The Incredibles were pretty much the only superheroes in town when they arrived 14 years ago, but so much has happened since – such as Marvel taking over the box office – they are in danger of being left behind and crowded out on their return. But, actually, The Incredibles 2 takes one audacious move that makes the entire superhero genre look old-fashioned.
The villain of the piece is a mysterious entity known as the Screenslaver, who hypnotises people and controls their minds through TV screens. In a monologue, the Screenslaver rails against the very passivity Incredibles 2 is catering to: “Superheroes are part of your brainless desire to replace true experience with simulation … Every meaningful experience must be packaged and delivered to you to watch at a distance so that you can remain ever sheltered, ever ravenous consumers.” Whoah there! This is a dangerously valid point. Quick! Get to a fight scene!
Quite understandably, the evils of screened entertainment are somewhere that screened entertainment itself rarely wants to go. It’s a blind spot, and for the sake of its survival, it needs to be ours, too. You might occasionally get a media-mogul Bond villain like Jonathan Pryce in Tomorrow Never Dies. At best you’ll get a dystopian reality show such as The Running Man or The Truman Show. Or maybe an inane TV show-within-the-show, as with The Lego Movie’s Honey, Where Are My Pants? or Idiocracy’s Ow My Balls! to be lapped up by a subdued populace. More explicit warnings against the screen are usually confined to horror: the spirits who enter through TV white noise in Poltergeist; the demonic video cassette of Ring; or A Clockwork Orange’s eyelid-clamping Ludovico Technique.
Going further than any of those was David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). Cronenberg, a former student of Marshall McLuhan, lays out a landscape of race-to-the-bottom ratings chasing; mass media literally warping perceptions of reality; and, behind it all, a conspiracy to brainwash audiences with a TV-transmitted virus that’s not far off the Incredibles’ Screenslaver.
“The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena,” says Videodrome’s media messiah Brian O’Blivion. If that is the case, we haven’t caught up. Time and again our screen heroes confront evil on a physical battlefield, with weaponry and superpowers. Even The Incredibles 2 resolves its media crisis with an action climax. But, in the present world, our threats are increasingly immaterial: fake news, social media propaganda, trolls, hacking, viruses and a US president whose worldview is shaped by Fox News – his own Screenslaver.
If weapons are really useless against this, don’t expect the movies to break it to you.
The Incredibles 2 is in UK cinemas on 13 July
