"I got my heroes secondhand, from television and movies, to a certain extent"
About this Quote
A confession with a shrug baked in: Brad Bird admits his pantheon arrived pre-packaged, routed through cathode rays and studio backlots. The phrase "to a certain extent" is doing sly damage control. It softens the claim, but it also signals self-awareness about the uneasy status of media-made heroes: convenient, influential, and a little suspicious.
Bird came of age when television became the family hearth and movies became a shared national dream factory. His line points to a generational shift in how myth gets transmitted. Heroes used to be local (parents, teachers, community leaders) or textual (books, history). Bird is describing a world where aspiration is broadcast, standardized, merchandised - and still, weirdly, intimate. You didn't meet your heroes; you watched them weekly, learned their gestures, absorbed their moral scripts between commercials.
The subtext is less nostalgia than a critique of mediation. "Secondhand" implies distance: these are not lived examples but curated performances, edited for maximum legibility. That matters because Bird's own work obsessively interrogates heroism as a public-facing role. The Incredibles is basically an argument about what happens when hero narratives become bureaucratized, litigated, and consumed as spectacle. Even Ratatouille, a film about taste and authenticity, is haunted by mass culture's shortcuts.
There's also an artist's origin story embedded here: if your heroes are fictional, your standards become aesthetic as much as ethical. You chase clarity, charisma, timing - the craft of hero-making. Bird isn't just admitting where he got his heroes. He's explaining why he learned to build them.
Bird came of age when television became the family hearth and movies became a shared national dream factory. His line points to a generational shift in how myth gets transmitted. Heroes used to be local (parents, teachers, community leaders) or textual (books, history). Bird is describing a world where aspiration is broadcast, standardized, merchandised - and still, weirdly, intimate. You didn't meet your heroes; you watched them weekly, learned their gestures, absorbed their moral scripts between commercials.
The subtext is less nostalgia than a critique of mediation. "Secondhand" implies distance: these are not lived examples but curated performances, edited for maximum legibility. That matters because Bird's own work obsessively interrogates heroism as a public-facing role. The Incredibles is basically an argument about what happens when hero narratives become bureaucratized, litigated, and consumed as spectacle. Even Ratatouille, a film about taste and authenticity, is haunted by mass culture's shortcuts.
There's also an artist's origin story embedded here: if your heroes are fictional, your standards become aesthetic as much as ethical. You chase clarity, charisma, timing - the craft of hero-making. Bird isn't just admitting where he got his heroes. He's explaining why he learned to build them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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