In Inside Out 2, we return to the inside of a young girls’ mind to hang out with her ever growing pack of emotions. Riley is 13 now. We get to visit a new room, deep below “headquarters”: a belief system grotto. Each belief is pictured as a delicate, pluckable string, emerging from a pond of poignant memories. The beliefs strethch up and entwine to form a tree: her sense of self.
We went to see the film as a family at the request of our teen daughter. This was a thrill, precisely because she, like Riley, is thirteen. Early on, we revisit Riley’s “islands of personality” and see that “Family Island” is now much smaller and hard to see. “What’s that blocking it?” asks Sadness, gazing through binoculars. “Oh, that’s friendship island!” chips Joy. “Isn’t it amazing?
All three of us laughed. Stunning accuracy :-). As it should be at 13.
.The original Inside Out (2015) is my sentimental favorite Pixar film (even if WALL-E is perhaps the studio’s greatest masterpiece). The year it was released, we also moved our only child to a new town, though she was a bit younger then. I bawled as Riley and her parents said goodbye to the place where all of her “firsts” had happened.
Both films work for so many reasons—but, in part, because they go straight for what Disney’s pixie dust catalyzes: emotion. On a meta level, they show what all of Disney—the best Disney, anyway— tells.
It’s not the first time the Walt Disney Company has taken us inside of someone’s brain. In the 1990s, EPCOT’s “Wonders of Life” pavilion included a show called “Cranium Command.” It was my favorite. The theater guests were welcomed into the brain of a 12 year old boy, piloted by a cadet named Buzzy. Each organ reported in to the left brain or right brain. All were voiced/filmed by celebrities (think Charles Grodin as the Left Brain and George Wendt as the Stomach. Hans and Frans (Carvey, Nealon) from Saturday Night Live were the heart, there to pump… you up). My favorite was the hypothalamus. It was robotic and would sarcastically pipe up, with a sigh, about how forgotten it was, even though it was the structure that kept the kid alive.
What’s special about the Inside Out films is how they foreground the fluid interplay between memory and emotion. (They also have a score that makes me cry and great scripts). I am part humanist and a little bit social scientist, so back when I was in grad school, I thought memory from either a social or psycho-social perspective or, more frequently, in terms of nostalgia (who gets a cameo here!) and uses of the past, especially in literature.
[Before that, I was the one singing Carole King’s “So Far Away” before my high schools friends had even left for college and “Memory” from Cats on the elementary school bus. Yes, I have a problem].
More recently, I’ve wanted to learn from colleagues in the sciences and the “harder” social sciences. I just finished Dr. Charan Ranganath’s Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters. “Memory is much, much more than an archive of the past; it is the prism through which we see ourselves, others, and the world. It’s the connective tissues underlying what we say, think, and do,” he writes (6). This was not news to me, but of course, the rich scientific research he makes accessible to non-specialists was.
For example, learning how the hippocampus indexes memories— when and where are crucial (40)— explained so much of my own ways of remembering to me, my own sense of being completed transported by vivid memories: “The hippocampus carries us back and forth in time, and we don’t even need a wonky DeLorean to do it.”
My own vivid memories, the kinds that often play like a video and include the proper year and, sometimes, a lot of detail, are somewhere towards the more—-what shall I say?— specific side of the spectrum. I’m pretty sure I do NOT have Highly Specific Autobiographical Memory, because I can’t recall days of the week or the weather, and I forget a lot. But at times my recall is uncanny especially if—and this is true for many people— the memory happened at a time of heightened emotion. I can still tell you almost every detail of my wedding weekend. I can also tell you almost every minute of the day of my cancer diagnosis. (I’m totally fine now, if you don’t know me IRL, perfectly healthy). And, naturally, all about the first time I went to Disneyland and Disney World. And which year my kid was tall enough to ride “Everest.”
I haven’t written here since last October. It’s complicated. The world is always broken, but it has seemed extra broken among many of the regions and groups I think about this past year. There has been some extra pain and stress in parts of my family this past year. There has been extra joy, too—my daughter became a Bat Mitzvah, and I still haven’t organized the pictures or finished finding the addresses for her thank-you notes. Work was a lot. Is a lot. Disney is there and I’m writing my book, but…
Writing about Disney did not seem useful. Neither did this Substack. I’ve been so awash in memories and futures and stories that are not mine to tell that writing has not worked. It’s still not really working, as you can tell from the rambling mode of this newsletter.
This week many people in my own local community are suffering immense emotional pain. This, too, is not my story, though it certainly made me cry a lot. But it is a moment enmeshed in memories, and I’ve been watching collective—collaborative—remembering do its unsettling, sometimes miraculous, sometimes heartrending magic.
Memory is process, material, and ineffable. It is neurons and brain structures, it’s the prism of our minds and also our words grasping out for others. In community, it becomes something even more.
Parenting a teenager is so very different from being one.
From what I’ve read (again, not a scientist), memories from our early teen years until some point in our twenties are particularly vivid ones. You also tend to be fairly attached to the music you liked at that time.
No, memory is not an archive, and our selves are not fixed, which I’ll say Inside Out 2 shows, without spoilers. We can time travel in our heads. But we can’t run the film backwards for real. And I think that’s why everything this year, from the empathy I feel for friends right now to so many earlier crises, is both so horrible and sometimes strangely beautiful. Like broken glass.
A week ago now, I saw Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy 30th anniversary tour. That album—loud, on repeat—is how I survived the end of high school and beginning of college.
And yes, she has a Disney connection—she didn’t write it, but she sang the song that makes you cry in Toy Story 2. (If you saw the film and it didn’t make you cry I’m sorry, you are a heartless person).
The musicians plucked their guitar strings and time folded in on itself. I was DeLorean-ed right back to ages 16-20). (I also remember the exact moment I bought the CD at a long-defunct Borders bookstore, and the first time I heard “Possession,” before that). Deep inside the song “Elsewhere” were beliefs and feelings about life, love, solitude. The strings pulled at a central chord running through my life since I came of age.
But then over that came the layers of the decades in between. And the song, surrounding me in an amphitheater by the Ohio River, got richer.