View from the Precipice

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The Life of Riley

 

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by Roman Sympos

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“Jiminy, mother-loving toaster streudel!”

 

                                    Joy, Inside Out 2

 

 

 

The opposing winds of light and dark are at war and we, body and spirit, have desires that are at odds with one another until Christ, our Lord, comes to help.

 

                                    Prudentius, Psychomachia

 

 

 

The other day, my 14-year-old grand-daughter, Ivy, persuaded her grandmother and me to join her in watching the Disney Pixar animation film Inside Out 2. It’s the hit sequel to Disney’s original hit, Inside Out, released in 2015. Ivy had seen them both. They spoke to her and she wanted to share her enthusiasm.

 

The Inside Out films depict the emotional turmoil of a girl named Riley at two important stages of her life, childhood and puberty, and take the form of an allegory in which Riley’s emotions become personified agents in the struggle to control her behavior and thoughts. Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust take center stage in the first film, devoted to Riley’s childhood. In the second, Riley hits puberty and these five must learn how to handle, and eventually work with, four new interlopers: Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui.

 

All of the personified emotions are cute, comical, and endearing, as we’d expect from Pixar, and the two tales in which they’re featured address complex and serious issues facing children who are growing into adulthood. They also point to a seismic paradigm-shift in our understanding of human nature.

 

This is surprising if we consider the genre of storytelling to which the Inside Out movies belong, which is quite ancient. It’s a form of allegory called psychomachia, roughly translated as “the war in the soul,” and dates back to the fifth century CE, when an early Christian by the name of Prudentius wrote a long poem with that title.

 

Psychomachia describes the battle between the forces of Good and Evil for the salvation or damnation of the soul. The forces of Good take the form of personified virtues, actions, and behaviors, such as Faith, Good Works, and Sobriety, and their moral anti-types appear among the human attributes enlisted in the service of Evil, including Heresy, Perjury, and Sordidness. The emotions are a different story. Care, Fear, Anxiety, Dread, Wrath, Lust—these are thick on the ground among the troops of Evil. The nearest thing to an emotion that the armies of Good can muster is Hope. In the mind of Prudentius, it seems, the emotions are anything but cute.

 

Psychomachia is one antecedent of the Inside Out franchise, but there’s another that’s much more recent—actually, a family relation—in which the emotions play almost no role at all.

 

The day after the three of us watched Inside Out 2, it occurred to me that I’d seen something like it when I was a child myself. I’m not sure what triggered the association, but I suspect it was the scene where Joy, always optimistic and in search of happiness, uncharacteristically loses her cool after being banished from Riley’s emotional Control Center and bursts out, in frustration, “Jiminy, mother-loving toaster streudel!”

 

For those of us of a certain age (Ivy had to be enlightened), there is only one “Jiminy,” and his last name is “Cricket.”  In Disney’s Pinocchio he is the patient, quiet voice of Conscience, materializing on the animated puppet’s shoulder at every turn along the road to becoming “real,” which is to say, a good person.*

 

Pinocchio, too, is an allegory, but not about the emotions, except perhaps marginally. It’s about temptation and the need to restrain, control, and redirect desire in order to overcome it. Pinocchio doesn’t rely on personification to dramatize its point, unless we count Pinocchio himself, a piece of wood who, by the end of the tale, has managed to become a living, breathing boy. Or Jiminy, a cricket who wears spats, carries an umbrella, and can talk and sing.

 

But while it may rate low on personification, Pinocchio relies heavily on another staple of allegory, especially Biblical allegory: symbolism. Geppetto, Jiminy Cricket, and the cast of miscreants and con artists who repeatedly lead Pinocchio astray from obtaining what he needs to become “real”—namely, Bravery, Truthfulness, and Selflessness—all have their counterparts in Christian scripture.

 

Geppetto the woodcarver, whose name starts with “G” and, in Italian, means “God will increase,” creates a human being—albeit out of wood, not clay—and, by wishing “upon a star,” brings his creation to life. Jiminy Cricket’s initials should make his Biblical meaning clear enough, but if we remain in doubt we need only remember that the expletive “Jiminy Cricket!” has saved angry Americans from taking the Lord’s name in vain since 1848, something Walt Disney, master of the American vernacular, would likely have known. (The cricket in the original book, by the Italian author Carlo Lorenzini, has no name.)

 

As for the bad guys, Stromboli, the master of the puppet show, is obviously the Great Satan “pulling the strings” of poor sinners like us, and his conniving cats, Honest John and Gideon are, just as obviously, the lesser demons (Belial? Beelzebub?) serving under him. (Cats are well-known “familiars” of the Devil.)  Even Monstro the Whale, who swallows Pinocchio and Geppetto as they make their escape from Pleasure Island, recalls the “great fish” that swallowed Jonah after he refused to do what God commanded.   

 

Pinocchio, like the Inside Out franchise, fits snugly into the psychomachia genre—even better, in fact, because, like Prudentius, Walt Disney included Conscience among the faculties at war in his puppet protagonist’s wooden noggin. In Psychomachia, it’s the real JC, not some arthropod impersonator, who finally intervenes to set things straight: “The opposing winds of light and dark are at war,” concludes Prudentius, “and we, body and spirit, have desires that are at odds with one another until Christ, our Lord, comes to help.”

 

Another human faculty allegorized by Prudentius but, like Conscience, left out of the Inside Out movies is Reason, which appears on the battlefield of Psychomachia at just the moment when Greed seems about to win the day: “Most infamous pestilence that Greed is,” writes Prudentius, “she is astounded to see her spears turned away so neatly from her enemies' throats” by Reason’s “great shield.”

 

Prudentius was a classicist as well as a Christian, so he knew his Plato well. In Phaedrus, Socrates (Plato’s mouthpiece or, well, puppet. . . ) uses allegory to explain the part Reason plays in protecting us against the waywardness of the emotions. Rather than shield us from them, however, his Reason harnesses and directs them toward a higher good, namely, Truth, whose beauty transcends all earthly gratifications.

 

Reason, says Socrates, is like a “charioteer” driving “two steeds, the one a noble animal who is guided by word and admonition only, the other an ill-looking villain who will hardly yield to blow or spur.” The first steed represents the nobler or “spirited” emotions, like admiration, courage, and love of country, and is easily directed toward the higher good by the charioteer’s commands. The second represents the “base” or selfish emotions, like lust, anger, and fear, and must be violently tamed before the chariot of the human soul can reach its heavenly destination.

 

Although Plato, like Prudentius, includes Reason among his allegorized faculties, he has no use for Conscience. The Inside Out movies have no use for either. That’s the big difference between Riley’s mental struggle and the traditional genre of soul-war to which her tale belongs.

 

Far from using Reason and Conscience to keep her emotions in check or direct them toward a goal, Riley seems to be entirely at their mercy. We never see her stopping to think, to weigh consequences and outcomes, let alone moral alternatives. Whichever emotion, childish or adolescent, gets the upper hand in the Control Room of Riley’s psyche instantly determines her thoughts and behavior. Case in point: when motivated by Anxiety to sneak into her hockey coach’s office at night to see if she’s been selected for the senior team, Riley experiences Fear (of being caught), but not Guilt, which, along with Reason, is conspicuously MIA in the protracted war for her soul.

 

In fact, listening to Joy, Anger, Sadness, and Disgust debate practical courses of action and weigh good against bad decisions, I thought Riley’s personified emotions seemed more rational than Riley herself, as though her Reason had been outsourced to them. (“It’s a movie about emotions,” Ivy reminded me.) So perhaps Reason is just working undercover.

 

Conscience, however, has lost its voice entirely and been visibly replaced by an inanimate object, a kind of glowing trophy called “The Sense of Self.” Morality is still alive, if barely, but boils down to whether or not Riley considers herself “a good person” (a view endorsed by the emotions of childhood, led by Joy) or “not good enough” (the constant refrain of the emotions of puberty, led by Anxiety). The trophy glows blue when Riley is feeling good about herself but turns orange (Anxiety’s hue) when her Sense of Self has taken a hit.

 

In the early days of Saturday Night Live, Billy Crystal’s character, “Fernando,” a parody of movie and TV personality Ricardo Montalban, was fond of saying, “It is better to look good than to feel good.”  The creators of Inside Out 2 seem to be saying, “It is better to feel good than to do good.”

 

Pixar’s emotional repurposing of Morality and sidelining of Reason closes the door on free will. Good and Bad are no longer choices Riley is empowered to make as a rational creature. They are feelings she has about herself, and in these two movies, as we’ve seen, Riley’s feelings are in charge of her, not the other way around. 

 

Should we do good because it makes us feel good? Or should we do good because it’s the right thing to do?

 

Let me pause to say that I don’t consider Pixar’s endorsement of the first alternative a bad thing, necessarily. We are living in a fraught time for adolescents and I’m sure every single child psychologist on Disney’s list of advisors for the Inside Out franchise could cite dozens of scholarly books and articles underlining the urgency of addressing the malaise of self-doubt, self-harm, indecision, insecurity, and depression currently threatening the happiness of today’s generation of young people. Telling them to “be good” is not much help when the grown-ups themselves seem unable to agree on what “good” is and incapable of doing any even if they could. If we can no longer make doing good foundational to feeling good, we have no choice but to settle for the reverse.

 

In Prudentius, free will is similarly attenuated, but not entirely missing. Yes, JC intervenes at the very end to knock some heads together, putting Sin out of commission once and for all, but not before Faith and Concord build him a suitable “temple” in which to dwell and “place the jewels of the virtues in their proper places.” Once we invite Jesus to take up residence within us, we need never face having to choose again.

 

Only Plato seems to understand what’s at stake when we cede so much executive control over ourselves to third party saviors, whether they be emotions or deities. In Socrates’ allegory of the charioteer, Reason harnesses the emotions, pointing the chariot of the soul toward eternity, where the only inhabitants are the immortals of Olympus who were born to freedom and those few mortals, like Socrates, who have managed to achieve it.

 

It's only too easy to persuade ourselves that what makes us feel good must be as good as it feels, and Plato's Dialogues are full of examples. But why look to 5th century Athens? There are people in these United States who think Donald Trump has been sent by God to save the nation. In their eyes following his commands is following God's commands, and they are delighted to do so.

 

To Plato, the freedom of the will is everything and depends on Reason. To Prudentius it’s something and depends on Faith. To Pixar it’s, apparently, not much.

 

Free will, however, is what Pinocchio is all about. “I’ve got no strings,” he crows, “to hold me down,”

 

To make me fret
Or make me frown
I had strings
But now I'm free
There are no strings on me

 

No visible strings, my little wooden friend, but lots of invisible ones. 

 

Pinocchio, like Phaedrus, raises the age-old question, “What is freedom?” The gifted British philosopher Isaiah Berlin had an answer, and it began with the notion that freedom comes in two flavors, negative and positive. Negative freedom is freedom from. Positive freedom is freedom to. Which one, he asks, are we talking about?

 

At first glance, these seem merely two sides of the same coin. How can you be free to do what you want unless you are free from the “strings”—parental, legal, tribal, religious–that would restrict your every move? But Berlin knew that freedom from did not, in and of itself, guarantee autonomy. If you lack Reason—which is useful for telling the true from the false—you are not free. The world is full of illusions, and temptations that promise pleasure but end in misery. “Seek the truth,” said Socrates, and above all, “Know thyself.”  Otherwise, you will remain the puppet of ignorance and impulse, unable to see, let alone achieve, what you most desire: mastery over yourself.

 

I expect there’s an Inside Out 3 in the works at Pixar. If so, I wish Riley the best as she negotiates the emotional shoals and whirlpools of high school. With maturity there will come, hopefully, more knowledge of herself and others and the world. Then perhaps Reason will finally arrive at the Control Room to help Joy and Anxiety and Fear and Embarrassment and the rest of Riley’s colorful emoticons sort things out, and her “Sense of Self” will clear its throat and begin to speak in the voice of Conscience.

 

In short, I hope Riley moves closer to achieving mastery over herself and, at last, becomes real.†

 

 

Notes

 

*As for “mother-loving,” someone at Pixar also knows their Chester Himes, the postwar Black writer whose publisher forced him to substitute the phrase for you-know-what in his gritty Harem crime novels.

 

† And before anyone out there yells, “What about the Velveteen Rabbit?” I’ll only add that Margery Williams’s notion of “real” has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with being loved. But that’s another fable altogether.  (Think Pygmalion, not Geppetto.)