- YEAR: 2018
- DIRECTOR: Brad Bird
- KEY ACTORS: Holly Hunter, Craig T. Nelson
- CERTIFICATE: PG
- IMDB SCORE: 7.6
- ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 93%
SEX SCORE: 3/5
✔️ This does pass the Bechdel Test but that’s not a given with Pixar – only 4 of the first 14 movies pass, which is very disappointing!
✔️ It is rewatchable! I love their universe and their family and I love spending time with them, although the first movie is much better…
✔️ And while I would fuck the cast – Helen Parr is hot and smart and capable and who wouldn’t?!
❌ …it didn’t inspire specific fantasies. There are plenty of superheroes to fulfil that role and the adult Incredibles are low down that list!
❌ But is it sex positive? Maybe not? There’s not much actual sex content but I feel what little there is became a source of humour and I have problems with certain sexist tropes…
As always, this contains spoilers so watch the film before you read on…
STREAMING: Disney+, Virgin Go, Amazon Prime (rent £2.49, buy £9.99), YouTube (from £2.49). For a full list of streaming options, check out JustWatch.com
[Content warning: motherhood, parenting, brief mention of emotionally abusive relationships]
OK so it was only when researching the role of Disney mothers and specifically Helen Parr, a literal super-mum, that I remembered quite how raw a nerve analysis of motherhood is for me. This could end in an almighty rant or reveal personal vulnerabilities that I’ll need more therapy to unravel (true story – I spent a surprisingly long time talking about Kramer v Kramer to my therapist last year!) or perhaps both. Let’s see!
So, Disney mothers – more often dead or absent than a loving presence, but fascinating nonetheless.
The fate of mothers is Disney movies is almost as popular a subject as the feminism of the princesses, with some blaming the untimely death of Walt Disney’s mother in 1938, but that feels too simple. For a start, Snow White had already been made by then and, more importantly, the trend didn’t start with Disney – a lot of the early movies are versions of classic stories that also involved dead or absent mothers. Why? What does literary history have against mothers? (Don’t tell me. It’s misogyny, isn’t it?)
A more sympathetic assessment would suggest that this was intended to show varied types of families. Disney families are usually happy but rarely follow the classic nuclear two-parents-and-children model, which is very progressive for 1937! Sadly, the death of mothers was historically a common occurrence due to the risks of childbirth and pregnancy so two parent families wouldn’t have been as much of a normality as they are now. Add that to the fact that marriage tended to be more of a business arrangement than the ‘love’ marriages we now aspire to and it becomes less surprising that widows married again quickly. After all, who else was going to cook and clean and look after the children?! I say this in an angry feminist accusatory tone, but it is a serious question that I will get into more later – who would have looked after the children? Even now, childcare is expensive and largely inflexible so when women had such limited career choices anyway, why would the man stay at home?
The problem, of course, is that perpetuating this historical precedent for the sake of a plot also perpetuates the patriarchy and its oppression and disregard of women, which isn’t cool. Thankfully, we no longer live in a world where mothers die with such frequency and this is no longer an excuse or an acceptable reason to disregard or ignore them.
The absence of a mother figure also offers another way for female characters to stall the plot. In contrast to the more standard trope where the plot wouldn’t happen if the (male) hero listened to the women’s advice, these movies rely on the absence of the mother to put the child hero in a situation where they get to be heroic! If there had been a sensible parent present to help them, the child wouldn’t have gotten into trouble and wouldn’t have needed to go on their adventures, almost as if ’the mother was a barrier to strength and growth.’
I’m also fascinated by the dichotomy of good but dead mothers with evil but present step-mothers. This division of mothers into good and evil isn’t new – I’ve written in my Halloween series about how horror mothers are either traumatised angels or the devil themselves with very few realistic portrayals of motherhood in between – Disney just makes the divide more obvious because good mothers die and are replaced by bad step-mothers. I say Disney exaggerates this divide but we should really blame the Grimm Brothers for the rise of the evil stepmother trope as it seems that the ‘decision to make the stepmother a villainous figure in the tales was a conscious one’ on their part. In early versions of both Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, it is the biological mother who behaves so abominably towards her children but this was changed to a step-mother in later editions.
Bruno Bettelheim, in his Freudian analysis of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales published in 1976, suggested that this use of a step-mother ‘serves the child well’ as it means the child never has to face the discovery that their mother isn’t perfect and can instead direct their anger towards someone else: ‘the fantasy of the wicked stepmother not only preserves the good mother intact, it also prevents having to feel guilty about one’s angry wishes about her.’ Depressingly, Anahit Behrooz also suggested that making the powerful woman someone only tangentially connected to the family core protected the Patriarchy as these ‘stepmothers were outsiders and could therefore act as a warning to other women without completely defying patriarchal structures.’ Coooool.
Most of this applies to mothers and mother figures in classic Disney movies – Snow White (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Cinderella (1950) etc – but later movies aren’t spared from problematic mother figures, when there is a mother present at all. Belle’s mother is dead in Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992) is an orphan. Both parents die in Frozen (2013) but their plan to lock Elsa away until she had controlled her powers was unsustainable and kind of abusive, and Moana’s (2016) parents definitely try to hold her back from her destiny. I also recently watched Tangled (2010) and Mother Gothel is not only an incredibly terrifying villain, she is probably the best representation of emotional abuse I have seen in any movie, let alone a Disney one: ‘Gothel holds Rapunzel hostage for nearly 18 years and tricks her into believing [she] is her mother; she spends that entire time subjecting Rapunzel to abuse that’s designed to subtly wear her down and keep her confined to her tower’ and her big song, ‘Mother Knows Best’ is an extraordinary ‘a two-and-a-half-minute onslaught of negging, gaslighting and guilt-tripping.’
Pixar has tried to right some of these wrongs. Brave (2012) is among my new favourite Princess movies and I love its examination of the complex relationship daughters can have with their mothers – loving and yet challenging with Merida, the daughter, trying to forge her own way while her mother, Elinor, tries to maintain the status quo. Lists of ‘best Disney mums’ also often include Riley’s mother in Inside Out (2015) and Andy’s mother in the Toy Story franchise; minor characters who nonetheless clearly support their children through difficult times.
And, of course, there is Helen Parr from the Incredibles.
I chose to write about the second movie, rather than the first, as it is centred around Elastigirl rather than the male characters, perfect for a feminist review, and it also seems like this blog is full of reviews of sequels (Magic Mike XL, Wonder Woman 1984) as they tend to be more interesting than the originals!
Incredibles 2 was the 2018 sequel to 2004’s highly successful The Incredibles – my favourite Pixar movie (fight me), a top 10 superhero movie and a brilliant representation of family on screen. Incredibles 2 starts at literally the second the first movie ends; superheroes are still illegal but the Incredibles have to reveal themselves as a hero family to save the city, while causing quite a bit of damage in the process! They are seen by tech billionaire Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk) who wants to make heroes legal again and feels that they simply need better PR. He chooses Elastigirl as the face of his new campaign and so Mr Incredible stays home with the kids. Elastigirl then goes and does some awesome hero shit and saves the day…until it is revealed that Deavor’s sister is the Big Bad and the Incredible kids are needed to save everyone!
There’s a lot I liked about Incredibles 2. I liked the diversity of the cast, which feels slightly ridiculous to say about a cartoon but remains important. There were lots of female presenting characters, including some in positions of authority, and lots of people of colour. I also agreed with Jill Gutowitz that Voyd, one of the new heroes, was definitely queer, even if this wasn’t explicitly stated. I liked that the women had different body shapes and appreciated the lusting after Elastigirl who, with her ‘extremely 2018 body type — an exaggeratedly thin waist with a thick butt and powerful thighs,’ helped me, a white woman in her 30s, understand what ‘thicc’ meant as a descriptor. Of course, Elastigirl’s curvy body is just as unachievable and unrealistic as the eyes-wider-than-stomach classic Princesses, but at least it was a change! And a welcome one, according to Anthony Lane of the New Yorker who wrote a hysterically horny review describing how Elastigirl reminded him of Anastasia in Fifty Shades of Grey and how, when watching her, he ‘rested his cooling soda firmly in his lap and, like Mr. Incredible, tried very hard to think of algebra.’ Okaaaay…
But I have a fundamental issue with the premise of the movie that makes me feel like I might have a sense of humour failure: I don’t think men struggling with parenting because their wives or partners have previously been doing all the work is funny nor is it acceptable as a plot point.
Having thought a lot about this, I think I had such an acute reaction to Incredibles 2 because Helen Parr has always been positioned as a great mother but she is also literally a superhero, described as ‘the ultimate multitasker…[who] takes the phrase “super mom” to a whole new level,’ and Incredibles 2 emphasises that it’s still not enough. When she tries to focus more on her career, her family life suffers in response as her husband is unable to take up the slack. Coooool. Anthony Lane makes a joke about how Mr Incredible needs to be ‘as flexible as his wife’ to keep his family together in his New Yorker review, which makes even her superpower feel ironic. Stretched and pulled in all directions but able to retract back as if nothing has happened, unaffected by the pressures placed on her. Mother, wife, super; she does it all and looks great while doing it! She is a supermum.
Are we supposed to empathise with her? Be inspired by her? I was told by a lot of people that I’d like Incredibles 2 as it showed a woman’s career being chosen over her male counterpart but I found it profoundly depressing. Sure, it’s great to see a woman’s abilities recognised but did it have to be so clearly at the expense of her family life? I’ve spent the last three years since my daughter was born struggling with the fact that I’m not a supermum, trying to remember that it’s OK that I’m not, and here is an actual superhero showing me that it still can’t be done. So why do I still feel like a failure for not managing to be ‘that archetypal female who is both a career woman and a housewife, and whose to-do list spans cooking, cleaning, parenting, earning a substantial paycheck and sexually satisfying her husband — all without a hair out of place’?
Last year, The New York Times wrote an excellent article about supermums and why we need to stop pushing this unachievable goal. In it, Lisa Selin-Davis describes how the daughters of second wave feminists grew up knowing that they had been given the right to work outside the home and deserved equal pay, but found ‘very little support in the form of legislation that might facilitate this zeitgeist shift, like subsidized child care or paid family leave.’ Unlike the widowed fathers of classic princesses who found step-mothers to do all the domestic work, our generation had no one to take on these responsibilities and so we found that our careers ‘didn’t turn out to be liberation as much as a second set of responsibilities added to women’s already full plates.’ More than this, motherhood has become more intensive, requiring more active presence, more homemade food, more…everything!
And so I flinch at movies or TV shows that mock or make jokes out of this issue because it still feels like a battleground and light-heartedly mocking the ineptitude of the men at the expense of the struggle of the women feels like a low blow.
Perhaps I am too sensitive but it still feels like the Patriarchy is indoctrinating us to see equality and the ‘middle ground’ differently depending on our gender, which makes it almost impossible to find a solution. People raised as women are still expected to hold households together, whether that’s actual physical labour or emotional and mental labour. (I think a lot about this Guardian comic on gender wars of household chores and Girl on the Net’s post on relationship maintenance if you don’t know what I mean). We are expected to do this work and made to feel like a failure when we don’t, even when we know that the division of labour is unfair. Conversely, people who are raised as men are expected to be breadwinners, to bring home the cash and the security, so can’t shake the idea that their job is more important, their financial contribution is more necessary. They have also never really been expected to do domestic chores before so, from their position of privilege, any help is better than none and risks distracting them from their primary role as breadwinner. DrJodi Vandenberg-Daves, author of Modern Motherhood: An American History, summarised this in the New York Time article by saying that ‘in heterosexual families, men are often doing more than their fathers did, but less than their wives do’ and Letty Cottin Pogrebin, author of Getting Yours: How to Make the System Work for the Working Woman, took this further by saying that ‘Supermom is just another way of saying, ‘Women do it all. Men don’t do very much.’’
So when Elastigirl does choose her career, does leave the domestic tasks to her husband, it really bothers me that he is shown to struggle so much and the family are so significantly worse off for her absence. Are we supposed to laugh at Mr Incredible’s inadequacy or judge Elastigirl’s selfishness? Neither feel that good…
I appreciate that not everyone will agree with me. Men being involved in parenting at all is a relatively recent phenomenon and so I am perhaps asking too much for it to be accepted as standard already, and I understand that well-meaning but struggling Dads do need to see themselves on screen as much as anyone else, but I’m tired of it. Just…do better.
Because while these plots do underline how hard mother figures have to work, they do so in a way that makes us pity the father figure for having to pick up where the mother is absent, emphasising that it’s not really their job – women’s work and all that – which doesn’t really move us any closer to equality. And it’s rarely sustainable. The mother usually returns to take over again, which may not happen on screen in Incredibles 2 but is definitely what will happen once the movie is over. Mr Incredible literally says that he has to succeed at parenting so that Elastigirl’s success will legalise superheroes, allowing him to work again. Do you really think he’s going to continue parenting at this level once he can be a super again?
To me, plotlines like these simply emphasise and perpetuate the idea that parenting is the mother’s role, rather than a parent’s. Moving to parenting being a mother’s role because it is too hard doesn’t feel better than old rhetoric that parenting is a mother’s role because it is beneath men. It’s the Patriarchy adjusting to social change without allowing any actual change. It’s so frustrating!
It’s not that I don’t think we should be allowed to see father’s struggle and fail; it’s more that we’re not allowed to see mothers do the same. We are not equal and movies like Incredibles 2 just make that clearer.
Mothers have to be superheroes.
NEXT TIME… MULAN!
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