One of my children is sick and we couldn’t go to the beach, so this year we spent 4 July at the movies. Outside it was 90 degrees with what felt like total humidity; inside, on the enormous lounge chairs of New York’s 84th Street movie theatre, it was cool and dark, and we watched America communicate an ideal version of itself – one in which superheroes are all-conquering but also understand marriage is hard work and babies can be demons – while doing our bit for the rise in obesity.
Incredibles 2, which has opened in the US this summer 14 years after the original – and is released in the UK next week – revisits the family of sardonic superheroes at a time when the idea of American heroism is at best laughable, at worst obscene. Back in 2004, the Incredible family grappled, sidelong, with a world in which George W Bush was president, decency was exiled, and upstart cowboys ran the world. It was a witty, spirited movie that, despite a knee-jerk nod to the terrors of health-and-safety gone mad, furthered the solid liberal idea that teamwork is great and a female superhero’s elasticity is more use than the brute strength of her spouse.
This latest chapter (from what I could tell between trips to the loo, an infuriating number of dropped items, and the fidget and chaos brought on by my own weakness at the concessions stand and a two-litre vat of something called Icee) reheats all of these homilies, plus the one that domestic work is harder than doing an interesting job. In the current climate its gentle irony seems quaint. The closest the movie comes to a controversial message is the suggestion that, in times of national emergency, you may have to break the law in order to change it.
Radicalism in the US has always been premised on the paradoxical notion that, in a country founded on uprising, there is nothing so conventional as rebellion. “Do you know why we celebrate 4 July,” a lady on a train asked my daughter last week, spotting the fake tattoo of the stars and stripes on her arm. My daughter shook her head and, looking mildly appalled, the woman replied, “It’s America’s birthday!” But it was hard to know how to celebrate this year. Two of the most searched-for terms on Independence Day were “how to bbq chicken” and “why do we celebrate July 4?” – and the answer to the latter seemed uncertain.
Last Saturday I went along with thousands of other New Yorkers to the Keep Families Together protest downtown, which at least revived one’s faith in the strength of American pluralism. In a huge, vocal crowd, and in 95-degree heat, the American ideal of dissent as central to the project of government felt as close to an appropriate celebration of 4 July as one could get.
A man handed out ice pops to red-faced children dragged along by their parents to stand for hours in the sun, waving placards. A woman with a megaphone urged demonstrators to look out for each other in the event of counter-protesters. It felt simultaneously like a moment of transgression and a deeply typical American gesture, as American as the delusion that superheroes always know which are the bad guys to chase.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
