Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Incredibles
2004 · Brad Bird · The Incredibles on Sightlines
Dash runs across water. A boy whose speed the family has spent years keeping under wraps is finally being chased, and his legs move so fast the sea holds him up. It is one of the purest thrills in Brad Bird's The Incredibles, and it works because the film has spent its first hour making us feel what it costs to keep those legs still.
That cost is the film's real subject. Bob Parr used to be Mr. Incredible. Lawsuits drove the supers underground, and now a man drawn with shoulders like a wardrobe adjusts insurance claims in the suburbs. Bird built the whole movie on one simple, painful premise: what if a superpowered family had to be an ordinary family? He has tied it to his own worry about balancing ambition with fatherhood. Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, turns out to have a surprisingly exact vocabulary for what that premise does to a superhero film.
Deleuze divided cinema into two broad regimes. The first he called the movement-image, and its engine is the action-image: a character sees a situation and acts to change it. Classical Hollywood ran on this circuit. In its large form, a situation presses until a decisive act transforms it. Its favorite shape is what Deleuze called the binomial, force against force, hero against villain. A superhero is that circuit in a cape. He sees the burning building. He goes in.
Then the circuit breaks. Deleuze argued that after the Second World War, film characters increasingly found themselves in situations they could no longer answer with action. They watched, they wandered, they endured. He called this the crisis of the action-image, and modern cinema grew out of it.
This is why The Incredibles is worth thinking through with him. Its first act is a crisis of the action-image played as domestic comedy. Bob perceives everything a hero perceives and is forbidden to respond. The insurance job is his jammed circuit. Dash's speed has to be kept down. Violet, whose arc is learning to accept being seen, lives behind her long curtain of hair, a piece of simulation the animators fought for and almost a character in itself. Even the editing registers the jam. Stephen Schaffer lets the domestic scenes, the dinner-table argument, Helen discovering Bob's secret, play in long, sustained, dialogue-driven beats, while the action scenes have the accelerating rhythm of a live-action thriller. In the house, time sits. Out in the world, it runs.
Deleuze has a name for the hero brought down this way. Writing about classical forms, he describes the sublime hero and his feeble inversion, the great figure turned into an uncanny everyday one. Bob at his desk is that inversion. It's funny, and it hurts.
What Bird does next is his invention. Much of modern European cinema answered the crisis by staying inside it, letting characters become watchers instead of doers. Bird refuses. When the mysterious assignment arrives, Bob goes back into costume, and the film builds his return as an affair: the lies, the rejuvenated body, the wife's growing suspicion. His heroism looks, structurally, like infidelity. The screenplay drops to a genuine low at the midpoint before it rebuilds the circuit. And it rebuilds it differently. The action isn't restored by one man recovering his strength. The family reunites for the climax, each member accepting rather than suppressing what they are. The old binomial survives, Mr. Incredible against Syndrome, but the hero is now plural.
Syndrome matters here. Jason Lee plays him as a wounded, motor-mouthed fan turned villain, someone who knows the genre from outside and badly wants in. Deleuze noticed that the crisis also produced characters and films aware that they were moving among clichés. The Incredibles is partly a commentary on the superhero form, made before the genre's later conventions hardened, and Syndrome is that commentary given a body. His weapon is fandom. The villain is the genre looking at itself.
Then there's the camera. Everything here is computer-generated, so cinematography means designing a virtual eye, and the natural eye of CG is frictionless, with everything in focus. Bird wanted the opposite: longer lenses, handheld shake, whip pans, rack focus, lens flares, the imperfections a real operator would bring. When we feel the camera as a presence perceiving alongside the characters, Deleuze calls it a dicisign. Bird makes that presence out of nothing. No one is holding a camera during Bob's flight from the Omnidroid through the jungle, yet the frame shakes as though someone were running with him. It is an act of faith in photography by a medium that never needed photography.
Deleuze never shut animation out of cinema, either. In the first chapter of Cinema 1 he says the cartoon belongs fully to cinema, because it gives us a figure always in the act of forming rather than a string of poses. The Incredibles takes that seriously at great expense: cloth simulated over stylized bodies, hair, skin rendered with subsurface scattering so it reads as flesh, surf and rain, all pushing Pixar to the edge of its computing power.
The film's debts are specific. Ken Adam's volcano lair for You Only Live Twice is the direct model for Syndrome's island base, with its open-plan control rooms, monorails and clean geometric menace. Goldfinger supplies the gadget-and-briefing set pieces and the John Barry brass that Michael Giacchino channels. Superman: The Movie gives a second scoring inheritance, John Williams' melodic, unironic heroism, which Giacchino revives against the percussive, atonal action music of the time. North by Northwest lends its innocent man chased through exposed, mappable geography. From Bird's own The Iron Giant come storyboard-heavy live-action staging and Randy Thom's character-driven sound, which won the Oscar here. Toy Story built the pipeline. This film gave it its first sustained test on human beings.
What did it pass on? Inside Pixar, its work on human figures, hair and cloth became the basis for every later cast of people. It is where the studio proved it could put humans at the center. It made Giacchino a major film composer. And it remains a high point of superhero cinema before the MCU, a version of the genre that gave midlife disappointment and a marriage under strain the same weight as a fight to the death.
Deleuze tells a story in which the action-image breaks and cinema has to learn to look. The Incredibles knows that story. It shows the break, with real pain, in a suburban house: a man who can see and can't act. Its answer is to act together. Is that a genuine renewal of the action-image, or a beautiful nostalgia for it? The film leaves the question open, and it's a good one to carry back in.
Next time, watch the cutting. Notice which scenes are allowed to sit and which ones run, and where Bob is when the film slows down. Watch Violet's hair. And when Dash hits the water, feel how much stillness the film spent to buy that speed.
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — A global situation (lawsuits drive supers underground) presses until the decisive act; the family reunites for the climax to transform it, after a genuine second-act low
- binomial — Mr. Incredible against Syndrome, force against force, rebuilt so that the hero side becomes the whole family
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Bob, forced into anonymous suburban insurance work, perceives as a hero but is forbidden to act; the family must suppress its powers
- inversion-image — The broad-shouldered Mr. Incredible turned into an insurance adjuster, the sublime hero inverted into an everyday figure
- consciousness-of-cliches — Syndrome as a wounded, motor-mouthed fan turned villain; the film working partly as commentary on the superhero form before its conventions hardened
- dicisign — A virtual camera given handheld shake, whip pans, rack focus, lens flares and an operator's imperfections, e.g. Bob's flight from the Omnidroid in the jungle
- montage-organic-american — Helen discovering Bob's secret and the family converging on the island lair for the climax, cut with live-action thriller momentum