Outside In

Pixar and the allegory of the soul.

Pixar’s Inside Out 2 is cleaning up at the box office, which prompted me to revisit the original movie from 2015. It’s an amusingly high-concept kids’ cartoon about an 11-year-old girl, Riley, and the five personified emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger—that manage her inner life. Riley’s happy childhood is disrupted by a move across the country, prompting a disastrous struggle between Joy, who has so far run the show, and Sadness, who has been kept at bay and must now be acknowledged.

The reflexively glum take on this movie would be that it embodies all the worst assumptions of psychotherapy culture, representing its human characters as hollow puppets at the mercy of their neurochemical impulses. But that would be too pat, and a little obtuse. No 90-minute animated metaphor for the human experience of selfhood is going to be perfect, and actually this one doesn’t suggest that Riley is just following a script dictated to her by the animal impulses of her brain.

Her emotions aren’t the only things in her mind, and they don’t add up together to the sum total of all she is. They operate within an elaborate architecture of reasoning and move across a shifting landscape of character, which is not without its darkly beautiful caverns of mystery. At one point Anger screws a lightbulb, representing an idea, into the console that prompts Riley’s sensations. After an expectant moment he says, “she took it,” indicating that she had the free will not to act on the idea that just occurred to her. There’s some machinery involved in the allegory, but Riley is not represented as a machine.

A question the movie does invite, though, is which if any of the characters within Riley is most truly and essentially her. But that’s not a question that was invented by psychoanalysts. Plato memorably observed in the Republic that we contain multitudes: “anger sometimes makes war against our desires, as if they were two different things.” Anyone who has ever reproached himself for drinking or eating too much—i.e., everyone—knows this is true.

When we talk to ourselves like that, who is talking to whom? Plato sometimes gives the impression that our rational mind is what’s most truly us in us, the core of our humanity that must assert its authority over the unruly appetites and desires. Other times he talks as if reason and emotion are both external forces and the soul is what negotiates between them.

Reason is notably not a character in Inside Out so much as a structural feature of the terrain itself. At the risk of spelling out what the movie leaves intentionally vague, I’d suggest that Riley—in the realest and fullest sense—is the whole that organizes all the parts and within whose contours they navigate. Aristotle reasoned that there must be a sense which perceives all the other senses, binding each passing moment of experience into a continuous unity. This kind of overarching self-awareness is what some therapists call the “observing self” and St. Jerome referred to as the scintilla conscientiae—the “spark of self-knowledge” (Commentary on Ezekiel 1.7).

Where does that watching mind, that sovereign self, come from? Does it emerge gradually from a collected record of life experience, as the world leaves its marks of pain and pleasure to form our personalities? Or is it there from the beginning, born pure in us before we ever meet the world? Inside Out doesn’t propose an answer. But the movie’s sweetest idea is the one it puts forward in its first thirty seconds, which just briefly hint that if there’s an attitude that comes imprinted in us before we even open our eyes, it’s joy.

Joy slips fully-formed out of the darkness of Riley’s infant mind to smile at the sight of her adoring parents. “There she is,” they say, and that’s the closest Inside Out ever comes to suggesting there might be an untouched spirit that walks with us into the world. Sadness follows almost immediately after, but unlike Joy she enters as a response to stimulus. There’s something profound in that: existence in itself is not an emotionally neutral blank slate but a positive, a delight. It’s the world that teaches us to grieve.

Of course, the whole movie is about how Riley has to integrate the honest pain of her experiences into her sense of self. If there’s a subtle black pill in the movie, it’s in the glimpses of adult psychology it offers: Riley’s mother has let Sadness take the helm of her own control panel. The lead partner in her dad’s emotional cohort seems to be Anger.

But Plato, too, knew that time and hard knocks can leave their imprints on us in a thousand ugly ways. To get back to the original essence of the newborn soul is impossible—at least in human language. But that’s because “an account of the soul’s true nature would be a thing altogether divine.” Which might mean that the truest self, in the joy of its being and the wisdom of its sorrows, comes to the world from the outside in.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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Image: David S. Soriano, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.