I promise this is not going to turn into a movie review column. But the new Pixar release Inside Out 2 does what it does so well that I think it deserves some positive attention, and without CGI-powered technology, a movie like this simply wouldn’t be possible. The thing it does well is to turn dusty abstractions into solid-looking realities that are vivid, memorable, and understandable.
The Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor once said that because we “breathe in” nihilism in the modern world, we tend not to notice it, just as a fish doesn’t notice it’s in water. But the tendency to reduce human life to only that which is scientifically verifiable — biochemistry and neural impulses, basically — is all around us, and probably lies at the root of manifold modern pathologies.
Inside Out 2 flies in the face of all this by making non-material concepts such as emotions, memories, and the sense of self into concrete, visible, and even entertaining realities. No, there is not really a little red-felt homunculus running around in my brain whenever I get mad. But anger is a real emotion, as real as hatred, fear, or love. And to pretend, as many scientists do, that anger is only a certain combination of neural activity and hormones is not just perverse, it’s incorrect and incomplete.
It’s appropriate that Pixar is a division of Disney, because with such films, Disney continues its tradition of making what I would call benevolent propaganda films for traditional family values. Consider the title of Whistle While You Work, a song written originally for the studio’s 1937 animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The song’s theme is what all responsible parents want their children to learn: life is full of work, so you might as well enjoy it.
In dramatising an emotional and ethical struggle experienced by the barely-teenage Riley that could take up many paragraphs in a learned treatise on the maturing of the concept of the self in adolescent girls, but doing it in a way that I hope millions of people will pay to watch, Pixar has done a great service in the cause of realism, philosophically speaking.
Historically, moderate realism has been the preferred philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as most other Christian denominations. I seriously doubt that many of the thousands of people working on Inside Out 2 consider themselves evangelists, and nobody is going to literally come to Jesus simply as a direct result of the film.
But anything that moves large numbers of people away from the nihilist worldview and gets them to believe that abstractions such as anger, fear, and love are real things — in some sense, more real than the atoms we are made of — is preparing the ground for actual evangelism, whether the filmmakers realise it or not. And for my money, that’s a good thing.
Karl D. Stephan is a professor of electrical engineering at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. His ebook Ethical and Otherwise: Engineering in the Headlines is available in Kindle format and also in the iTunes store.