Perhaps Catherine's decided not to destroy her children's lives by
being a working mother with a chip on her shoulder.

However, I found a tragic feminist "Oh get a life" review of "The
Incredibles." by Mz Razorblade.


"Oh god, here we go: "the family unit". Not even "their family
unit", which might involve admitting that gay, single-parent and
extended families exist, but THE family unit, i.e. the heterosexual
nuclear family. "

Oh god, here we go. A dyke.

"The problem is that I needn't really have bothered watching the
film. The right-wing polemic, while it did exist, was crammed in
quickly between endless action sequences, "

It's a cartoon?!?!?

"The only characters who were not prehistoric stereotypes were, well,
modern stereotypes. These were at least slightly interesting. Edna
Mode, who designs suits for superheroes, was a send-up of Anna Wintour
and got by far the biggest laughs; the discovery that she was voiced by
Brad Bird himself, however, had me thinking less "amusing parody"
and more "misogynist parody". And why wasn't she a gay man...
actually, scratch that, the French guy was bad enough. And then
there's the villain; but I'll get to him later. "

Oh please.

"Incredible is your archetypal selfish male breadwinner, believing that
the fact he works an eight-hour shift outside the home gives him the
inalienable right to ignore his family: he hides in his study, goes
"bowling" with Frozone in the evenings, "

Yes, it's only money after all. Oh, and he doesn't go bowling. He goes
out crimefighting. (You know the people who keep the streets safe for
women.)

"The statement 'moms have to stretch in 100 different ways each
day' is of course often correct; the problem is that Bird seems to
view this an as exemplary situation rather than an injustice to be
rectified by forcing men to shoulder a greater share of childcare and
housework. He's not even content to restrict the most sexist lines to
the male characters, either: it is Violet who says ominously (and quite
seriously!) "Mom and Dad's lives could be in danger... or, worse
still, their marriage." Pathetic."

Mz Razorblade has some serious problems. In fact I'd say it's not just
a chip she has on her shoulder, but the entire european potato
mountain.

"When Elastigirl tells her son "Everyone's special, Dash," he
mutters, "That means no-one is." Incredible refuses to go to the
party celebrating his son's progression from the fourth to fifth
form, on the grounds that "they keep creating new ways to celebrate
mediocrity"."

Ah! The feminist slogan, "All must have prizes."

"The idea that WMDs are perfectly safe, provided they are kept in the
hands of just a few countries, could be read as a straightforward War
on Terror allegory. However, the story also bears a noticeable
resemblance to the Kurt Vonnegut short story "Harrison Bergeron",
set in 2081,"

It's official she's having a bit of a crisis.

"This evidently wasn't violent enough for Bird's tastes, so
Elastigirl, believing that Mirage is The Other Woman, becomes furious
and punches her in the face with her super-long elastic arm. Incredible
then grabs her by the wrist, drags her towards him (despite the fact
she is shouting "let go of me!") and... kisses her!"


He kissed his wife, he kissed his wife! All men are rapists! All men
are rapists!!

" Elastigirl, however, is incapable of intimidating Incredible: when
she shouts at him furiously for getting them into so much trouble, he
responds with an indulgent smile, "You can pick a fight, but I'm
just glad you're alive." She is also incapable of controlling their
son: he obeys his dad, but ignores his mother's instructions."

Ah yes. The feminist denial of reality that causes social collapse.
That belief that women can control their boys without a dad, if they
just "love them" enough.

"The most outrageous crime of the whole lot, however, is the character
of Violet. For a start, she is THE thinnest, spikiest,
tortured-on-a-rack-in-childhood waif that has ever had the misfortune
to grace a cinema screen. Her left ear is wider than her waist; her
eyes are bigger than her feet. This, as you can imagine, makes her a
crap hero; despite her superpowers, a guard defeats her easily at one
point by simply knocking her off her feet. She is also an atrocious
wimp with an unrequited crush on a boy in her school; after he glances
in her direction near the start of the film, she hides behind a wall
and swoons, "Oooh. He looked at me."

My 16 year old niece came home the other day and burst into tears. Her
mother asked what was wrong, and she replied "Normally men look at me
when I walk home, but today, no-one did."

Ms Razorblade has spent too much time living in the Barbican.

"I anticipate complaints to the effect that I am reading too much into
a supposedly light-hearted children's film. But children's films
are more important than adults', not less; children are much more
vulnerable to this kind of rhetoric because they have no knowledge base
or political system with which to refute it. Adults can roll their eyes
and dismiss this cartoon as a postmodern satire of James Bond, or
whatever. Kids won't know."

Hmmm. She's not completely stupid after all, just bitter and seeing a
whole team of psychiatrists.



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