As the world was taking advantage of a special offer for deluxe seats on a chartered handcart bound for an all-inclusive trip to hell, I took myself off to the pictures in the middle of the day. What else are you going to do? My placard-making abilities are limited, and my mind and feet are weary.

So, to the soft velvet hush of the auditorium, and the delights of an afternoon Magnum. And to the follow-up to Brad Bird’s 2004 animation The Incredibles, a film in which a husband and wife superhero team take on baddies galore by way of a sleek 1950s aesthetic and costumes styled by a memorable amalgam of Edith Head and Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo. We are used to the idea that culture reflects the times we live in, and that if those times are particularly interesting, it may reflect them in unexpected ways. Thus, the villain of Incredibles 2 will strike a chord: a gimp-masked fellow called the Screenslaver, whose evil plan is to hypnotise a society addicted to the consumption of events – news, art, sport – through the devices it is unable to see beyond. In a week that has seen the frequent invocation of the film The Manchurian Candidate in relation to Donald Trump in Helsinki, this seems less and less far-fetched.

So far, so situationist: the Screenslaver’s beef has its roots in the ideas of thinkers such as Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard, who argued that the spectacular will soon become a substitute for authentic experience and that the masses, suborned by the lure of the image, will be complicit in their own control. And this variation includes sharp contemporary observation: cohorts are recruited, against their knowledge, by having a pair of virtual reality glasses slapped on, so that their screens become a part of them.

But as the film unfolds – and look away if you fear spoilers, although the plot of Incredibles 2 is enjoyably hokey enough to be pretty revelation-proof – there is another development. It emerges that Screenslaver himself is something of a decoy; a filter that obscures the master villain’s true purpose, which, it so happens, is to redefine the nature of the civic good.

Mr Incredible, Elastigirl, Frozone and their band of altruistic activists stand for good deeds in the face of reckless, vicious harm; they are at their finest taking on malcontents such as The Underminer, who literally destroys the ground beneath the populace’s feet. Like all superheroes, they have their run-ins with the forces of law and order. Nonetheless, their intentions are not in doubt, and nor is the gratitude and affection that they inspire in the general public.

But do-gooders aren’t good for everyone. Certainly, they are problematic if you believe that they weaken the individual’s survival instinct. If ordinary people think a superhero is going to show up every time a baddie threatens to kidnap their family or ransack their house, they might slack off on the self-defence exercises and the stash of weapons they’re carefully husbanding in the cellar.

In other words, superheroes are a nightmare if, for instance, your plan is to create an all-encompassing culture war in which an atomised society is mobilised to fight for self, the family, the neighbourhood against the alien and the other. If your plan, in other words, has a touch of the Steve Bannons about it – as does that of Screenslaver’s boss – the superheroes need to be stopped. Perhaps I was watching with virtual reality glasses of my own: glasses that saw a week in which a rightwing American tourist told a British radio producer that the jailed Tommy Robinson was the backbone of a country that would wither without him, and an American president appeared to toy with treason live, on television, in the service of a world leader whose security forces had likely recently murdered a British citizen. Perhaps.

But my afternoon of escapism ended up as a surreal reimmersion in these strange times. I emerged from the darkness to yet more reality-resistant news in the form of a Trumpian “would” that should have been a “wouldn’t”, and revelations of electoral fraud. Incredibles 2 ended, naturally, with the triumph of good over evil. It even reclaimed technology, turning the extraordinary inventions of the villains against them. The glasses of doom were ultimately smashed. It’s unlikely that either the film or this interpretation will find favour with the likes of Bruiser Bannon or the Sunbed King himself. But then, of course, they have the ultimate get-out. Fake news: it didn’t really happen.

• Alex Clark writes on culture for the Guardian and the Observer