they were trying to tell anyway.

I actually talked out everything I had to say about it in my watching notes, so I hope you don’t mind me C&P-ing them to save time, after I already C&P’d a conversation with @mittensmorgul to save time on writing these, so really this is incredibly incredibly lazy :D Laziness squared.

Pfft some extras from the Walking Dead wander into the Bunker making obvious pop culture references. Do we even analyse that mention of Dad or do we just laugh hysterically and move on?

-

Wait so that time when they seemed to have it on set they weren’t just fucking around with the baseball bat because they felt like making one but it was actually going to be in an episode oh my god

-

I wonder if Mary has been watching The Walking Dead or if she hasn’t had time.

-

Being distracted by Mittens:

elizabethrobertajonesWait - Sam is clean… is this meta or are we still in the pop culture reference?

mittensmorgulThe things on Dean, “ghoul, wraith, siren.”

elizabethrobertajonesyeahThey fought a SIRENWHAT HAPPENI want to know everything

mittensmorgulI DON’T KNOW?!

elizabethrobertajonesI bet if it was “back to back to back” they didn’t have time for it to be complicated

mittensmorgulI mean, DEAN fought the siren, Sam is completely clean

elizabethrobertajonesWHY IS SAM CLEAN

mittensmorgulAnd Dean’s been wearing his underpants for four daysPeople are screaming OOC

elizabethrobertajonesoh god

mittensmorgulI have no idea

elizabethrobertajonesAhahahahah  "Frodo"

mittensmorgulSort of reminded me of how he looked after he killed the stynes

elizabethrobertajonesIs that a thing

mittensmorgul:D

elizabethrobertajonesmaybe they intentionally USE those code namesmaybe Mary talked to Samwait if Mick is telling Sam where to gohas he given them “back to back to back”

mittensmorgulyes…

elizabethrobertajonesand Dean did all the killingand Sam was cleanOkay THERE’S the symbolism I was looking for :P

mittensmorguldo go on…:D

elizabethrobertajonesI am literally paused just at “Frodo” and his missing campers message so idk what happens nextbut yeah :PDean’s being used as the weapon here and Sam’s coordinatingAka trying to turn him into Ketchor Mark!DeanSam doesn’t have any blood on his hands for these huntsand they’re coming too fast for Dean to process them and work out shades of grey….

mittensmorgulYep

elizabethrobertajoneswhich means the Negan thing is probably a reference to how bloody it has all beenand not just a joke >.>

mittensmorgulnope

elizabethrobertajonesthey’re trying to turn him back into a bloody single minded hunter like Johnthis is awfulI LAUGHEDnow I feel horrible about it all :P

elizabethrobertajonesAlso Dean not being a germ freak about it all is probably a bad sign >.>

-

elizabethrobertajonesOh no Sam lyingepically

mittensmorgulyep

elizabethrobertajonesreminds me of 8x01 when he tells Dean how he found Kevinbut he actually did thatDean like Purgatory DeanWait fuck that baseball bat is his purgatory weapon*slides under the table* Go away NeganThis is worse than the Eliot Ness thing

To clarify that last reference, it’s when they get to the uni campus and Sam explains in great detail how he tracked Kevin via his IP address and router and stuff, while Dean sits there unimpressed eating his first burger back from Purgatory. Despite actually being shown as the better HACKER (thanks, “Strictly into Dick” moment) Sam’s got a broader computer knowledge while Dean seems to have just intuitively picked up the software Frank and Charlie taught him better than Sam, probably because Dean learns the tools of the trade while Sam is, really broadly, more aligned with lore and research (this is a gross oversimplification for both but all these moments play into it) 

I think it was also that Dean forgot computers while he was in Purgatory and had to sort of re-learn being in the modern world and showing him not following computer babble was a good way to show how his mind was working right then… he re-learns it off-screen and within a few episodes was perfectly competent again. Dean making silly comments about computers only being good for monsters and porn also echoes that sentiment while he’s in a sort of over-hunted exhaustion because I think the point was to show him in a very particular state where all the Dean danger signs are flaring up, from not being precious about keeping his home tidy and initially rejecting the shower, to almost… tempting him with the high of killing monsters endlessly, and making him channel the darker part of himself that gets involved in killing. The attack dog imagery wasn’t spelled out for once, but Sam being completely clean showed the imbalance even before we see he’s getting all the cases…

Anyway Dean channelling Negan is awful and I haven’t even seen TWD but the meta links are brilliant even with a casual outside eye on what’s going on there, because the shadow of John is over everything all the time, and Negan is like… a worst case scenario or something, a way to really explore the idea of John as the boogeyman he is in the narrative because there’s a fresh reminder out there of Negan being like… a pop culture renowned worst villain ever contender because he’s really horrifying people and making big pop culture waves as far as I can tell sitting over here really not caring what JDM or TWD are up to and hearing all about it from multiple sources anyway :P I was wondering if they’d sneak a reference in but that was extremely blatant. It would be for someone who’s actually watched TWD to comment in-depth, but anyway linking John and Negan in the narrative is CLEARLY pulling pop culture strings to make a point, and one that works in the story… 

Not to say John was that bad, but to remind us that he was a dark, ruthless hunter, for example in 2x03 he was compared to Gordon, and we’ve always known he was falling out with mainstream hunters, and clearly with a black and white revenge-y approach to monsters that would fit well with the BMoL’s goals. He instilled “saving people, hunting things” in Dean (who passed it onto Sam) but 1x01 and 1x02 are a lot about taking up the mantle of that job because John’s moved on, abandoning everything to do with working regular cases and saving people, to work on the revenge mission. It’s clear that Dean especially in season 1 and both of them in general are much more focused on saving people, and Sam in 1x22 has his huge moment at the end of picking family over revenge, after which in 2x02 he clearly gets onto the same path Dean was on in 1x02 of focusing on the job and saving people… Anyway that’s all in contrast of what we learn about John while he’s around, which is mostly that he’s running around doing plot stuff and throwing cases their way to deal with, and not behaving as a regular hunter who’d work those cases himself. He’s on a quest to get revenge where that darkness has consumed him, and we see all season through Sam, what that means with the danger it could consume him too, until Sam rejects it at the last moment. But in many cases revenge makes Sam reckless and impatient and he leaves or argues with Dean about why they’re following orders and working regular cases, so if you parallel them together, you see through Sam that John had no interest in “saving people hunting things” any more, and that it had probably only been something he did on the side to his revenge mission anyway, emotionally. Like, he starts the family business, but out of necessity, while his sons are raised in it and as a life, changing the way they relate to saving people…

Sorry, this is really rambly but I get the feeling no one ever reads my long rewatches where I write very long essays about this sort of thing, so I’m trying to summarise in a few paragraphs something I’ve written like maybe 100k words on at least after wandering through season 1 and 2 getting really invested in the early Winchester family drama :P

Anyway! tl;dr John is still haunting them, especially when Dean is in a bad way, ESPECIALLY when he’s being made to prioritise “hunting things” over “saving people” because there’s a REALLY fragile balance and Dean only functions well when he’s over on the “saving people” side, and if he’s not, angst follows :P Even just being made to hunt monsters non-stop immediately wears down on Dean’s humanity, and so you get a parallel like this, and to Purgatory, Mark!Dean, and generally showing all sorts of the good parts of Dean stripped away. >.> I think it’s a warning we should be WORRIED about Dean, NOT a direct comparison between Dean and Negan, especially as he makes the comparison himself between John and not!Lucile, and therefore the parallel is between John and Negan, and Dean’s just caught up in that as an incidental part of his characterisation, but probably isn’t going to go around braining people willy nilly.

[theconservativebrief]

The most important scene in Brad Bird’s Incredibles 2 comes early on and offers a brilliant summation of everything the writer-director does so well.

The Parr family, having attracted the attention and irritation of the government with their superhero shenanigans, sits in a lonely motel room, munching on Chinese food. They’ve just saved the city of Municiberg from the Underminer, who set his giant drill on a path to destroy City Hall.

But officials don’t see all of the destruction that was averted — they only see the rubble that actually exists. Yes, nobody wants supervillains like the Underminer robbing banks, but there’s a process in place to ensure those banks and the money within them, and having superheroes leap in to save the day just complicates that process.

The scene is notable both for its small, detailed animation — pay attention to how Bob Parr (aka Mr. Incredible) can’t seem to grasp anything with his chopsticks and finally just stabs an eggroll through the middle — and for the way it tosses a bunch of questions the movie knows it can’t possibly answer up into the air. To change the law that has made superheroes illegal, the Parrs will have to break it, to show that superheroes can still be useful. Or, as G-man Rick Dicker wearily sighs in an earlier scene, “Politicians don’t trust anyone who does a good thing just because it’s right. It makes them nervous.”

The first time I saw Incredibles 2, all of these ideas jostling for space within the movie struck me as a movie frantically searching for a story to tell, one it eventually found but that didn’t quite cohere with everything else. The second time through, though, the movie made more sense to me as a meditation on the popularity of superhero stories and what it means to live in a world where what’s legal isn’t always what’s right. It doesn’t offer solutions, because it knows there aren’t any.

But the movie is also keyed in to something that’s always present in Bird’s work, something that’s caused some to accuse him of being an objectivist along the lines of Ayn Rand: an obsession with the rights of the exceptional and how they can be stacked up against everybody else.

Incredibles 2 strikes me both as Bird’s deepest exploration of this idea and his biggest refutation of it. Bird might be fascinated by the exceptional among us, but he’s also not interested in exceptionalism if it doesn’t benefit the larger community.

Brad Bird Photo by Juan Naharro Gimenez/Getty Images for Disney

The works of author Ayn Rand — including Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and others — have been hugely influential on the thinking of various political and economic theorists over the years. (Among current politicians, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan is a notable devotee.) To put Rand’s writings in modern terms, you could describe her objectivism as a kind of extra-strength libertarianism, in which the truly great among us should, as much as possible, not be shackled by the law or by conventions.

Atlas Shrugged is her magnum opus, a futuristic dystopia in which citizens who don’t contribute to society leech off the business classes, who create both wealth and useful material goods (mostly trains and railroads). The action of the book — if a book so heavy in long discussions of philosophy can be said to have “action” — mostly involves the various characters learning that society needs them more than they need society, that the world is only as strong as its strongest, who should be subject to as few rules and regulations as possible. Rand stops just short of saying, “Billionaires should be able to straight-up murder whomever they want,” but reading the book, you have to think the idea occurred to her at some point.

This is a vast oversimplification of a book I read once in high school for an essay contest, but Rand’s ideas that regulations are bad and wealth creators are good have trickled down into the modern Republican Party in ways that are hopefully obvious.

The question is if they’ve also trickled down to influence the films of Brad Bird, one of modern animation’s few auteurs, but also a writer-director who keeps returning to the idea that society places unnecessary constraints on exceptional individuals. You can see where the comparisons come from.

Bird has made just six films — 1999’s The Iron Giant, 2004’s The Incredibles, 2007’s Ratatouille, 2011’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, 2015’s Tomorrowland, and 2018’s Incredibles 2 — and four of those wrestle with the above idea at length. There’s a touch of that idea in Iron Giant (which we’ll get to), but it doesn’t dwell on it at length, while Ghost Protocol (one of the finest modern action movies) is mostly about how it would be totally rad to free climb the world’s tallest building. (Ghost Protocol and Tomorrowland are live-action; the other four films are animated.)

The “objectivist” tag was first applied to Bird extensively after the first Incredibles. And to be sure, the very premise of the film plays in this territory: superheroes have been outlawed due to safety concerns, and one character bellows, “With everyone super, no one will be!” This is particularly true of a concluding scene in which young Dash Parr, blessed with super-speed, intentionally throws a race at a track meet. The plot reason for this is that he can’t let anybody know he has superpowers (which are still illegal), but it plays as a weird critique of the idea of participation trophies and the attempt to make sure no child’s feelings are hurt.

The criticism followed Bird through Ratatouille — which is ostensibly about how anyone (even a rat) can cook but is also kind of about how if you don’t have talent, you should get out of the way of people who do — and especially Tomorrowland, in which a group of geniuses abscond to an alternate universe where they build the sci-fi future imagined in the ’50s and ’60s and mostly abandoned in our modern era of imagined dystopias.

A world where the exceptional cordon themselves off and refuse to save the rest of the world is literally Galt’s Gulch from Atlas Shrugged, where the book’s mysterious hero, John Galt, hides out to proclaim his superiority to everybody else. And now Incredibles 2 toys with many of these same themes, which makes sense as a continuation of the first film. (When I asked him about these themes, he mostly punted on answering the question, saying he didn’t think about it that much when writing his movies.)

I think it’s worth considering all of these ideas in the context of Bird’s career, which got a bit of a late start. After beginning as a young wunderkind animator at Disney in the early ’80s, Bird was fired after raising his concerns that the company was half-assing it, instead of trying to protect its rich legacy.

Bird spent much of the ’80s bouncing from project to project — he worked on, among other things, a Garfield TV special and the Amazing Stories episode “Family Dog” (his directorial debut) — until in the early ’90s, he landed a job as the animation supervisor on a new TV show named The Simpsons, a job that made his career and allowed him to direct Iron Giant. When that movie flopped, he was brought to Pixar thanks to a college friendship with John Lasseter (who has recently been pushed out of the company after accusations of sexual misconduct).

But his directorial debut still didn’t arrive until he was in his early 40s. And while that’s not exactly unprecedented, it is at least a little unusual in an industry where someone with the evident talent of Bird likely would have proceeded through the ranks of a major animation company and directed his first film somewhere in his 30s.

Bird’s self-admitted demanding nature likely make him difficult to work with — something that surely contributed to his difficulty getting a film made, despite numerous almost-realized projects, like an animated adaptation of the comic The Spirit. (Bird was also probably hurt by his certainty that “animated film” and “kids film” shouldn’t be synonymous, even though animated films aimed at adults have always been difficult sells in Hollywood.) It makes sense that Bird’s frequent musings on the shackling of genius might be a political, but it’s just as possible this is an artistic idea, based on the struggles he had getting his career to take off. (My friend David Sims has had similar thoughts at the Atlantic.)

So, yes, we could read Bird’s filmography as a celebration of Ayn Rand and of climbing very tall buildings. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t also read it in the context of the career of a director who felt stymied at every turn for almost 20 years, before he unexpectedly became one of the most successful directors of his generation almost out of nowhere.

Even then, we’d be missing something big.

The Iron Giant paints a very different picture of how those with great talents should behave. Warner Brothers

One of the things that makes that early motel-room scene in Incredibles 2 so potent is the fact that there’s no clear right answer to the issues that Bird raises via his characters. Nor is there a right answer in a later scene in which Helen Parr (Elastigirl) talks with a new friend about whether the ability to create something great or the ability to sell it to the mass public is more important to the world. Nor in the frequent arguments about whether breaking unjust laws is the right thing to do, even if society requires people to be law-abiding to function.

It’s impossible for any animated movie to truly be “timely” because they’re produced on such a long timeframe. But Incredibles 2 feels eerily tapped in to the political debates we’re having around the globe right now. If you have massive amounts of power and feel like the world is circling the tubes, is your primary duty to society or to the self? Or your family? Or all of the above? Brad Bird doesn’t know this answer, so the movie doesn’t either.

This is a common thread across his filmography. All of his movies grapple with objectivist themes, to be sure, but they also don’t conclude that doing what’s best for the self is what’s best for everybody. The closest thing to an answer Bird ever provides is “Do what’s right, and what’s right is what benefits the most people.”

In short, his movies always posit that the exceptional should be allowed to express their talents to the best of their abilities — but only insofar as they can benefit society at large.

What’s interesting is how often Bird’s most openly objectivist moments and story ideas are presented as bad things. That collection of geniuses making up Tomorrowland, for instance, invents a machine meant to bring doom to our world, while the famous line about being special or super from Incredibles is actually spoken twice — the first time by a child and the second time by the movie’s villain. Helen is the closest thing the Incredibles franchise has to a moral conscience, and she’s always the one on the side of the idea that “everyone is special.” We just have different talents.

Ratatouille might be the best developed expression of this idea among Bird’s films. His portrayal of a restaurant as a collection of people who do very specific jobs to the best of their abilities, all adding up to a kind of symphony, is very much like filmmaking, with the film’s hero, Remy the rat, standing in as a director. The movie’s villains are those who would stand in the way of Remy realizing his full talents — but you can also read that as being against prejudice, as a celebration of the idea that anyone can cook and great art can come from someone you’d never expect (like a young and hungry would-be animator from Montana, not exactly a hotbed of Hollywood talent).

It’s telling that Ratatouille’s great chef is a rodent and not the gangly human who discovers he’s the son of a great, dead chef. Talent isn’t always predictable, following along conduits you’d expect. But when you find it, it’s best to encourage it but also make sure it’s tempered with kindness, as it is in Ratatouille, a movie where even the restaurant’s waitstaff is briefly but memorably celebrated.

All of which brings us back to The Iron Giant, a movie rarely discussed in conversations about Bird’s interest in exceptionalism. If any Bird creation is exceptional, it’s a giant metal man who eats railroads and can become a literal death weapon, but the arc of the film is about the giant trending away from that which makes him exceptional and would harm others, and toward what about him is exceptional that could benefit others. It’s a movie about a really amazing walking gun who decides, instead, to become Superman.

Superman’s a fitting icon to consider as a way to understand Bird’s ultimate philosophies. Yeah, he could kill all of us with a flick of his fingernail, but he doesn’t. So could the superheroes of Incredibles 2, but they make the choice not to.

That’s why Incredibles 2 stands so beautifully as Bird’s most fully engaged wrestling with all of these ideas. It never offers easy answers because there aren’t any. The question of how we build a society that benefits everybody and gives them the same rights as everybody else, while still allowing people as much freedom as possible to exercise the talents and abilities unique to them, isn’t one that can be answered easily. It’s arguably the work of democracy itself, and it will never be finalized, as long as human beings strive for a better world. Thus, those of us who are exceptional, be they people or rodents or whole countries, are only as exceptional as they are good.

While it’s not always easy to determine the right course of action, determining what’s good almost never is. It’s what takes you away from celebrating the self and back toward figuring out how that self can fit into the community of others, how your own exceptionalism can become a part of the great symphony of life.

Original Source -> Why Incredibles director Brad Bird gets compared to Ayn Rand — and why he shouldn’t be

via The Conservative Brief