What Inside Out 2 shows us about Emotions. Blog #1

by Norman Brown Ph.D. Pixar’s Inside Out 2 opened in mid-June is now the highest grossing cartoon ever made, making 1.46 billion in its first six weeks. It’s unusual, like the first Inside Out, in that it doesn’t thrive on either violence or romance. Its tomboy heroine Riley plays on a girls’ ice hockey team in Middle School and seems to be destined for a glorious future in high school hockey until the emotional storms of puberty wreck the control panel somewhere inside her body, probably in her brain. This disastrous demolition sets off an unexpected emotional avalanche affecting all of her relationships with others. All of these are girlfriends her age or girl-gang members one or two years older, except for her parents. Of the latter, her father seems to be a goofy cheerleader, and her mother is a colorless prop who seems to be a backstage function.  Since the movie shows the nature of pre-teen and pubescent girls’ emotions, I won’t follow the plot line but explore the emotions instead, as symbolized by the characteristics and behavior of the cartoon figures. First, and most closely identified with our hero is the willowy yellow-glowing and multicolored figure of Joy, with a normal flesh-colored face on a head taller than the others that signals that she’s the leader over everyone. She usually has a buoyant, enthusiastic open-mouthed cheery smile, despite acting almost always as the decision-maker for the four other emotions in her entourage. As a many-generation offspring of the Disney imagination industry, Joy shares genetics with Tinkerbell, since she’s often radiant and apparently motivated by the pursuit of happiness for everyone. Thus it’s unsubtly shown that joyousness is the desirable path to social success, at least among women. Oddly enough, this big-smile joyousness appears now to be the winning strategy of Kamala Harris’s successful presidential campaign. Is that really natural, or just what the culture expects of women? The others always follow Joy, while occasionally expressing disagreement toward the matter at hand. First, there is Sadness, with a round pale-shadowy blue fragile-hearted face, who lets out weak sighs when the plot gets rough. She sometimes airs some doubts about what Joy wants, but always goes along with her. So Sadness also secretly symbolizes weakness, even helplessness, implying thereby that a sad female will also be weak. If I’m a man-in-the-streets reacting intuitively to this character, doesn’t that mean sadness is a weak feeling, so real men don’t get sad?     By contrast, Anger is a sputtering, all red stocky body, with a double-hump head and bulb-eyes like a Disney frog and angry intense-eyebrows and flaming spiky-hair, a hopping frustrated immature boy-bully, but usually impotently fuming. He never gets anything done. What does the little fuming frog suggest as a symbol? A boy having a temper tantrum because he’s too small to be effective and nobody ever pays attention to him. So in my every-man eyes anger never does anybody any good, and it’s certainly gets juvenile detention at any school. Fear’s pale purple body has an uncertain-gender chimney-head freaking out and wildly blowing smoke. S/he’s blabbering incoherently, in a frenzy to escape from whatever’s happening but hanging on to the others for dear life. At least Anger is ready enough to give and take a punch or two, but Fear is so unpleasant that her ungendered whole scene is just extremely shameful, and no normal human, male or female, would be caught dead feeling it unless in a Disney horror movie and already dead.  In a surprising contrast, Disgust is a slinky overdressed grass-green slippery snob in high-heels with constant negative reactions, saying “ee-uw” down her nose, recoiling from everything around and also without any impact. At least she can show us how to react to the others: with superior dismissal. So, I’d wonder, are all of these follower-feelings worthless without Joy at their head? If Riley’s the guide for how a budding adolescent girl would feel, it’s meeting every moment with an insistent cheery smile that conceals and stores her timid sadness, boiling rage, jibbering panic and quietly superior rejection. And as an everyman or boy in the streets, how should I react? Don’t believe that smiley-face. Play the same game she does, but expect volcanic drama if she’s triggered. Don’t worry, though. You can reassure and ignore her sadness, placate rage (and use flowers if she’s a grownup), reassure (and condescend to) her fearfulness and just stonewall her disgust. And now stay tuned for the second act.

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