The Fluffy Wisdom of Inside Out 2
The tension between aspiration and harsh reality is a normal part of life.
My full review of Inside Out 2 for the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Online.
Inside Out 2 will not elicit the oohs and aahs and quips about the glory of modern cinematography in the same way Oppenheimer did. But that’s not its job. Nevertheless, its core message is every bit as worth paying attention to. As of writing this review, Inside Out 2 is the highest grossing animated film to ever grace the silver screen, and its insights are being internalized in unprecedented numbers by people who would most probably never benefit in the same way from the latest masterwork of Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorsese.
The film, despite its genre, exhibits some serious discernment regarding our society’s youngest generation, which merits examination. One of the primary conflicts in the latter half of the movie focuses on the tension between a Sense of Self driven by Joy, the emotional protagonist of the first film, and a Sense of Self driven by Anxiety, the unwelcome newcomer of the second. As Riley’s experiences become more complicated with maturity, she repeatedly must choose between making decisions based on a principle-driven perspective and a comparison-driven one. It’s the battle between “I’m a good person and do good-person things” and “Despite my best efforts, I’m simply not good enough.” Put simply, that is the battle of my generation.
Inside Out 2, in its own way, portrays that brokenness, depicting in vivid detail the way that modern virtue-signaling represents a mirror-perfect bastardization of the conscience: God uses the whisper of the soul (guided by Scripture and reinforced in healthy religious community) to show us our missteps and sins and guide us toward righteousness and health, while the nagging of the aspirational self (augmented by peer pressure and the comparison hamster wheel that social media keeps spinning) highlights our insecurities and envy and guides us toward dysfunction. For what it’s worth, that’s also the experience of being a teenager—being acutely aware of the necessity, even inevitability, of progressing in life, while all too often being paralyzed by the idea of progressing to a place that might be unhealthy or, worse, brand you unpopular. I’m a good person vs. I’m not good enough is a tension that, rightly understood, can lead you to profound self-betterment and moral maturity.
Read the full review here: https://rlo.acton.org/archives/125764-inside-out-2-fluff-hijinks-and-exactly-the-right-message.html