Yes, YES, absolutely. I love the philosophy behind this movie in celebrating the light, warm, wholesome side of superheroism.
And I love how well Syndrome represents basically ‘toxic nerd culture’. When he can’t see superheroes as people he relates to any more, he regresses and sees them as playthings instead. He acts like these real people are action figures for him to do with as he pleases, as visually demonstrated by the scenes where he holds people in zero-point stasis and moves them about, frozen in stationary action poses.
He refuses to accept any perspective but his own. He talks about the superheroes like they’re comic book characters to him - like when he finds out Mr Incredible and Elastigirl got married, or in the interrogation scenes where he seems to be critiquing the ‘new’ Mr Incredible and berating him for having let him down. He talks about it like it’s a character reboot he doesn’t agree with. Plus his whole mantra of providing (selling) superpowers to everybody, so nobody will be ‘special’ any more, entirely designed to take away the specialness of what he coveted and couldn’t have, just as many guys entrenched in nerd culture refuse to let anyone else share it and act like it’s a secret club only for them.
Syndrome represents arrested fanboy development in which he refused to grow up. He carries this resentment from childhood all because his favourite hero actually had other things to do with his life than to cater to him. Mature people have responsibilities, actual jobs, they age and have families of their own, that’s what mature means and it’s what Mr and Mrs Incredible stand for, and everything that Syndrome echews in favour of being somebody’s ‘arch-nemesis’. He still thinks that maturity is dark, brooding, sexy (I mean the person he picked as the front for his scheme, not him), and about how much collateral damage you can cause. But he’s just a manchild living out a comic book dream, creating his own fictional life story (his robot is designed to be impervious to superpowers and stage a disaster that only he can defuse, thus saving the day - the whole thing is playing pretend and endangering thousands of people’s lives). Kids like to play at being heroes and stopping disasters, but because he refused to grow out of any of this, he acquired the means to do it for real and became a murderer in the process. All because he couldn’t accept that he was, essentially, wrong. By refusing to believe that his childlike hero-worship was over the top, he buckled down into it and continued to play pretend as a child would. Another aspect of maturity is natural change and Syndrome rejects it just as Mr Incredible and all the other supers accepted their reprimand (by having to go undercover and live as normal people) and adapted to it even though they didn’t want to.
My favourite line in the whole film is when Bob threatens him and Syndrome shrugs it off saying, “Nah, that’s a little dark for you,” because he’s all at once criticising Mr Incredible’s ‘character’, evaluating a real person in front of him as though he has him pegged on a morality chart, and you know he could back it up with some creepy nerd facts like “In 1964 you said the same thing to Lord Heatwave and you were totally bluffing”, as though Bob is predictable, unchanging, completely fictional to him, AND he’s being dismissive of Bob’s personal life, he thinks Mr Incredible’s gone soft, weak, become a family man, because he thinks his former hero needs to be cool and gritty and running away from explosions, not an actual person with depth and goals and feelings - which is, of course, why we as an audience like Mr Incredible and his whole family, thereby proving Syndrome and the Dark Gritty Reboot culture wrong simply by having watched and enjoyed the movie they were in.
dailybridgerton
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