Spoiler alert: This essay reveals (most of the) key plot points in Pixar’s Inside Out 2.
Trigger alert: Discussion of panic attacks.
We showed up at the theater, just the two of us, gray hair in a sea of blondes, brunettes, blacks and reds. We concealed the boxes of candy purchased at Rite Aid in the long-sleeved shirts we carried with us to combat the over-chilled theater air on this ninety-degree summer night. We queued behind families with school age and preteen children excited about this sequel a full nine years after the original wowed children and adults alike.
On Sophie’s suggestion (just twelve years old when the original came out), we chose Inside Out 2 over Ryan Gossling’s The Fall Guy. At first, Susan leaned towards The Fall Guy. On her semester abroad during college, she made it a point to watch French-dubbed Fall Guy episodes, one of the few American shows she could find on broadcast TV. The show holds a special place in her heart. Alas, The Fall Guy was only showing in Hanover, Pennsylvania, thirty minutes away. With Sophie’s recommendation and all, Inside Out 2 got the nod.
Walking from the box office into the theater, looking at our tickets, Susan laughed out loud “Ha, they gave us senior discounts.” This has been happening to me for a couple of years. I’m pretty sure this movie was Susan’s first.
Like many (most?) adults, I have some experience with mental health concerns. I almost wrote ‘mental illness’ but that sounds maybe a bit too dramatic. Mine are (have been) mostly disruptive rather than disabling, and I think that’s a key distinction to make—a few depressive episodes in my rearview mirror, intermittent moderate anxiety, and extended bouts of OCD as a child and an adult. With my OCD seemingly in remission right now, my mental health issues are run-of-the-mill at worst. So why did I find Inside Out 2 so disturbing?
Because it’s an animated children’s movie, I assume few reading this know much about this movie franchise. Here come the spoilers. Much of the action takes place at a control panel in a girl’s brain. The console is operated by ‘people’ who serve as incarnate representatives of human emotions. In the original movie and at the start of the sequel, Riley’s thoughts are controlled primarily by a woman named Joy, with periodic input from Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust.
A short way into the movie, thirteen-year-old Riley’s puberty-alarm goes off, and a new set of emotions arrive: Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Teenage-Ennui (for comic relief). Anxiety is the ringleader of the new group of emotions, and she quickly banishes the original emotions, along with Riley’s character—a beautiful, glowing orb that lights up headquarters and is a constant source of pride for Joy—to the far reaches of Riley’s brain, a surprisingly cavernous area with a good deal of industrial activity. This is also the place where Joy has stashed thirteen-years of Riley’s unpleasant memories. Riley has, so far, has lived with, and her character was formed with, only happy thoughts.
As the (person) Anxiety drives Riley’s new thoughts and actions, Anxiety takes the resulting memories and uses them to rebuild Riley’s character, an ugly, scrawny, broken-looking thing. Over the course of a few days at sleep-away hockey camp, Riley becomes fueled by the negative thoughts and emotions that anxiety (Anxiety) formed. She ditches her old friends, lies to fit in, breaks all the rules, and turns her back on the concept of teamwork.
The movie climaxes with Riley’s panic attack in the middle of a hockey game. Externally, Riley shows the classic symptoms—shortness of breath, sweating, trembling, and displaying an overall air of doom. Inside Riley’s brain, a tornado has engulfed her emotion console. At the center of the tornado, Anxiety is paralyzed, terrified, hand gripping the control stick, trapped in the storm of her own creation.
For humanity, anxiety is an important emotion. A modest amount ensures that we keep motivated, and we give our actions careful attention. An overdose of anxiety has the opposite effect. It causes us to react out of negative emotions or in extreme cases, we lose the ability to react at all. A panic attack is the extreme manifestation of an overdose of anxiety.
My own, single panic attack occurred several months after a near fatal bicycle accident. As I lay in bed talking with Susan about god-knows-what (this was thirty years ago) my anxiety quickly escalated. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe, and I broke out in head-to-toe sweat. I shot up in bed, my head swinging side to side like a trapped animal, but there was nothing to escape from. The demon was inside me, and I couldn’t shake it loose. Days later I started therapy, and fortunately, I headed off any follow-up panic attacks.
The Inside Out 2 scene was too much. Too much for me, and I wondered if it was too much for the children surrounding me. When the movie ended a few minutes later, I told Susan I thought that scene was a little too realistic for me. She thought so too and wondered aloud how many people have been adversely triggered by watching that. I purposely haven’t looked online to see others’ opinions. I wanted to write this from my own perspective. Perhaps few children have such acute experience with anxiety to react like this. But for me, this the build-up of negative emotions and the nightmarish panic attack snapped me out of enjoying a cute movie and reminded me of one of the worst moments in my life.
Have you seen Inside Out 2? Do you have panic attacks? I’m curious to hear what other people think about this topic.
Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash
