By Norman Brown, Ph.D.
Once initiation to womanhood (perhaps via the unmentionable experience of menarche) sets the main plot in motion, the most dynamic new character appears: the bright orange, big wide toothy-mouthed Anxiety, always hyper, with pin-ball eyes and fireworks-mohawk infecting everygirl by making everything imperfect into a problem that can’t be solved. Anxiety’s purpose is to anticipate future social dangers and make sure anything bad will get worse. In fact, she spoils Riley’s encounters with an older girl gang while alienating her old friends and foils her attempts to join the varsity ice hockey team that’s above her abilities and worsens these social catastrophes by overreacting.
Though Anxiety’s purpose is to make a mess out of every unfamiliar scene, she quickly becomes the star of this new teenage period, the antagonist to Joy’s protagonist. With Anxiety’s help, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness get stronger and the plot takes a downward turn to enter the movie underworld’s perilous life tests. Anxiety also brings her own entourage of characters, all of them negative.
First there’s Ennui who slumps over, a limp dark purple balloon oozing out her life-force with eyes barely open as slits. Ennui and Anxiety team up to promote not knowing how to act to please the older girls and not trust either parents or her old friends. Ennui isolates herself and lies in a hammock or couch in listless boredom, not finishing anything she starts and gazing back at the dwindling past. The twinkle in Joy’s Tinkerbelle sputters at the edge of giving herself up.
Along comes blue-green Envy smaller in stature than the rest. For she’s gazing with overflowing pupils at the larger-than-life statuesque figure of Valentina, admiring and wishing to be just like her—is she yearning but not trying? She seems entranced but not able to act, contemptuous towards anyone inclined to look, but nobody does. She has nothing to offer but unhelpful criticism.
But Embarrassment has a massively oversized body; he’s the shy, well-intentioned unhappy fat boy from everybody’s high school, unable to hide in his faded grey oversize hoodie. His whole pudgy face and bulbous nose blush rosy, and he tries to hide his eyes every time that something challenging happens but can’t keep from looking anyway. When he finally turns his hulking back on us, his oversized hoodie and slumping pants leave an inch-high slice of uncovered skin revealing his butt-crack. This closing surprise triggers our own embarrassing suppressed laughter, enlarging the silent embarrassment we all share to a crescendo as piercing as every adolescent girl might dread.
Anxiety is the most dynamic adversary by far, pushing the action ever forward. She intensifies the tension between Riley and Valentina’s older hockey team and girl-gang. Later on Anxiety whips up a hurricane that knows no bounds and even invades the usually protected headquarters of her carrier’s brain. Taking over everywhere inside, she hurls and whirls all of the stable fixtures against the control tower’s inside walls until the central console—that is her grey matter–is wiped clean of any arms and legs and the whole operating system shuts down.
Joy then gathers her bedraggled band together and sets out on some confusing journeys in search of ways to restore direction and sanity in herself. In one particularly psychological adventure, Joy and emotions reach the back of her mind and manage to clamber up the loose mountain of mostly negative emotional memory-bulbs at the top. Joy’s gang is stuck there with a self-conscious and self-hating image of herself until an unspecified construction-guy aims a cannon and blows the mountain up so they can float back to some new normalcy. Joy eventually manages to restructure her emotions with some respect for each of them, whether they’re experienced as negative or positive. From a disembodied voice with godlike authority, Joy and the theater audience hear the words, “Don’t let your emotions tell you who you are.”
Now if I were an ordinary college-educated man, I’d think that sounds like a metaphor for the 18th century Enlightenment or a lightning bolt from a graphic novel. I’d also wonder who taught Joy how to rearrange and regulate the other emotions and how she developed the skills and wisdom to act adroitly and firmly to remake her personality so quickly. I’d suspect there was a mighty wise therapist on her shoulder or a new AI deity fumbling with the machinery behind the scenery.
If I was an ordinary man-in-the-street, I’d think the best way to get rid of that nasty pile of memory-bulbs is to get an AR-15 and blast away at everyone around me. I’d know all women are insecure, hit bottom almost every week and act emotionally crazed for a bit of the days at their “time of the month.” They’re also dreamy, lazy, catty and worried they’re ugly, no matter how good they look.