Inside Out

There's a moment in Inside Out that fucking destroyed me. It's one of the few instances in which the film jumps out of 11 year old Riley's (Kaitlyn Dias) mind, and into someone else's. Riley's at the dinner table, and something is clearly troubling her. Her mother (Diane Lane), is trying to visually communicate to her father (Kyle Maclachlan), that something is up. We then fly into her mother's mind and see that, like Riley, her mind is a control center manned by five primary emotions we all share: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. As the only mind we've seen into prior is Riley's, we assume everyone's is the same: Joy runs the show, and every other emotion does their best not to get in the way. Flying into her mother's mind, however, its revealed that her dominant emotion is Sadness. And when we then move into her father's mind, we see that his dominant emotion is Anger. This is not to say that these two people are outwardly sad or angry, because as their respective control centers show, their emotions have found a way to work with each other. But it does mean that every decision they've made, every action they take, is underpinned by this dominant trait. There's a quiet devastation to that moment that bleeds through to everything else the film offers. It's a moment primarily intended to work as a joke, but I began to cry, because I realised that this was going to be the central struggle of the film: which emotion is going to dominate Riley's life? And to see the way that the film very simply shows the utter complexity of emotion, and memory, and the relationship between the two terrified me for Riley. Because emotions and memory are complex, and it can be near impossible to understand that when you're a child.

So, I've mentioned that there are five emotions running the show in everyone's heads here, but Inside Out, as far as Riley is concerned, is about the relationship between Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith). In Riley's infancy, she can't understand the need for Sadness, and neither can Sadness herself. Even though Joy stresses the importance for Sadness to stay in the corner and not interfere with the control panel, Sadness is still compelled to touch everything, infecting Riley's happy memories to remind her that there was a sadness to many of them as well. You see, Riley doesn't understand the second side to every coin yet, and it's something even adults struggle with. Who wants to acknowledge Sadness just because Joy is its opposite? Joy doesn't see the purpose of Sadness until she meets Bing Bong. Riley's past imaginary friend since forgotten, Bing Bong is a big, pink amalgam of different animals that wanders the banks of Riley's long-term memories, hoarding those that the two shared together, unaware that doing so gets Riley further away from remembering. At one point in their journey, Bing Bong acknowledges his irrelevance to her, and begins to cry. Sadness sits beside Bing Bong, and together the two embrace each other and weep. Then, much to Joy's surprise, Bing Bong and Sadness feel better. It's this acknowledgement that allows Bing Bong to reconcile that he's no longer a part of Riley's life and sacrifice himself so that Joy can get herself and Sadness back to the control center. Sitting in the recesses of Riley's Memory Dump as Joy rockets to safety in the magic cart Riley and Bing Bong created as a child, Bing Bong says, "Take her to the moon for me, Joy." It's important to stress that though these are separate characters with unique personalities, they're all elements of Riley's singular existence. So the emotional gut punch that is that moment has a second hit on the way when you realise this is Riley subconsciously letting go of Bing Bong to save her maturity.

I've talked before about this incredible interview with Louis C.K.; of the profound truth that resides in the declaration to embrace both extremes of the emotional spectrum because of the mutual relationship the two extremes share, and it's just as relevant here. In Riley's infancy, she possesses a desire to store memory in stark black and white, happy and sad. A memory of her parents sitting on a tree branch with her in the winter is something Sadness feels compelled to interfere with, to Joy's horror. Their incompatibility leads to their accidentally being ejected from Riley's control center, leaving Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Fear (Bill Hader) in control, and Riley depressed and apathetic towards life. It's only when Joy finally sees Sadness's capacity for positive effect that she revisits that fond memory and remembers that Riley was sitting on that branch because she'd lost the hockey game that day, and was thinking about quitting sports forever. Reunited in the control center, Joy and Sadness create a new control panel, that allows for cross-emotional networking, and together, they help Riley break down and tell her parents that she wishes they hadn't moved, that she misses her old life. And together, they break, and they cry, and they piece each other back together. This is Inside Out's most profound lesson, something so simple and so crucial to a child's emotional upbringing: life is really, really hard, and it's okay to be sad about it sometimes.