Inside Out 2: Good Enough Emotion
Almost ten years after “Inside Out”, and after many years of mediocre, engineered or bad Pixar movies (except for you, Luca), the sequel to “Inside Out” arrived in theaters. And yes, it was good and thought-provoking. Unlike the first movie, which I enjoyed but also felt very uncomfortable with how it simplifies the human psyche into a few basic colors, mechanisms and an “office” work environment, this time I felt more at ease. Not only did the range of emotions expand, but Riley also stopped behaving like a puppet controlled by her emotions. If anything, it seemed that she was becoming the great spirit, the totality, of her inner workings. This was expressed first and foremost with the appearance of her “personality”. If until now Riley was operated by memories, emotions and personality islands that were created due to experiences and acted mainly as abandoned amusement parks, the personality itself that was gradually built within her as she grew up became her true inner voice. Not an emotion, but an ethical perception of her selfhood.
In this sense, “Joy” goes through a bit of what Woody went through in the “Toy Story” movies. From being the central, positive emotion that expresses Riley’s optimistic youthful spirit, she began to share control with Sadness and an understanding of the limitations of her power. In this movie, all the emotions are pushed to the sidelines. Although they still have “control” over Riley’s mind in managing her memories, repressions and building the foundation of her ethical personality, with the appearance of new emotions led by the neurotic “Anxiety”, the basic emotions become taken for granted. Like software running in the background that is no longer really operated. In this sense, the fact that they were sent to the repression department (“vault of secrets”) of the psyche was both an amusing twist but also something that was easy to identify with. Our daily preoccupation with basic emotions is decreasing on a conscious level compared to the “management” of internal social systems aimed at bringing about future well-being, real or imagined. The focus shifts from the inside to the outside: Ennui, Envy, Anxiety, and Embarrassment are all social emotions that are more related to relationships than to the basic existential state and of course more dominant during adolescence, where awareness of the future and current social relationships, with the special dynamics of faux relationships, becomes central. And so does the self-image that we suddenly become aware of. From now on there is no “I” but also a “self”. How I perceive myself in the mirror.
Anxiety, which is a hyperactive version of Joy that tries to control and engineer the present and Riley’s mental and moral health in an attempt to ensure a desirable future for her, is what pushes Joy aside. As in Toy Story 3 in the kindergarten, it starts gently and politely and then violently, forcing the old gang to fight for their place in the world as a group and not as individuals against a new enemy.
Most of the characters we loved have become faded in this movie. The influence of Fear, Sadness, Disgust and Anger as emotions is hardly expressed. They could easily be replaced by any other creature from Riley’s world. They also deviate from their roles as emotions: Anger becomes sensitive, Disgust gets turned on by a character from a video game, and Sadness becomes a secret agent. Joy, on the other hand, remains the most central and well-rounded character in this film as well. Already in the analysis of the first film, I noted in the review that Riley’s inner world is not managed as a child’s world but as an adult’s world, specifically parents. Joy and her friends may be impulsive but they treat Riley like parents. They are smarter than her, more aware of the consequences than her, and follow her every move with concern. The way Joy watches Riley on a big screen is similar to the way Christof, the manipulative director of Truman’s life in “The Truman Show”, looks at him sleeping on a big screen and even gently strokes his hair like a parent quietly entering the children’s room out of concern and love for the next generation. Like a parent, Joy learned in the first movie to allow the child to also experience negative experiences, and like a parent in this movie, she is forced to step back even more. The moment the social world becomes central in Riley’s world, the influence of Joy, like that of Riley’s parents, gradually disappears. This place is filled by Anxiety, which in many ways does exactly that: pretending to control processes instead of allowing flexibility and authenticity. If Joy had to learn to make room for Sadness, Anxiety has to learn to make room for Riley and the understanding that the course of life cannot be engineered. Not even through assessment of future processes and managing relationship interfaces. This is especially evident in the surprising moment when, despite all of Anxiety’s efforts to ensure that Riley succeeds in the self-actualization task she set for Riley, she lost something much more significant when Riley’s self-perception changes from “I am a good person” to “I am not good enough”.
Good Enough Mother
Here it is worth stopping for a second and referring to the wonderful idea of the “good enough mother” which also characterizes what Joy and Anxiety learn along the way. In short, the psychiatrist Winnicott outlined the concept of the “Good Enough Mother” to describe the mother who provides adequate care for the baby, but not perfect. According to Winnicott, a mother who tries to be perfect and meet all the baby’s needs immediately actually harms his independent development. In contrast, a “good enough” mother allows the baby to experience some frustration and develop the ability to cope with difficulties, which is essential for healthy development.
The concept of “good enough” is significant beyond the context of parenting and has become a more general principle in psychology and life. It represents the idea that one should not strive for perfection in everything, but rather settle for what is good enough. On the existentialist level, there is a reversal of the measure here: “settling” for something imperfect is not a compromise in any way! The truth is that first and foremost we are measured in relation to the possible, the accessible and reality, and not against imagination. The issue here is not only the yardstick but the recognition that the possible, the practical world, is the essential arena where good operates, while the ideal is a reality-imposing fantasy that often causes a perceptual gap and disconnection, as well as insensitivity to the dynamics of life itself.
In this movie, it is beautifully reflected in Riley’s anxiety attack where the standards Anxiety set for her collapse. Not only did she abandon her perception of being good and betrayed her friends, but also the professional goal she set for herself seems unattainable. The fear of failure turned from a possibility to an essential self-perception. Thus, Riley collapsed in the face of the model she set for herself, and in American terms of achievementism and competitiveness, she collapsed in the face of her potential and thus became her own greatest enemy.
This is the point where Joy’s lesson from the first movie becomes relevant to Anxiety in this one. The ability to make room and detach from absolute control is no longer about a motherly emotion towards the child, but about a child’s attitude towards himself once he develops a conscious self-perception. Anxiety needs to let go of control, but not only that: the very assumption at the heart of the movie’s world — that our personality has a “control room”. The moment Anxiety takes her hand off the steering wheel, Riley is able to return to herself. It is not Joy that controls her, but her new core of selfhood. When Joy regains command, Riley does not return to a one-dimensional perception of “I am a good person”, because she discovered that it is not true. From now on, she has a multidimensional perception of herself that requires her to act in her life as a person full of contradictions and dynamic. A personality in constant becoming that grows from below, often through failure and mistakes. This is also reflected in Riley’s realization that the competitive sport she competes in, a bit like life, is first and foremost a game. And only then a goal to be achieved, if at all.
Success and Failure
The ending of the movie echoes the exemplary ending of Monsters, Inc. Instead of showing us the message that Riley was accepted to the national team, we only see her joyful facial expression. But it is also sad. In Monsters, Inc., Sulley’s expression in the final shot stemmed from a bond of love in a world that transformed from a world of fears to a world of laughter. While here, after everything Riley went through and learned, she is left in the final shot without her new and old friends, without her parents and without the experience she went through, but only with her professional achievement as some kind of approval for the journey she went through. At the end of the day, the world of work and career so typical of Pixar movies has seeped in here as well. Riley got an answer that she is good enough. It’s a shame it’s not about her relationships with her friends, whose names we don’t even remember. But who knows… maybe in “Inside Out 3” we will finally get to meet a small and negligible emotion called Love.
I find it difficult to disconnect the movie from our situation in Israel, a country that is collapsing under the expectations it represents from every direction until it collapses in on itself in internal and external wars. A good enough country is perhaps what we deserve. Any other idealistic or imaginary painting requires the disappearance of one of the groups that populate it. Every public walks around with the fantasy that if only Bibists or Kaplanists or settlers or ultra-Orthodox or a certain group would disappear or be thrown to the back of the brain, to areas of repression or oblivion, our situation would be oh so good. But no. This anxiety attack that has been enveloping all of us for over a year sharpens the recognition of the need for a reality that comes from below. A reality where compromise between the different parts is not really a compromise but a sobering up from a childish dream about some ideal coherent self-perception that has no tension, duality and development over time. When you look at things this way, you can really see that there is room for love. Not as an independent emotion, but as something that arises the moment we stop engineering reality according to external perceptions.
May we be worthy.
