Aaaand… we’re back! Hope you enjoyed part I, here’s part II:
I’ve been surfing around the waves of Inside Out on the internet and came across this little beauty, which talks about a pretty significant message in the movie; that sadness has an important place in our lives. It’s a fair point and I won’t rehash it all here, but I do want to add a little commentary on the matter. Its worth calling to mind the fact that many conversion stories start with how a person hit rock bottom, faced the reality of their isolation, fear, pain, etc. and finally admitted that their happiness can’t come from them, that they need to reach out. In the movie, sadness causes Riley to receive help and attention from her friends and family, which in turn comforts her and returns her to a more wholesome and lasting joy. As a matter of fact, the honest facing of one’s sadness, when paired with he loving embrace of her parents leads to new core memory and an even bigger family island.
By analogy, this is the dynamic one finds in the life of faith where sadness or darkness causes one to reach out to God. If this reaching out is met by the assurance of faith and the presence of Christ, it leads to a deeper and more lasting sense of God’s presence – and expanded “faith island” if you will. What comes to mind is the famous verse in the bible, which is also the shortest verse, John 11:35 – “And Jesus Wept.” Christ came not to take away our sadness, but to take it on. He became fully human and so sanctified the very gritty experience of human sadness, loneliness, and loss. The fullest expressions of faith do not meet human pain with a saccharine “Jesus loves you, don’t be sad,” but something more like “take courage, Jesus is with you in the sadness.” That is the supreme victory of the cross – not that it takes sadness, pain, and death away, but that it makes sadness, pain and death a part of sanctification – sadness and death are no longer meaningless. In fact, by the redemptive act of Christ, they can actually increase joy, but in a way beyond the cheerfulness and blind optimism of the character Joy.
Another scene of interest wasn’t really a scene so much as a quick glimpse. As the credits rolled, there were several humorous scenes of the emotions in other people’s heads. In particular, they featured one of the “popular girls” who wore makeup. The lens for this scene is humor and humor tends to incline people to accept what they experience, which is why humor can both help a person deal with a tough situation and serve as a tool for gradual corruption. As such, the scene inside the popular girl’s head is meant to be taken at face value. The events show her acting cool and then freaking out inside her head that others would find her to be a fraud. One of the emotions, I forget which, responds by saying that won’t happen because they’re wearing eyeliner. The message? Probably that acting cool by pretending to be something you’re not leads to insecurity. It could also suggest the idea that make up is sometimes used to hide from others – either way, it was so quick that many children probably won’t pick up on it. Yet, if a child did catch it, it could be a useful starting point for a conversation with your them about the ridiculous and artificial dynamics of popularity in middle and high school.
I’d like to return briefly to my musings on the meaning of the opening scene when Joy was alone in Riley’s head. Perhaps it still suggests that people are meant for happiness, but the different arrangements of emotions in the Mom’s head vs. the Dad’s seems to mean that Joy is a dominant or central trait for Riley in particular. Notice especially who is sitting at the center of the console for Mom and Dad:
Since this look into people’s heads is the central point of the movie, this probably is probably intended to be accepted as in some way true. It probably signifies the dominant trait in each character, which is fine because each person does in fact have a natural temperament and is more easily angered or saddened or whatever. It might be a fun thought experiment to reflect on what the different arrangements mean for the interior life of a person – why, for instance is fear all the way on the left for the mom but sitting next to the middle on the right for the father? I’m not sure, have fun.
(N.B. The bus driver is shown to have 5 copies of Anger running his mind – not a bad example of how a person can let a single emotion become an excessively dominant trait… and that driving a buss full of kids every day can be a maddening experience…)
Anyway,the other interesting thing is that all of these emotions work together in the adult’s heads. They have a dominant trait, but the other emotions have clear input and communication with one another. By the end of the movie, Riley’s head gets a larger console and the emotions begin to work together in more mature way. This is probably a fairly accurate depiction of maturity: i.e. A mature person is not dominated by a confused mess of emotions. In reality, this is kind of a funny concept because you’re emotions don’t actually talk to each other – they are simply felt by you in varying degrees of intensity. Still, the gist of it is a helpful visualization of getting one’s act together.
This brings me to my final and most nuanced point. I’d like talk about two invisible characters – or rather, two things that could have been characters but instead remained an unspoken assumption. Reason and Free Will. In the movie, it is unclear where actual decision-making takes place. The emotions deliberate and use the console to influence Riley, but they don’t appear to have complete control, especially when Riley’s plan to run away causes the console to turn gray. This at least hints at the fact that emotions are distinct from free will – something you may have noticed if you followed that link I gave you at the beginning of part I. In other words – emotions can influence your decisions, but feeling something does not have to be, and often should not be, the same thing as deciding something – that would be impulsiveness, and that’s a vice (a bad habit).
What is less clear, however, is the role of reason or intellect. It seems to me that this trait is basically found in all of the characters, especially when they talk to each other and, well… reason with each other. This is good because our feelings ought to be guided by our reason and not the other way around., but our feelings usually influence the way we reason. Even better, the credits feature scenes inside a dog’s head and a cat’s head – in both of them there is no reasoning, only instinct (food) for the dog and randomness (read “evil”) for the cat. I may be making too much of a small point, but this subtly points to the real difference between animals and humans. Both have emotions which influence their actions, but only human beings actually have the ability to reason, to deliberate.
This arrangement is an interesting choice on the part of the writers. On the one hand, it definitely captures the reality that human beings, even holy and mature ones, are supposed to have passion and that being passionate is not opposed to being reasonable. Applying this to our faith in real life, this kind of understanding avoids two extremes that both get associated with Christians – they tend to be accused of being totally emotional and irrational or of being cold and distant judges (funny how that works huh?). On the other hand, this representation of emotion does fall short of the truth about reason’s relationship to emotion and will. Reason is above emotion, not in it – the depiction of the movie kind of shows reason working through the five Emotion-Characters rather than directing them, as if the emotions do the thinking for you.
I only point this out because I see so many people on the internet confusing their ability to think with their ability to feel – they’ve lost the idea of reason as a distinct ability. Some would say this is something like emotivism. In a perfect state, the emotions obey reason as a part of making decisions and acting on them. The fact is that reason is a reflection of the divine image in mankind. Reason points to the existence of Truth (capital T) and to God. The movie even makes a joke at one point about the difficulty of telling the difference between facts and opinions – sometimes that is indeed a very difficult thing to do and your emotions (and imaginary friends) won’t be able to help you. The best way to know the difference between fact and opinion is through consistent reasoning and by sticking to sources that can be trusted (i.e. that you have faith in)
Now, this is not a reason to condemn the movie or avoid watching it – such a standard would make most movies “unwatchable.” No, the key is watch intelligently. It is necessary to take notice of a movie’s messages, implicit or explicit. In this chase, this particular portrayal of reason & emotion is potentially dangerous if a child is already stubborn about letting their emotions make decisions for them – it could reinforce the confusion of “feeling” with “thinking.” By exposing this subtle difference to the light of reason (and faith), it can make it visible and “everything that becomes visible is light.” This is one way that a Christian can learn from God and faith to pull the good out of the bad (within limits). After all, that is the whole point of this blog isn’t it?
There you go. I hope this shines the light on a few things. Check back later for more movie reviews and for homilies from the Preacher Man (if he pays his rent, the mooch!). Till next time…