Who’s in charge?
First: this is about the the original Pixar movie, so there are no spoilers ahead about the current film (but many about the original).
I first saw Inside Out in theaters, when it came out. Pixar produces movies known for beautiful imagery and direct plots that bring out raw emotional themes. And then brings out the tissues. Inside Out is no exception. The movie pulled me into Riley’s efforts to handle the loss, isolation, threats to competence, rejection, and the many other challenges that came with the move, and just generally, from getting older. But I’m not going to review a 9 year-old movie. I recently re-watched the movie with my own kid. I got to see it partially through their eyes. And I got to watch it from a new lens: examining control over change. Essentially, who’s in charge of Riley?
Control: In the beginning…
Inside Out starts us right at the beginning. Riley as a newborn. And right from the get go, there are three different layers: Riley as a system, Riley’s fledgling internal representations, and the outside world. Riley System is what we usually think of as the person. The creature that is cooing and giggling. Riley’s internal representations become the main focus of attention in the movie. Psychologists sometimes call this the “black box.” This is what takes the input of dad’s silly face, processes it, and spits out a giggle response for Riley. In another infant, the result might be an “oooh” of wonder about a world that contains such variety of expression. It’s called the black box because what happens there, as of yet, can’t really be observed or quantified.
Inside Out puts emotional responses center stage, but they are by no means alone in this internal universe. Thousands and millions of other ideas and representations fill a vast domain.
And then the outside world is similarly populated. While at first it might seem like the parents are it, the sole influences, Inside Out recognizes that this is a slight of attention, if you will. It’s not till Riley recognizes her crisis much later that it hits you how many environmental influences there have been. Yes, her friends. The different school system. Yes, the different job status for her father and how that is affecting their relationship. But also: different sports culture. Different community layout and spread. Transportation styles. Climate. Size of the community and ways people connect to each other. You even see how much of an effect different food culture has.
Control from Many Forces
How do these three worlds come together? And what does that say about who’s in charge? We want to believe that we are in charge of ourselves. Riley makes decisions for Riley. Yet from the start, we see internal representations steer these decisions. Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness may not have it all together, but they are using what they know to make educated guesses about how to respond. That’s the beauty of our internal systems. We are constantly faced with novel situations and limited data. And often, little time to produce a response. Our internal representations not only spit out their best response: they are also learning dynamos. They take new data from causal attribution, reinforcement, social observation, and curiosity to expand, refine, and consolidate. A huge assortment of internal systems meld together and produce an active creature that mutually impacts and is impacted by the world around.
So… are these representations in control? They would appear to have an outsized role. We spend most of the movie with them. They appear to decide Riley’s output, including what she chooses to take in from the external world. Take the pivotal family argument scene. With Joy and Sadness gone, Riley’s responses come largely from Fear and Anger. And they interpret her parents’ words as hard to trust (mom’s words) or a threat (dad’s words). Unfortunately, dad is also filtering through anger and the argument quickly bursts into a predictable “Go to your room!” This scene has far-reaching consequences. It places her on the path to running away. Case closed? The internal representations are in charge.
Control has Context
But hold on. Why are Joy and Sadness gone? Where did Fear’s and Anger’s responses and interpretations come from? And, what if mom and dad had responded differently? Joy and Sadness get sucked out trying to hold onto their input over Riley. Step back and put this moment in context. You see Riley faced with a novel situation: feeling insecure, removed from what she knows, and isolated from support. She feels sad and you see Sadness pulled to the control board, but really has no idea how to express sadness in this context. Sadness has rarely been given the opportunity to learn how to operate the board. Getting sucked out is a convenient mechanism, but Joy and Sadness are removed because Riley has not learned how to apply them to what she is facing.
Similarly, Fear and Anger respond from their training. Hide and deflect are simple defenses we learn very early. And same for mom and dad: mom has learned to respond mostly from Sadness, and dad mostly from Anger. Their experiences have shaped this. It is possible that, if mom or dad had found the exact right response to Riley to match what she had experienced at school that day, Joy and/or Sadness could have suddenly been sucked through one of those tubes back to headquarters. This is not to place blame on mom or dad: first, they would have to be wizards to figure this out, and second, they would have had to have an entirely different training themselves. And the movie would have only been half an hour, provoking an Anger response from a short-changed audience.
A Gestalt, not an Addition
Ultimately, Riley’s internal representations are not static processes. Riley’s infant Joy is not her 10-year-old Joy. The interplay between Riley, her internal representations, and the many inputs from the world around her is dynamic and many dimensional. To give a physics analogy, these are relativistic processes, not mechanical. You cannot add up or even multiply Riley’s inputs to get her output. I think the system of Inside Out contains an additional element of chance or chaos, which is represented most by the lightbulbs. Riley can integrate all this history and the streams of current input and produce novel responses (to her, and potentially to the world) like ‘run away’ or ‘get off the bus.’
Control: Summary
When put into context, Riley is not in charge, nor is she out of control. She is and is not. And every shade in between. Control is an idea, not a mechanism. What Riley is left with is responsibility. We all have a responsibility to corral huge oceans of inputs from Inside and Out, and to try our best to learn and do better.